© Jonathan Stillo This couch, where crying relatives sit waiting for the patient to be admitted is the saddest place in the sanatorium. Sometimes, the goodbyes said here are final ones.

The most important “ethics review” I ever received did not come my university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), or the Romanian medical ethics board which both approved my anthropological research on tuberculosis in Romania. Rather, it came from Mr. Gheorghe, a fifty year- old Roma man dying of MDR-TB,   when he stepped out on the sanatorium balcony and told anyone within earshot something close to the following: “Jonathan is a good person. He wants to know about your lives and your families. You should talk to him.” I could feel myself blushing as he said this. His opinion mattered to the other patients, especially because he was the one selling them cigarettes out of his nightstand. Suddenly, other patients seemed eager to speak with me when they had been aloof and skeptical only days before.  Gheorghe didn’t live long enough for me to thank him, he died of a “massive hemoptysis” a technical way of saying he coughed up a massive amount of blood. This is how TB patients often die and it is terrifying.

©Jonathan Stillo Hemoptysis- As patients grow sicker, they cough up blood, sometimes pints at a time.

It took years for me to obtain the official permissions required to live at a Romanian TB sanatorium. I even had to sign a waiver for the U.S. National Science Foundation that they were not liable if I caught the disease. But just having the permission of my university and the Romanian government were not enough. I had to actually ask patients for their permission to ask them about sensitive issues, sometimes asking dying patients about their regrets and about how their families will survive without them.  Part of my initial problem was I didn’t know how to ask the patients to let me interview and survey them. Following my IRB protocol, I showed them my stamped informed consent, a full page of Romanian legalese with talk of risks and benefits. I would read sections out loud and the more “informed” the patients became the more uncomfortable they became. This level of formality does not exist in most aspects of their lives. They could not understand that if I only wanted to talk with them, why I needed such involved paperwork with multiple signatures, dates and stamps.  In fact, when I submitted my original protocol to the Romanian medical ethics board, I was laughed at and told that this research did not need approval because it was not “clinical”.

What did patients care about? That I would protect their identities and that the process was voluntary. Everything else, including talk of risks and benefits, names and numbers of people to contact, made them uncomfortable.  They just wanted my assurance that I would maintain their confidentiality by not publishing their names.  Many patients did not even have an expectation of privacy and did not feel qualified to make the decision as to whether or not they should participate in my research. They did not want to hear about protocols. Rather, they wanted someone that they trusted to tell them it was ok and that they could trust me. A document from my IRB could not accomplish this, only someone else vouching for me could.

I gained the endorsement of Mr. Gheorghe by accident.  There was no plan, he just seemed willing to talk so I sat on his bed with him and asked about photographs on his wall, one of a handsome young man in a military uniform (him during socialism), another of a strikingly beautiful woman on a motorcycle (his 18 year old daughter) and my favorite, him and his wife proudly standing with their eight children in front of their rural home. He told me that doctors never sit on patient’s beds and they never ask about things like this. Visiting doctors and researchers only care about numbers and information on the patient charts. They are not interested in patient’s lives, only their disease.

In my last post, The Trobriand Islanders Never Friended Malinowski on Facebook,  I suggested that the reason for the existence of IRBs is not primarily the protection of research participants. Rather, it is to provide legal protection to institutions such as hospitals and universities which despite their non-profit status, operate more like businesses every day. Every researcher connected with the CUNY system must undergo an online ethics training course where they are without fail, asked questions about the Tuskegee syphilis study and the importance of informed consent. The problem is that researchers in any time are operating under the ethical norms of their particular time and place. Withholding antibiotics from those men long after their syphilis could have been cured is ethically unconscionable now, but then, it was not, at least to enough of the people involved. Today, it is still the medical industry (specifically pharmaceutical companies) that is pushing (and in my opinion far exceeding ethical boundaries, in spite of the presence of IRBs in virtually every medical and educational institution.

US CDC Venereal Disease Branch (1970-73) Tuskegee syphilis study doctor injects subject with placebo

In Romania, people generally don’t sue each other, especially the impoverished patients I work with. They live on a mountain “beyond the sight of God” as one patient put it. They don’t have access to lawyers and cannot even call or email the contact info on my informed consent because they lack internet access and money for international calls. When these patients give me their informed consent, it is informed by the personal relationship I have with them and those they know. They do so with the knowledge that they would have little recourse if I did behave unethically. It makes their consent all the more meaningful. Ultimately consent, at least in my research site, has little to do with my protocols and institutional approvals. For the patients informed consent is not something I read out loud to them, it is earned over the course of months through drinking coffee, staring off the balcony and exchanging stories of our families. It is something I take seriously not because of the IRB, but because I know that the people sharing their lives with me trust me on a personal level. I owe it to them to behave in a way that is ethically appropriate and respects their humanity and dignity. I think at this point we have a system of ethics approval which is designed by clinicians and enforced by lawyers for the protection of hospital and university endowments in a litigious society. It is the worst of possible worlds and despite best intentions 20 years from now, future researchers will read of all of the unethical research that took place even in this age of IRBs.

I think part of the issue is that ethical research means different things to different people and institutions. In the technical, clinical and legal language of U.S. IRBs, it means limiting “risk” to the study participants. This definition of ethics was inadequate for one of my Romanian transcribers who did not want to work on my project unless there was an actual benefit to Romanian TB patients—that I am not simply studying their “biosociality” or some other nebulous academic nonsense, but rather trying to use my research to improve people’s lives. I told her that is the only reason why I research. This is the same concern that many patients had. However, it never comes up in my U.S. ethics reviews.  I wish it did.

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?

This fall, I taught a literature course for the first time, and at Queens College, where I’d never worked before. The class was scheduled at 3 in the afternoon on a Friday, and during this time the Queens campus seemed pretty deserted. I dragged my wheely bag around empty floors and stairwells, from my office, to tech services, to the building where I taught. One faculty member observed my class, and the meeting with her that followed was a bright, warm spot of collegiality, advice, and encouragement in an otherwise pretty isolated semester. Then, Weir’s email arrived, and I had that great moment that comes from sharing experiences in a particular profession: “That exact thing happened to me!” Weir mentions students’ tendency to open papers with broad general statements. I had just spent a day with student papers that began with some variation of “Since the dawn of time, humans have thought about the important topic of identity….” I had also spent the day writing in the margins of my students’ papers comments like, “Interesting claim, can you support and develop this with an example, or cite a source?” Weir addresses these issues in this informal email in a way I found very helpful.

Last year, Talia wrote an excellent post about how to get adjuncts (who are isolated from professionalization events because they are already “stretched thin” timewise), to participate in pedagogy workshops. She came up with three great tips for how to reach out and engage adjuncts. Below, I offer Weir’s email as an example of the sort of spirit of collegiality and engaged, attuned teaching that did not wait for a Wiki or a workshop, but just reached out—both to colleagues with whom I can assume he already has a rapport, and to strangers and fellow teachers like me.

Weir wrote:

“…..I wanted to share a “teaching moment,” if I may, and forgive me for jamming up your email at this point in the semester, when everyone has too much to read.So my undergrad students and I (ENG 395W) where talking about the first paragraph of the first drafts of their research papers -”research-,” “term-,” “analytical-,” whatever you call those papers.

And my students are of course in love with generality and with big sweeping introductory moments.  Not in a hostile way: They are convinced of the importance of big contextualizing opening remarks,and why not?  But it leads to first sentences like: “David Foster Wallace develops literature in an artistic way.”  They do think that a general introductory move is important and necessary and basically required.

And so we were trying to figure out how to write an opening sentence that was both specific and catchy, that hauled you into the essay, set a tone, and also got right down to business – just as one example of an opening-sentence-strategy.  And don’t ask me how we ended up talking about marijuana.  Um, I don’t remember?  But suddenly we were discussing all the ways in which folks get busted for carrying a tiny amount of pot on their persons; and one of my students said, “Cops like to make arrests right at the end of their shifts, because it forces them into overtime and extra pay”; and one of my students said, ”Drug busts for a small amount of marijuana are really popular because the NYPD can use those arrests to pump up statistics about how they’re
keeping down crime in NYC”; and there were like 5 students in the room who had information to add, and they mentioned various articles they had read on this topic in other classes and/or on their own.  They cited their sources, in other words.  And everyone in the room, all 17 students, were suddenly talking, with way more interest and excitement than they had shown in our discussion of, well, anything else all
semester.

And it so happens that I’ve been reading Judith Halberstam’s *The Queer Art of Failure* (Duke U Press, 2011), wherein, among other things, Halberstam has stuff to say about pedagogy and the academy, including her assertion – a propos of Jacques Ranciere’s *The Ignorant Schoolmaster* and Laurent Cantet’s 2008 documentary *The Class*(*Entre Les Murs*) – that “learning is a two-way street and you cannot teach without a dialogic relation to the learner.”

“Okay,” I thought, “here’s our dialogic relation,” and I drew my students’ attention to how instantly and fully they got engaged in a conversation in which each student entered into the argument with a specific example: Cops make drug arrests at 5 PM; the NYPD uses drug busts to brag about crime control; etc.  And I reminded them that they had cited their sources.  And I asked them if they imagined that they might begin a paper about David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” by pointing immediately to a piece of evidence, a moment from the text, an event, a compelling linguistic turn, a critical intervention made by a scholar or critic or writer, etc. Rather than, you know, ”Western Literature has long struggled with the problem of language.”

And I think they got that.

All of which is to say that I have found that the only pedagogical tool I have is ignorance and unknowing, which I perform for my students whenever possible (usually out of necessity!), and that mostly this strategy fails, but sometimes it gives students room to veer away from the topic and demonstrate their expertise in some other area of discourse.  And once in a while, I am able to point out to them that they already know how to do what we are struggling to figure out how to do.”

When I first taught freshman composition, I was charged with covering the five primary rhetorical modes. Of course there have always been more than five, but the contemporary moment demands that we re-direct our gaze toward the reality of an infinite body of modes (even if we continue to insist on the tidy and classical handful of five: they can still be useful). This doesn’t mean that every classroom must embrace and welcome tweets and texts and slang into its culture and content, but rather that even if we want to limit the language-types circulating in our classrooms or in our students’ essays , we’re going to have to name them, collectively, first. “The ability to write” does not constitute one undifferentiated field, and as teachers we must liberate ourselves from that fantasy.

I’m curious to hear about strategies others have uncovered for teaching multiple fluencies. One of the challenges of living up to the promise of this pedagogical approach is that the very assumption of audience that underlies the conventional conception of rhetoric has been thrown into deep disarray.  To whom is a Facebook status update addressed? Is it to an individual, to some parcel of one’s collection of “friends,” to some imaginary conglomerate Other, or an aspect of oneself?  I’m quite sure that in many cases both the identities of speaker and audience are unknown. Perhaps one route of entry into the new rhetoric of communication is via a return to, and revision of, an elemental study of self and other: one that accounts for student, teacher and screen.

Today I would like to look at common threads in articles on CAC during the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s. I also want to discuss current questions or concerns that have emerged in articles in the past few years.

The emphasis on how Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC) courses might prepare students for corporate jobs continued through the 1980s:

The importance of the development of oral communication abilities has been documented in a number of sources. Studies of graduates, employers, and corporate executives have revealed, for example, that skills in problem solving, communication, and interpersonal relations are most valued in high tech corporations….One way of assisting students in developing oral communication competencies is the required speech communication course, and another way is to integrate communication skills into content area courses. (Hay 1)

Communication Across the Curriculum at Baruch is certainly part of this lineage of CAC programs which emphasize communication as a business skill. However, since Baruch’s Communication Intensive Courses are in Theater and other humanities departments, they represent more than just communication for business. Depending on the class and the instructor, the emphasis might be communication as effective performance, communication as the transmission of cultural understanding, or communication as a means of displaying academic knowledge. For a rich background on the development of Communication Intensive Courses at Baruch, this 2008 Change article is required reading (Warner).

The 1990s witnessed a surge of articles on the assessment of Communication Across the Curriculum courses (Cronin and Grice) as well as on the applications of new technologies (Reiss, Selfe, and Young). Email, the web, and presentation software helped to increase the relevance of CAC and CIC. This seems fitting, since (as I showed in my last post) the original idea of Communication Courses came out of training in the use of communication technologies such as the typewriter.

Despite the spread of CAC and CIC, the basic Communication Course still exists within Communication Departments Across the country, though of course it has evolved through the decades (Morreale, Worley, and Hugenberg). Alongside the notion of Writing in the Disciplines, discipline specific definitions of communication have spread through Communication in the Disciplines movements (Dannels and Gaffney).

The first decade of this century witnessed articles demanding an even greater standardization of CAC, even while acknowledging that standards of communication are developing within each discipline as much as without (Dannels and Gaffney). Articles in this decade appear to be just as likely to survey the field of CAC as they are to pose discipline-specific (CID) questions (Hyavarinen et al.). Many writers also focus on questions of practical pedagogy (Dannels, Gaffney, and Martin).

The question, then, is what is CAC today? One of the issues that CAC faces is how to balance general communication practices with discipline specific standards (Garside). New communication platforms will likely also stimulate scholarly inquiry.

I personally am interested in the ethics and human purposes of communication, but these questions are generally not addressed by authors writing about CAC; I imagine this is because moral or ethical questions are seen as disconnected from “objective” standards of communication. However, looking at our Cacophony posts from this semester, it seems as though we are continually returning to questions of how communication relates to power dynamics and identity. I wonder whether these are questions that are being asked by CAC participants in other parts of the US.

Zucotti Park, October 2011. Source: emilydickinsonridesabmx‘s Flikr photostream

Works Cited

Cronin, Michael W. and George L. Grice. “Oral Communication across the Curriculum:  Designing, Implementing, and Assessing a University-Wide Program.” 77th Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association. Atlanta, GA. Oct. 31-Nov. 3 1991. Conference Report.

Dannels, Deanna P., and Amy L. Housley Gaffney. “Communication Across The Curriculum And In The Disciplines: A Call For Scholarly Cross-Curricular Advocacy.” Communication Education 58.1 (2009): 124-153. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Dannels, Deanna P., Amy L. Housley Gaffney, and Kelly Norris Martin. “Students’ Talk About The Climate Of Feedback Interventions In The Critique.” Communication Education 60.1 (2011): 95-114. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Garside, Colleen. “Seeing The Forest Through The Trees: A Challenge Facing Communication Across The Curriculum Programs.” Communication Education 51.1 (2002): 51. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Hay, Ellen A. “Communication across the Curriculum.” 73rd Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association. Boston, MA. 5-8 November 1987. Conference Presentation.

Hyavarinen, Marja-Leena, Paavo Tanskanen, Nina Katajavuori, and Pekka Isotalus. “A Method For Teaching Communication In Pharmacy In Authentic Work Situations.” Communication Education 59.2 (2010): 124-145. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Morreale, Sherwyn P., David W. Worley, and Barbara Hugenberg. “The Basic Communication Course At Two- And Four-Year U.S. Colleges And Universities: Study VIII-The 40Th Anniversary.” Communication Education 59.4 (2010): 405-430. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Reiss, Donna, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young, Eds. Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. ERIC Database. Urbana, IL:  National Council of Teachers, 1998. Web. 4 Dec. 2011.

Warner, Fara. “Improving Communication is Everyone’s Responsibility.” Change Nov. 2008. Web. 4 Dec. 2011.

This semester, my students and I have been struck by a series of uncanny synchronicities between the course material we are covering and national events.  First, the Penn State/Sandusky/Paterno scandal and ensuing student riot climaxed the night before we watched a documentary about James Meredith and the violent resistance he met as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.  Watching reactionary students overturning cars and attacking journalists in the Deep South of 1962, because they resented any “outside threat” to their beloved institution, was particularly chilling in light of the previous evening’s images of Penn State students rampaging in misguided defense of their hero.  Similarly, units on the People’s Park occupation of 1969 in Berkeley, California, resonated neatly with the Zuccotti Park occupation and subsequent eviction.  Finally, our coverage of Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement, which is portrayed with clarity and emotion in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties (now streaming on Netflix!), in the context of the wider campus uprisings of the Vietnam War era, coincided (somewhat sickeningly) with the recent incidents of protest and police violence in our very own Newman Vertical Campus at Baruch.  In all of these cases, discussions of the similarities between eras of past upheaval and the current sociopolitical landscape were unavoidable, and helped reinforce, for me, a couple key points about teaching in the 21st century.

I think every teacher wants their students to connect the subject they are studying to their everyday lives, to see its relevance and to integrate its teachings into their lived experience.  As social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to expand in popularity, particularly among college students, it makes sense to employ these tools as a way of connecting students more directly to their course material.  Tom Harbison and I have been experimenting with this a bit, creating a shared course wiki that allows students to collaborate in creating a database of historical knowledge.  One aspect that’s been fascinating to watch develop is the visual aesthetic of each wiki page, and how students find unique ways to communicate often profound historical observations. One recent, brilliant example (above) shows how students juxtaposed two images of Rosa Parks to create a striking tableau of change over time.

At their root, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking utilities all seem to nurture a particular human desire to narrativize our experience of reality, to take the primary sources of our shared history and arrange them into an understandable story.  This impulse can be useful, and is indeed ubiquitous in pedagogy, because it allows for the communication of complex concepts by embedding them in easily digestible narrative morsels.  Of course, making a “story” out of everything has its dangers, as well: imagine whole generations of students getting all of their information about World War II from Saving Private Ryan (shudder).

Speaking of the Second World War, a recent New York Times piece describes a project called “Real Time World War II,” in which an Oxford University history graduate, Alwyn Collinson, is recreating, hour by hour, the events of the war, beginning in 1939, via an astoundingly detailed (and increasingly popular) Twitter feed.  Collinson’s project appeals to me because it satisfies the “you are there” excitement of storytelling while simultaneously demonstrating the necessity of thorough research.  Also, it’s a lot of fun (not to mention incredibly spooky) to witness the march to world war in the postmodern vernacular of Twitter.  A Yale professor quoted in the Times article states, “People in the past weren’t living in the past, they were living in their own present. . .These kinds of tweets restore to the past the authentically confusing character of the present.”  For me, Collinson’s experiment offers one example of how to use the raw tools of social networking to stimulate a more imaginative connection to course material, and serves as a reminder that, as technologically-enhanced human communication continues its expansion, so does the need to adapt our learning strategies to fit a rapidly shifting set of historical circumstances.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The mother of all the rabbits”

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

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

photo credit: ekai

For most of us, our interactions with technology are strictly non-humanoid. We e-mail, text, tweet, upload, download, blog, skype, and share, but rarely do we speak with or come into physical contact with technologized incarnations of ourselves. And when we do, we often might not know it, since we are not in physical proximity to the telephone operator transferring our call or the app administrator playing a game with us. Of course, robots have worked on industrial assembly lines for decades, albeit in the form of robotic arms rather than embodied laborers. Increasingly, humanoid robots are also being introduced into our social and personal spheres. While far from common in the workplace or home, humanoids already have been tested as receptionists, teacher’s assistants, showroom models, companions for the elderly, and child sitters. This current adjacency to and future integration with human society compels us to reexamine what we desire in verbal, visual, and tactile modes of communication. We must ask—and answer—some weighty questions: How will these robots impact day-to-day communication? How will human-human communication be reshaped as a result of humanoid participation? When an English-speaking robot is being programmed with language, what form of English will it be? Will our existing notions about class and education be reiterated in humanoid language software? And, more broadly, in what ways will our ideas about agency and subjectivity be modified and what might “humanities” come to mean?

As humanoid robots are further integrated into the human sphere, their creators are arduously trying to make them look, sound, and move more like humans. However, as Chris Carroll and Max Aguilera-Hellweg point out in their National Geographic article, current models underscore how much humanoids do not resemble humans. From a distance, some humanoids might already “pass” as human, but up close one sees that their mouths do not close completely, their speech still comes across like “scripted observation” rather than dialogue, and their skin lacks elasticity—all of which, as Carroll and Aguilera-Hellweg remark, lends a bizarre quality to these robots. We strive to make them resemble us as much as possible. We anthropomorphize them to make them more acceptable to us. Yet, in producing robots that are “more like us” manufacturers replicate some of the more problematic aspects of our cultural and interpersonal constructs.

One particular humanoid model was subjected to a transformation that illustrates this conundrum. Yume, a humanoid robot created by Japan’s Kokoro Company, was deemed not quite believable enough to “pass,” so she was shipped off to Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center where five graduate students worked to revamp her and make her a worthy “other” for human communication. The result, as one of the students summarizes, is an actroid who is “‘slightly goth, slightly punk, all about getting your attention from across the room’”. While her makeover was not considered a wild success, what is noteworthy about it, I would argue, is how she has been sexualized in order to grab attention “from across the room.” The physical and sartorial attributes that render a young human female fetching and approachable in the human world have been transposed onto a carefully modeled collection of wires, metal plates, and silicone in order to make it more “believable” in whatever “entertainment” context it is destined for. But do we really want to copy and paste our current norms onto this new terrain?

It is difficult not to see elements of Narcissus’s and Pygmalion’s stories here. We seem to be so enamored of ourselves that we are willing to replicate qualities that many of us deem problematic, even detrimental, to fruitful, engaging, respectful relationships. We might not have fallen in love (yet) with these humanoids, as Pygmalion did with his creation, but the ongoing work of robotics designers suggests that the prize of near-perfect object-companions is worth the labor. Which begs still further questions: What sorts of interactions will be acceptable and what types impermissible? How far down the Stepford and “Svedka” roads do we want to go? Could increased interactions with humanoids—which lack self-awareness and emotion—broaden our understanding concerning sentience and its role in communication? Does HRI ultimately suffer because we know a light remains off in the attic even though the battery pack is fully charged? If we want to move beyond “Hello Kitty” clad Yumes, then people whose work is centered in communication need to be involved in research and development.

Back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT created ELIZA, one of the first computer programs (chatter bots) that could maintain a meaningful conversation with humans. ELIZA was created to help patients in need of psychotherapy. ELIZA software responded to patients by using pattern matching techniques – providing answers based on similar keywords. The name ELIZA was inspired by Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, who learns to speak as a member of the elite society.  After some interaction with ELIZA it was possible to discern that ELIZA was a program, however some people believed that ELIZA was a real person.

A Turing test is usually used to evaluate how well a software program imitates humans. Created in the 1950s by Alan Turing, the test helps differentiate between humans and computer programs that imitate human intelligence. During the test, a human judge is assigned to chat with a human and a machine. If the human judge is able to guess who is who, the software program fails Turing Test. The test is implemented in an annual Loebner Prize competition that evaluates the most sophisticated chatter bots.  One of the winners of Loebner Prize – A.L.I.C.E.  is able to maintain a conversation, however in spite of receiving three Loebner Prizes, it still fails to pass Turing test. Another chatterbot Cleverbot won Machine Intelligence Competition in 2010  and passed Turing Test by only 42 percent.

A recent trend is to apply artificial intelligence for the development of personal assistant programs in mobile devices. Dragon Dictation software types down everything you say, and a Genius Button imbedded in hardware of some Android based phones is at your command at all times – finds locations, replies to your emails, calls your contacts and performs other routine tasks. Personal assistants can send emails, post to social media sites, take notes, translate, look up weather, update calendars, find directions and talk to their owners. While Apple’s Siri received a lot of attention in the media, there are similar programs available on Android Market, such as SpeakToIt and Jeannie. To help understand accents, a Singapore company SingTel created DeF!ND, software that understands Singlish – English spoken with a Singaporean accent.

While the use of Artificial Intelligence in mobile applications is on the rise, how this technology will develop? The usage of such applications in academia is also intriguing. For example, can students benefit from using “personal assistants”? Will it be possible to create technology that looks up references, helps in doing homework, or automatically creates and posts assignments by the deadline?

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

“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.

As I wrote previously, the idea of the communication course first arose in the mid 1940s when WWII veterans flooded colleges on the GI Bill:

The Communication course sprang out of the demands of the armed services during World War II for faster and more practical instruction in the language arts than was being given by existing sources. Such courses in the language arts, according to the armed services, were unrealistic, ineffective, and too slow. Language, from the armed services’ point of view, should be studied as an instrument for communicating ideas in a social system. (Malmstrom 21)

In other words, college communication courses extended military training in communication even after the war was done. Thomas F. Dunn also makes this argument when he states that “During the Second World War, the term communication came into widespread use, largely from the impetus given by the special needs of war trainees whose preparation for receiving and giving military commands, making reports on activities, and directly operations both orally and in writing were not adequately provided by the traditional college training” (31).

Take a minute to look at this 1944 training video on how women can be most productive when using typewriters for the military. The first minute is hilarious, but then, if you’re really interested, you can skip past the history of typewriters to minute 5 where the instruction in how to sit begins:

Early communication courses both served the practical need for expertise in everyday “reading, writing, speaking, and listening” and the desire to ensure the spread of American democracy, or as Malmstrom puts it, “keeping democracy dominant” (23). They could be in a variety of disciplines, as long as the four modes of communication were the focus and were evaluated as ends unto themselves (Malmstrom 22). However, the idea that there should be a systematic emphasis on communication across the entire college curriculum didn’t really emerge until the 1980s.

By 1959, communication courses had diverged in a number of different directions:  “Some courses [centered] themselves around personal awareness and personality development as a means to better expression, others around the media of mass communication, others around the structure of language, and still others around semantics or general semantics” (Dean 80).

As I mentioned in my last post, articles discussing communication courses thin out in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, an interest in communication courses returned in the early and mid 1970s, although the emphases were slightly different, falling on questions about how to teach communication to students of diverse backgrounds (such as in Diana Corley’s “An Interracial Communication Course for the Community College”), how to evaluate speeches (such as in Sara Latham Stelzner’s “Selected Approaches to Speech Communication Evaluation”), and how to communicate in business (such as P.H. Hewing’s “A Practical Plan for Teaching Oral Communication in the Business Communication Course”). While the notion of business communication had been around since the early 1940s, articles on that topic really exploded in the second half of the 1970s.

In the early 1980s articles referencing communication courses continued the business communication trend and also highlighted multicultural or intercultural communication (such as in Richard Fiordo’s “The Soft-Spoken Way vs. the Outspoken Way:  A Bicultural Approach to Teaching Speech Communication to Native People in Alberta”). In 1985, an article whose title today seems a bit quaint appeared:  Leon W. Couch and Charles V. Shaffer’s “Development of a Computer Communications Course Plus Laboratory.”

Many sources claim that the Writing Across the Curriculum movement rose in the early 1980s (this includes the Purdue OWL website). This is indeed when most articles on WAC were published, but technically, the term was first used in 1965 with the Writing Across the Curriculum Project at the University of London and the earliest articles referencing the movement in America were published in the late 1970s (Steinfatt 461). But, throwing another wrench in the works, in Charles Bazerman, Joseph Little, and Lisa Bethel’s Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum the movement is traced back through the 1970s and then ever further back to 1931, when Alvin C. Enrich presented the findings of a late 1920s study conducted at the University of Minnesota:

Essays collected from 54 freshmen both before and after completing their freshman composition course at Minnesota were reviewed using one of several popular essay rating scales. The conclusions drawn from Eurich’s scholarly research report were that extended habits of written expression cannot be influenced in such a short time… (13-14)

The idea of more comprehensive writing instruction over a student’s entire time at college was proposed in 1931 but was then pushed off for another four decades.

Based on my research, however, WAC and CAC share a startling common ancestor. Both WAC and CAC in American colleges can be traced to a 1969-1970 Writing Across the Curriculum faculty seminar “led by Barbara Walvoord” at Central College (Bazerman, Little, and Bethel 26). This was the earliest WAC seminar in the US, and the philosophy of CAC grew alongside Central’s WAC program as it evolved in the 1970s. As far as I can tell, the seminal paper which discusses communication across the curriculum is Charles V. Roberts’ “Communication Education Throughout the University:  An Alternative to the One-Shot Inoculation Approach,” which was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Communication Association in April of 1983. Roberts, who is from Central College, lays the groundwork of a CAC philosophy and discusses how it emerged alongside Central’s WAC program. He claims that one or two communication courses are not enough to make students into expert communicators (3-4); rather than forcing students to take more communication courses, the “responsibility for helping students speak, listen, write, and read more effectively” should be “diffused across the academic community” (4). He then claims that Central College is the first to systematically require a communication emphasis across multiple disciplines rather than simply within the Communication Department; he discusses how this developed at Central over the 1970s, beginning with a writing “laboratory” in 1972 and evolving into faculty training in communication evaluation in 1979 (4-5).

Steinfatt mentions two reasons for the growing emphasis in the late 1970s and early 1980s for robust instruction in communication skills:  the first is the National Endowment for the Arts‘ 1983 report entitled “A Nation at Risk” which proclaims that the nation is facing an erosion of educational standards (460). WAC also arose largely in response to this report. The second reason is “the opinion of many corporate executives, expressed in university surveys, in casual conversation with university faculty and administrators, and in grants and bequests, that the number one problem of college students entering the work force, both for the organization and for students’ chances of advancement, is that college graduates ‘can’t communicate’” (460).

In summary, the ways in which communication courses were discussed and theorized shifted with the pedagogical concerns of each decade. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was an increased interest in communication for business. Both WAC and CAC in America were born in Central College. WAC evolved first, beginning in 1969, and CAC was added on during the 1970s.

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles, Joseph Little, and Lisa Bethel. Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. West Lafeyette, IN:  2005. Web. 10 November 2011.

Corley, Diana. “An Interracial Communication Course for the Community College.” Communication in Education 24.3 (1975):  237-241.

Couch, Leon W. and Charles V. Shaffer. “Development of a Computer Communications Course Plus Laboratory.” CoED 5.3 (1985):  14-19. Web. 10 November 2011.

Dean, Howard H. “The Communication Course:  A Ten-Year Perspective.” College Composition and Communication 10.2 (1959):  80-85. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Dunn, Thomas F. “The Principles and Practice of the Communication Course.” College Composition and Communication 6.1 (1955):  31-38. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Fiordo, Richard. “The Soft-Spoken Way vs. the Outspoken Way:  A Bicultural Approach to Teaching Speech Communication to Native People in Alberta.” Journal of American Indian Education 24.3 (1985):  35-48. Web. 10 November 2011.

Hewing, P.H. “A Practical Plan for Teaching Oral Communication in the Business Communication Course.” Business Communication Quarterly 40.4 (1977):  9-11. SAGE Communication and Media Studies backfile Collection. Web. 10 November 2011.

Malmstrom, Jean. “The Communication Course.” College Composition and Communication 7.1 (1956):  21-24. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Roberts, Charles V. Communication Education Throughout the University: an Alternative to the One-Shot Inoculation Approach. , 1983:  1-16. Web. ERIC Database. 11 November 2011.

Steinfatt, Thomas M. “Communication Across the Curriculum.” Communication Quarterly. 34.4 (1986): 460-70. Print.

Stelzner, Sara Latham. “Selected Approaches to Speech Communication Evaluation.” Speech Teacher 24.2 (1975):  127-23. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

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.

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 8^th 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:

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.

With the advent of new technologies, that number is only expected to grow. Further, in American culture and society, the power of advertising to persuade, manipulate, and shape behavior has been undeniable. Despite its primary objective as a medium of selling products, advertising has long been criticized for having deeper and more complex effects on people’s attitudes and behaviors.

While there has been much research about the effects of the media on individuals’ behavior, one of the most prominent areas has been the objectification that it fosters, specifically with regards to the stereotype aimed at women. Many researchers have attempted to understand this phenomenon, and have come up with empirically-validated theoretical accounts and explanations. One such construct, termed objectification theory, posits that in Western society, the female body is regarded as a sexual object that is to be looked at and evaluated (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). According to this theory, the female body is “treated as a body (or collection of body parts) valued predominantly for its use (or consumption) by others,” (p. 174). As a result of this process, females come to internalize this “observer” position of themselves, and therefore view their bodies as objects for visual inspection and evaluation. The term self-objectification refers to the adoption of this observer view of the self, and includes constant monitoring and evaluation of how one’s body appears to others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_objectification).

Although levels of objectification can differ among women, it has been argued that objectification generalizes to all women due to the female gender role socialization that is found in Western society. Although research has documented many long-term effects of objectification (i.e., anxiety, depression), more recent findings suggest that objectification can lead to short-term effects (i.e., body consciousness, cognitive disruptions) as well.

Despite objectification being a societal problem, there is little doubt that it has made its way into the classroom. I first experienced this firsthand a number of years ago, when I noticed that in all of my classes, I barely had females participating in class discussions. Not thinking much of it at the time, I simply encouraged more participation (from everyone) in general. Little did I know then that what I was facing was much deeper than I could have imagined. One day, a student came up to me after class to tell me how much she loved my class, but that she was afraid of speaking because of her fear of “looking stupid” in front of other students. So naturally I did what any educator would do, and over the course of a few weeks, tried to figure out just how much of a problem this was for other (female) students. I asked several students what they thought about class, and particularly, class discussions, presentations, and other assignments that consisted of some performance aspect in front of other students. Quite surprisingly, I found what my female student had hinted upon: while males had no issues speaking in class, it was the females who had much reservation, mainly due to their concern of how they would appear to others in class. As one female student put it, “I am always worried of what other people will think of me.”

To be honest, this was something that had never crossed my mind before. Here I was teaching topics in marketing, yet one of the most obvious effects of the subject matter was right in front of my eyes. Had the media had such an effect on my female students that it stifled even something as basic as their participation in class? Sure, there were some exceptions to this, as I had some female students who were clearly outspoken and (at least in my opinion) did not have any fear or anxiety in speaking up in class for fear of “looking stupid.” Unfortunately, however, such female students weren’t the norm. And while I have tried to eliminate this problem as best I can (by encouraging participation from everyone, making it a point that I value everyone’s opinion, talking about the topic of objectification, and even showing the video (seen above) in class), I continue to encounter this problem semester after semester.

Although the issue of objectification and its effects on females is something that will be hard to change given that it’s a system problem, I urge you (as instructors) to at the very least recognize it. As Jane Kilbourne mentions in her film, the first step in addressing the problem is awareness. Bringing it to light in the classroom, especially by their college years, might bring us one step closer in finding a solution.

Example of a “Chinglish” sign

photo credit: Jonas in China

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

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

Supertitles before an opera

  photo credit: testastretta-999

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

David Henry Hwang's Chinglish on Broadway

  photo credit: Mark Runyon

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

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

“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.]

E-books are not new. They existed in various formats, PDFs mainly, for a number of years. However, the launch of Amazon Kindle in 2007 changed the game. Light, easy to carry Kindle could hold hundreds of books. A year after, Barnes and Noble followed with a Nook reader. Later, Borders joined the contest by partnering with Kobo, Toronto-based e-reader manufacturer. In 2010 Apple’s device iPad was released, providing a more efficient way to buy e-books from various providers including the Apple’s own iBooks app. Android tablets followed the suit. By the end of 2010, Amazon reported for the first time that they sold 115 e-books for every 100 paperbacks, excluding free book downloads.

While Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iBooks reap the most benefits from e-book sales, publishing houses have to face the most dramatic change since Gutenberg’s times. Traditionally, publishers have not worked with end consumers. Instead, they employed a middleman – a bookstore. But bookstores have their own agenda. The Internet makes everything cheaper. Amazon, a dominant book retailer, deliberately reduced e-book prices in order to increase its market share and sales of Kindle devices. For example, if a book retailed for $26, Amazon would pay a wholesale price $13 to a publisher, and sell the book for $9.99 to an Amazon customer. By taking losses, Amazon ensured cheaper prices of e-books.

Apple proposed a different pricing model. Apple allowed e-book sales through their iBooks App by charging 30% per transaction. Publishers liked a new model as it let them set the price of the book rather than dealing with Amazon’s draconian methods. As a result e-books became more expensive. Amazon did not have a choice but to adopt a new agency pricing model. At the same time, Amazon did not forget to innovate. In September 2011, Amazon announced a new Kindle Library lending program. Library users with access to Kindle software can borrow Amazon books for free from their local libraries. In addition, the majority of libraries offer free Kindle instruction sessions ensuring that e-book opponents can receive guidance and sufficient training on how to use e-books.

Publishers have fewer outlets to sell books at a regular hardcover price. However the costs of running a publishing house did not change. Publishers spend money on author advances, royalties, printing, advertising and distribution, facilities and operations, editors and so on. In addition, more and more authors prefer self-publishing. By avoiding a publishing house, authors reach out to consumers by offering books mainly in 99c range. Moreover, all classic literature is available for free to download due to expired copyright protection rights. How can publishers put up with disruptive digital publishing?

Guido Lang, VP of Business Development at MintRight, Inc., a global e-book distribution platform, says: “Publishers have to answer the question of how they add value. In a world where you can publish online in real time and at little or no cost, it is hard to convince someone to pay for a publisher. On the flip side, publishers have great experience in identifying, developing, and marketing great stories, which will remain a key skill. However, publishers have to adopt the new tools of their trade – e-books, apps, and social media.”

Of course, opponents of e-books may claim that an e-book will never replace a ‘real’ paper book. However, what is real? The first books known to humanity were set in stone, written on papyrus scrolls, clay tablets, parchment and silk. Paper books replaced ancient forms of book making, and Gutenberg’s printing technology replaced handwritten books. Digital technology and e-readers are ready to transform the whole industry of publishing.

Will paper books cease to exist? Probably not. While everything that is released in paperbacks can be easily digitized, books with colorful illustrations, such as cooking books or art books are perceived better in paper formats and are great gifts. As an analogy, mass produced prints did not replace handmade paintings. The challenge for publishers is to update their existing business model and innovate.