Paul Watzlawick was a great researcher on the topic of communication, somewhat forgotten in the digital age but incredibly relevant. Born in Austria in 1939 he studied with Jung, continued his studies in El Salvador before ending up in Palo Alto in 1960 where he worked with Don Jackson and followed the now famous Gregory Bateson. He worked mostly in the field of family therapy, but was interested in a much larger understanding of context in communication, seeing the dynamic as a system involving both parties and framing communication as something we do no matter what. To Watzlawick there was no non-communication, just as there couldn’t be a non-behavior, which meant that everything had to be studied as communication.

Another one of his ideas is that communication involves not only the message delivered, verbal or non-verbal, but the message received as a response, which might seem obvious but isn’t when you think of it. Much of our misunderstandings are in the ways we decipher the response to our ways of communication, which is understandably difficult since it comes from another person who might interpret things quite differently. In the age of rapid electronic messaging, the gap between what is communicated and what is received can be drastic, especially when we cannot measure what is received.

Watzlawick coined another distinction between what he called digital and analog communication, which is not the digital and analog we know. By digital he meant words, whereas analog depicts the non-verbal. Communication had to involve both, i.e. words and the way in which they were being delivered through behavior. The behavior involved the relationship and the context in which words have meaning, meaning also that words alone are not fully communicative without the understanding of their context and without understanding the relationship and behavior of both parties communicating.

This all made me think that we have substantially reduced communication in the age of electronic media in the sense that we have abstracted it to messages delivered without there being a true dialogue involving fully present and communicating individuals, integrating both the digital and the analog. Of course there is no going to back to old school, but perhaps we should think of what or who lies behind the screens that mediate.

Source: bryna-ethiopianhunger.blogspot.com

The noted Nigerian novelist and prolific writer, Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi, has an excellent quip about the dangers of misconceptions across cultures.  As she states,” the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story…. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity…. “ (Also see Binyavana Wainaina’s pieces here and here.

The rise of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and You tube has invariably connected millions of people across the globe.  In an unprecedented digital age, we no longer live in geographic isolation. Armed with our smartphones and ipads we are walking receptacles of instant information and connectivity.  In a culture where sound bites are king, how does one make sense of current events in African politics when the sum of all phenomenon is viewed through a prism of perpetual conflict, dysfunctional institutions, repressive government and the myths of a “single story.”

More specifically how does one effectively navigate a new information culture that is often replete with attention grabbing details that can obscure the larger context?  To what extent do news stories in general  invite us to delve deeper or inspire further inquiry on our part? Such pursuits are  simply too time consuming and costly. The irony is that globalization has flattened our world, widened and deepened worldwide interconnectedness.  Yet we know so little of Africa, that faraway, exotic place. Somehow in our rapidly evolving technological environment  rising awareness through the power of social media has not managed to produce careful dissemination of knowledge or events in far flung corners of the world. Take the Kony 2012 hullabaloo for example.

The meteoric attention and rapid attention that the thirty minute video managed to garner was unprecedented.  From blog entries, to Facebook, twitter, and classroom discussion, the sheer fire and debate  it ignited speaks to an enormous transformation of knowledge production and dissemination.  It also highlighted to some extent a surprising shift in consciousness.  This is because far from simply jumping on the bandwagon of the normal pity party that Africa’s conundrums frequently inspire, the you tube video inspired considerable critiques.  It seemed that far less people bought into what many deemed a brilliant advertising or marketing strategy and instead questioned the motives, the messianic overtones and seeming paternalism . Admittedly, Invisible Children’s plea  for assistance in hunting down Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony for his horrific use of child soldiers to carry out a reign of terror is certainly noble for it spurred United Nations action and renewed  US attention. But many in the academic, policymaking and blogging communities questioned the short shrift to complicated circumstances in Uganda, misinformation in the video and the nature of Invisible’s Children’s agenda.  In short, many viewed co-founder Jason Russell’s pleas as symbiotic of a continuing polemic of paternalistic western engagement.

I vividly remember the response of my students to the video which I showed in my Africa in World Affairs class.  Much to my surprise the bulk of my students were not convinced and pointed to misleading facts in varying shape and form.  Others expressed disdain for the seeming “patronizing’ tone, one-sided view and absent voices of Ugandans themselves.  What of the voices of Ugandans they wondered?  Some of my students bristled at the call for charity and how the images presented seemed to reify the “White Man’s Burden.”

How do we re-imagine Africa in the digital age or illuminate the wider historical, post-colonial realities of the continent without resorting to reductionism? Better yet, how do we move beyond stark and troubling stereotypes of Africa as the “dark continent’ waiting for the light of the west, waiting to be saved?  How far have we moved beyond prevailing images of the starving child, jutted bones, and swollen bellies?  Just like those late night infomercials, but perhaps more gripping, the power of YouTube ‘s ability to convey and transform the way we perceive and react to social phenomenon is undeniable.  The most interesting or newsworthy bits are not stories that seriously consider the political historical contexts. Instead broadcast journalism is most concerned with shock worthy sensationalism that is ephemeral at best.  In the 21^st century, this is simply unacceptable.  Despite the continent’s quagmires, there is hope and promise.

African initiated efforts to bolster economic growth, technological innovation, increase indigenous capital and investment is evident as are a growing number of emerging economies, reverses in brain drain among a plethora of other developments.  As the Economist notes, “in the past decade, six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies are African.  In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia.

Re-imagining the continent requires rebranding-using the very (powerful) instruments of technology and communication to showcase a diverse peoples whose futures will not hinge on the goodwill of the west or its aid.  Indeed, the efforts of Ghanaian software pioneer, Herman Chinery-Hesse, and architect of a technological revolution is noteworthy. The third annual symposium Africa 2.0 is also testament to a new narrative of empowerment, amid efforts to transform the continent’s image.   According to Jessica Ellis of CNN, not only is Chinery-Hesse considered the “Bill Gates of Africa” he is a founder of one of Ghana’s biggest software companies and has been “has been spawning innovations for two decades, helping to break down tech barriers between the continent and the rest of the world.”

Source

However, ordinary Africans must also do their part. By harnessing the power of social media, taking ineffectual and corrupt governments to task and ultimately ushering the much awaited “African Spring” these actions can remake, reshape and reconfigure Africa’s image and upstage prevailing stereotypes of what Africa is and is not. North Africans in Egypt used social media forums to harness support and boost activism against a repressive regime.  The western world, African continent and states elsewhere can smartly, sensitively and effectively use social media in constructive ways that channel the capacity for cross cultural understanding while avoiding the dangers of a “single story”.

At a recent brainstorming session at the Schwartz Institute, we discussed how to promote student participation in Blogs@Baruch by pitching the site as a place to develop a more professional online identity than one might express on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Of the proposed slogans for this campaign, one in particular struck me as both incredibly clever and potentially troubling.  It stated (I’m paraphrasing):  ”When you post something online, you’re also filling out a job application.”

I find this slogan to be so resonant because it captures some of the stark contradictions of the continued digitization of life on Earth.  On the one hand, it’s more than realistic to assume that your online activities are not only heavily monitored, but will in fact be acted upon by future and/or current employers, various organs of the State, and (gasp!) your parents.  In short, your digital identity is a growing part of your total self, and thus must be consciously cultivated to meet the same social, cultural, ethical, and economic standards that constitute your actual (meaty) self.  This perspective holds that, to be safe, you shouldn’t post anything online that you wouldn’t want your boss (or the Department of Homeland Security) to read.  This recent article describes how U.S. employers are increasingly requesting Facebook passwords from prospective employees, while obliging them to sign “non-disparagement agreements” that promise to never speak negatively about the company on social media, lest they face termination.  At companies like this, Facebook statuses literally function as lines on future job applications.

But is this the direction we want the internet to go?  If our online identities are essentially extensions of our “professional” lives, then we never leave the workspace; our digital ghosts will necessarily conform to the values of our employers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  I think this is a dangerous way of looking at social media and the internet in general, since it robs digital communication of its most potent properties by severely limiting the kinds of conversations that can be created.  While promoting responsible online behavior is important, our students shouldn’t be made to feel, at this ripe moment in their intellectual development, that they need to make sure their ideas meet the standards of corporate America.

As many of us know, a job interview is often the last place where creative thinking takes place.  The room in which a job interview transpires is perhaps the most restrictive rhetorical environment on the planet.  Interviewers ask questions intended to elicit responses that fit within an incredibly narrow range of imaginative possibilities, and nervous job seekers reply in ways that (they hope) will please the interviewers and prove their (the applicant’s) total internal alignment with the goals of the organization.  By invoking the metaphor of the job-acquirement process as a model for online behavior, we (inadvertently or otherwise) export that grey institutional atmosphere to our whole internet lives, and continue the process of boxing the digital frontier into an endless vista of chain stores and HR offices.  In my mind, I’m already sitting in one of those offices, and the words of this blog post are being read back to me aloud by an accusatory management figure.  I’ll try to think of a good response now.

Every form of communication is positioned in an economy of attention–the 30 second elevator speech, the graphic novel, the comic strip, the 30 minute newscast. And I don’t think one can talk about economies of attention without considering the role of privilege as a multidimensional variable encompassing items such as a person’s education, leisure time, and access to various technologies. For instance, I posit that the type of media that people consume on the subway can be largely predicted by their degree of privilege. Unfortunately we do not live in a utopia where the New York Post and the New York Times share the exact same readership.

In response to this tendency that I and other consumers of media have to skim text or to fast forward through TV shows, media has further economized itself. On Reddit, for instance, there is an abbreviation–TL;DR. Fittingly, TL;DR is shorthand for “Too Long; Didn’t Read.” Often, at the end of a paragraph-long Reddit post, the poster will put TL;DR and write a line summarizing the post for those who couldn’t be bothered to read it:

There is also a section on Reddit that is called TL;DR. This section is used to summarize an entire day of Reddit posts in one line of text. Somewhere between November 13, 2009, when this section first appeared, and July 15, 2006, which was the opening day of Twitter, I guess the whole internet realized that most everything was just too wordy.

Ironically, though, I still can bury myself in a book, but it has to be a book that is hard to put down. From what I’ve personally heard and read, literary agents are increasingly looking for page-turners, for the truly “immersive” and “accessible” read. No longer can books get away with too much exposition, no longer can they afford to let you walk leisurely down the road with Jude the Obscure, observing his thoughts about earthworms. Now the characters have to grab you, throw you in a car trunk, and drive off with you to Mozambique.

I wonder, though, how such pressures to economize the delivery of information might affect academia. Academic discourse has always been a discourse of privilege…even, I suppose, when some of the recipients of Phds are living on food stamps. Now that forms of communication are potentially economizing themselves, does academic discourse appear even more distant, more unrealistic? Is academic discourse guilty of alienating larger and larger swaths of the population? What might be the consequences of such alienation?

Recent years have already witnessed an increased diversity in the forms, or, one might say, the economies of academic writing. These diverse forms include summarizing one’s thesis in a single tweet, academic blog posts, the traditional academic article, word visualizations of conference speeches, and everything in between. In this negotiation of form one might wonder whether a real balance can be achieved between efficiency and the maintenance of academic rigor and integrity. Are there some cases in which an academic  argument can only be introduced in 30 pages or more?

TL;DR: Communication is economizing itself. How will academic discourse adapt?

Canada

I didn’t answer these questions last time and I won’t answer them now. The previous post cited a number of recent arguments for the university as a site of public good. In this post, I want to keep on asking what the university does and how its operations can be understood in relation to politics. I apologize in advance for the fact that my argument is not better articulated. I am wrestling with these questions and welcome comments and feedback.

To begin with, I want to mention three different things that I believe universities do. Not being an expert in the sociology or mechanics of education, I won’t be able to give detailed statistics or explain exactly how each of these three processes works. But I want to draw attention to them because it seems to me that they are not always conceived in relation to each other or to politics.

Japan

1) The first thing that universities do is teach and train university students in a variety of fields. This is the most obvious and central task of higher education, the one that receives the most attention and is most often at the heart of controversy. Current controversies over what to teach, how to teach, and who to teach all have to do with this basic function of colleges and universities. What should we be teaching? What do students need to know? Who gets to be a student and where? What is the cost in dollars of a BA, MA, or MBA? What is its value in other terms? What kind of training do students receive and how does this different from one institution to another?

The political implications of these questions are undeniable because we are talking about the mainstream, common (but not at all universal) training of adults. But what kind of training is this? From one perspective, it is essentially a professional training, getting people ready for particular jobs. From another perspective, it is training for responsible citizenship or—even more grandly—for responsible stewardship of humanity and our ecosystem. If the former, then there is no need for universal access to education. Instead, each person can receive just the training they need to fill in their particular slot in society. If the latter, then access and “gen-ed” core requirements become crucial parts of defining the future world. It seems to me that this is where the current debate over higher education is mostly taking place, and these are the terms on which arguments are most often made.

Russia

2) Another thing that universities do is support advanced research at the edge of diverse fields of knowledge. Few would deny the importance of this function of higher education, but it is more difficult to understand its political implications and more difficult to mount an argument on behalf of higher education in these terms. That’s because the “edge” of a field of knowledge is by definition partly unknown. If the classroom is a site ripe for general controversy, because everyone feels qualified to assert what ought to be taught there, then the research edge of any field is necessarily absent from mainstream discussion. There can be no easy way to talk about its “politics” because such an edge cannot even be articulated in plain language. Only a few people understand what is there, at the edge. And because they value it as an edge of knowledge, they are usually loathe to try and “translate” it into directly political terms.

Finland

(This is importantly not true of technological innovation. The thing about technology is that it can be distributed and used by people who don’t understand how it works. So the distant research edge of chip design or electrical dynamics can, under the right circumstances, be transformed into a handy gadget that massively effects the way we live. Think of radio, telephone, internet, cell phones, weapons, cars, and everything else we now take for granted. So when we talk about the politics of knowledge, we should be careful not to confuse knowledge with technology. Unlike advanced technology, advanced knowledge cannot easily be distributed to massive numbers of people. One can buy the technological products of knowledge in a store, but one cannot in the same way purchase the knowledge itself.)

Although their relationships to politics are very different, these two functions of universities are both fairly uncontroversial. Who would deny that universities both educate students and support advanced research? These are both political processes. They need to be analyzed in very different ways because the latter takes place at the edge of what is known and for that reason cannot be easily assimilated to the discourse of politics. However:

Nigeria

3) There is a third function of universities, which to my mind is at least as profound—perhaps even more profound—in its political implications, but which to a large extent goes unremarked. This is that universities play a large role in determining the structuring of primary and secondary schooling. As the “top” of the educational system, universities shape everything that we encounter in school from the time we enter kindergarten. As stated above, I don’t feel qualified to accurately describe all the ways in which universities influence primary and secondary schooling. Clearly the training of teachers and the development of textbooks and curricula is part of this. But more fundamentally, universities model—no, they actually constitute—the fields of knowledge to which students are introduced starting in the earliest grades.

Taiwan

This is an aspect of the politics of knowledge that isn’t usually discussed. We tend to think of primary and secondary education politics in terms of access and curriculum, but we rarely connect this with the questions that are at stake in higher education. Yet these questions run through the entire educational system: What fields of knowledge are important and for whom? When universities are viewed in this light, as the keystones of an entire educational system, then their potential impact on current and future politics becomes evident. At the same time, it becomes clear that the language of political debate is not sufficient to discuss these issues because it leaves out the texture and depth of knowledge. One cannot discuss “curriculum” in the same way with regard to both third grade reading and postgraduate professional training. Yet in both cases, curriculum is precisely the site of politics and of the creation of the future.

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Image credits: Charts of educational systems in various countries.

In addition, there have been many efforts made by organizations like the government in helping push the healthy eating agenda. For example, across various cities and states in the U.S., a tax policy on items like soda has been proposed in large part to curb health issues like childhood obesity. In New York City, a new regulation, started in 2008, limits restaurants to using trans fat-free ingredients, and fines those who do not comply. And while such tax proposals on “bad” foods are becoming more and more commonplace in recent time, some legislatures have even gone as far as suggesting a “Fat Tax,” or in other words, a tax for simply being obese.

Beyond the political side of things, companies themselves appear to be taking on an initiative towards providing consumers with healthier food options. For example, fast food chains like Subway position themselves almost entirely as being a healthier option than the typical burger joints. Even restaurants like Dunkin Donuts, the epitome of unhealthy eating, have joined in on the fight and changed their recipes towards healthier alternatives. Moreover, a huge trend in the past few years has been the addition of altogether healthy menu options. One of the pioneering retailers to do this was McDonald’s, whose salads, fruit side dish, and even whole wheat bun options have led others to follow suit.

While the addition of healthier options (theoretically) represent the good intentions of fast food restaurants, there is uncertainty with whether these efforts are truly benefitting society. In fact, recent work in the academic literature suggests the opposite. In one recent paper by Wilcox, Vallen, Block, and Fitzsimons (2009), the researchers examined consumers’ choices when presented with either menus that contained unhealthy and healthy options (i.e., french fries, salad) or menus that only included unhealthy options (i.e., french fries, cheeseburgers). Quite surprisingly, findings suggest that when menu included healthy options, consumers were more likely to choose the most unhealthy option than when the menu included only unhealthy options. Further examination of this effect provided support for a vicarious goal fulfillment explanation–that is, when consumers saw the healthy options on the menu, they felt like they vicariously fulfilled their health goals, and thus were licensed to indulge by choosing the most fattening, unhealthy option instead.

In a similar vein, other research has found that consumers often perceive of all food items at so-called healthier restaurants as having fewer calories than those  found at restaurants that are not primarily positioned as being healthy. In work by Chandon and Wansink (2007), consumers were found to underestimate the total number of calories in foods from restaurants positioned as being healthy. Additionally, this health halo generalized onto the side dishes they chose: the healthier the restaurant was perceived to be (due to the availability of healthier menu options and a little bit of marketing), the more unhealthy side dish options consumers chose.

Thus, I leave you to ponder what the best plan of action is. If the efforts being made by the push towards healthy eating by the government and companies is backfiring, what is left to be done? Can educating consumers, and thus making them aware of these effects as highlighted above, help? Whatever the answer may be, it is crucial for us to figure out the answer. With  1 in every 3 Americans is now technically considered obese,  figuring it out now may greatly affect our society for generations to come.

Several years later, when I boarded the plane to New York to pursue a Ph.D. in Accounting, the word “culture shock” just popped into my mind. For the following few months, everything was novel to me. I felt that I was experiencing a totally different life from what I had in China. As time passed by, I almost forgot such the feeling of shock I had at that time.

But I could never forget the first time when I went to Chinatown in Manhattan. Yes, the biggest “shock” I had was from Chinatown. It was a new world to me, unlike any of the places I visited in China. If you ask me what the differences are, I have to say that I cannot tell quite exactly. Probably, the feeling came from the traditional-fashioned seafood stores, the Cantonese-style lion dance, the Cantonese opera played by amateurs in Columbus Park, or even from the store-name styles which I only saw in Hong Kong movies. It is not a kind of thing either like the culture in which I grew up or the American culture I learned from English textbooks, TV shows, and my American friends. This might be the charm of multi-cultural environment of New York.

The initial shock of Chinatown has weakened. I go shopping in Chinatown once or twice a month and will never get lost there again. I’m getting to the so-called “mastery phase” of culture shock now. Yet it seems that some of my undergraduate students are suffering the similar “shock” as I ever had, which not only lies in language difficulties. Last semester, I had a meeting with a group of Chinese students to help them with their final presentation on Business Policy. After their presentation rehearsal, one of them told me that he always felt nervous when he spoke in public after he came to the U.S. Because his English is not bad, I was not sure whether his problem was also caused by the “culture shock” and could only help him by relaying my own experiences and was still not sure that I succeeded.

It seems to me that “culture shock” can really create some adverse influence on international students’ preformance, especially for their first semester in a foreign country. As more and more international students come to the City, how can we help them suffer less from the culture differences? Is their any means to reduce this initial confusion and anxiety?

cc photo credit: Paolo Rosa

Implementation of the CLP will impair the ability of writers, readers and scholars to conduct research at the NYPL’s central research library. Patrons organize their library time around heavy, often complicated schedules. We therefore must maximize the time we spend in the library. My requested materials typically arrive together, allowing me to hunker down and get to work. Under the proposed plan, it is impossible to guarantee that all of one’s requested items will arrive together—a significant impediment to maximizing time in the library. What if a few books arrive one day and the rest trickle in over the next couple of days, but a patron cannot be back at the library for another week? And what about the patron who has traveled from outside NYC, and thus has a very limited timeframe in which to conduct research? Or the student who is striving to write a research paper under deadline? Architects of the CLP claim that requested materials would be available within 24 hours. In a piece titled “Improving a Treasured Institution,” NYPL President and CEO Anthony Marx argues that “24-hour turnaround is made possible by major enhancements already in the works, most notably by bar-coding every item.” Upgrading the means by which books are tracked makes sense. Moving the books offsite does not. Current turnaround for most materials is roughly less than an hour and that is because most of the collection is located in the stacks or in storage under Bryant Park. Touting a projected 24-hour turnaround as a benefit underscores a major flaw of the CLP and the myopia of its supporters: researchers should not have to wait 24 hours—and probably more—for their materials. Indeed, due to time constraints and deadlines, they often cannot.

A sectional view of the New York Public Library. (1911) by leiris202, on Flickr

The CLP also fails to take into account the serendipitous aspect of research. While reading a particular text, I have often been guided to additional sources via footnotes and bibliographical entries. I then request those texts and receive them in an hour or so. Threads of thought have the best chance of coming to fruition when they are unbroken, when one can engage with several texts at the same time. Trying to hold on to a thread—before it even becomes an idea—for days before one can consult a needed text is difficult, if not impossible. A keyboard or a pen and paper are often not enough to keep an idea going. A book is vital to the development of an idea and, if the flow of research is impeded by having to wait longer for materials, then the quality of one’s research will suffer. Given the logistics of peoples’ schedules, many day readers may simply forego by necessity the opportunity to read the books they want to read. Books that people cannot find in circulating collections, books that are out of print, books that are unavailable digitally in their entirety, books that are unaffordable for personal purchase. Circulating and research collections are completely different from one another and one should not be the sacrificial lamb for the other. In response to a query on what will replace the stacks, the NYPL cheerfully declares, “Books!” Does anyone else see the cracks in this veneer?

It is disingenuous to argue that, after the NYPL’s largest circulating library has been folded into the nation’s second-largest public research library, research activities won’t be compromised. They will. Whether one is involved in a years-long research project or has devoted a day to read up on a topic of personal interest, the patron of the research library is there not only because of the collection, but also for the overall environment that the research library provides. The expansive Rose Main Reading Room, whether on a weekday morning or mid-afternoon on a Saturday, provides a conducive place to work. That is because people are there to read and write and this engagement is wonderfully palpable and inspiring. The anticipated spike in traffic from combing three libraries into one is enormous. Lauding this increase, the NYPL boasts, “[t]he number of visitors to the new Schwarzman Building will likely triple, and the percentage of people using the collections will soar.” Try conducting focused research under those conditions! Researchers working on long-term projects may apply to use the Allen Room or the Wertheim Study. There often is a waiting list, though, and access is limited. The CLP calls for the allocation of “dedicated spaces for up to 500 NYPL-affiliated writers and scholars,” however that will still leave the vast majority of research library patrons to try to function as researchers in overcrowded, mixed-use space.

The price of this overhaul is estimated at $300 million. The cost of this overhaul is well beyond dollars. One does not upgrade a world-class public research library by turning it into a glitzy, overcrowded facility. Nor does one upgrade the city’s largest public circulation library by shutting down its current location and reconfiguring it within an existing library. Public access computers can be added without gutting the stacks. Of course money is an issue. It always is. However, if the CLP is the best that the library’s executives can do in light of objectives and budgetary concerns, then they have failed in their stewardship of the NYPL. The library has a page on its website titled “Join the Conversation” through which the public can communicate its concerns. Yet, since comments are not shared through the site, a “conversation” never really materializes and how the comments are handled behind closed doors remains unknown. There is also a Facebook campaign dedicated to stopping the CLP. But we need to do more than “like” it. If we want to assure that the people’s research library continues to operate as such, then we need to collectively, vocally, and tirelessly speak out against the Central Library Plan until it is stopped.

Sydney, 1938 / Sam Hood (State Library of New South Wales collection)

In preparation for an upcoming CLASP (CUNY League of Active Speech Professors) symposium at Hostos Community College, I have been reflecting on this meaty topic: Theatre Practice and Communication Studies–the Intersection of Two Vital Disciplines.

Over the last few years, I have had opportunities to think about this from a number of perspectives, but when trying to compose my thoughts in a coherent form for the panel, I needed a jumping off point. I went back and looked at an article about the role of the introductory theatre course in the liberal arts curriculum, which the Institute’s Director, Mikhail Gershovich, co-wrote with theatre scholars (then Fellows) Amy Hughes and Jill Stevenson. A baseline assumption of the article is the reciprocal exchange between actor and spectator that makes theatre studies “an ideal forum in which to explore the means and methods of effective oral and written communication.”[1]  As I read, I discovered one potential source of my writer’s block; the panel topic requires elaboration on a point of intersection that has become intuitive. I have conditioned myself to take these principles for granted in my teaching and my coaching of students, as I time and again return to the basics of theatre collaboration: as the article spells out, in the classroom these basics (ideally) translate into encouraging cooperation among students, active learning, prompt feedback, time on task, high expectations, diverse talents and ways of learning. Speech and theatre arts become just two chummy pals, the cookies and milk of the liberal arts curriculum.

Even though I recognize that disciplinary battles between theatre and speech have a long and sordid history, I’ve often found the opposite to be true—that faculty boldly yell across these divisions, in an effort to get past what are really just departmental (or bureaucratic) boundaries—boundaries which are changing more slowly than our pedagogies. My charmed vantage point might have to do with the fact that I have had “communications people” expect certain strengths from me as a “theatre person,” and vice versa, and rarely confront the kind of “get out of my playground” mentality for which many academic fields are famous.

This can sometimes cause problems, too. Maybe you’ve had the same experience: when considered the “theatre person” in the room full of “communications people”– disciplinary divisions being what they are—it is assumed that you’ll be the one capable of immediately engaging students in a full body warm-up, making inflexible students flexible, convincing shy students to pop from their shell, evoking diaphragmatic breathing from the whisperers, and, at a moment’s notice, reveal a grab bag of tricks and strategies that will free them from their frozen stances. Because of these assumptions, when I began teaching Public Speaking– and before that, English as a Second Language– I occasionally felt like a fraud; I didn’t actually have in-depth training in voice or movement as an actor, beyond an inglorious stint on an improv team in college. (Many of my performance experiences were  in the realm of performance poetry, which privileged the word over any other consideration.) My academic theatre training focused on dramatic structure and playwriting, along with critical reading of texts– theatrical theory and plays– and I believed my strengths in the speech course would stem from there, through structure, research, and analysis. (When forced by curricular fiat to take acting courses, I shrank in fear of being asked to remove my shoes in the presence of other students.)

But I warmed to the challenge of being the “theatre person” among the communications people in part because I realized that their expectations reflected a true need among our students—and a potential gap in public speaking courses. The hope that a “theatre person” could more efficiently tackle these needs inspires me to believe in the best that theatre training can and should offer, within the context of a communications course. It is this inter/disciplinary “hope” that has slowly infused my speech teaching practices with “borrowings” from the theatre discipline: I now rely on my comfort watching and discussing the body and its relationship to breath, or my familiarity with the push and pull between the rehearsal process and the eventual work, and I follow my desire to push the desks aside in order to transform a classroom into a training space.

Additionally, in my experiences at the Institute– where one of my responsibilities last year was to support sections of Introduction to Theatre Arts– I met instructors who wanted to integrate communication goals into their coursework, but felt that approaching the course through dramatic literature tied their hands. They had fallen into a routine of assigning play reviews and response papers, rarely asking their students to move from a written to an oral form of communicating ideas. Usually this was “fixed” easily, since the instructor had already designed the course to encourage active learning and collaboration, allowing for numerous places of oral communication interventions. Taking it a step further, we would brainstorm where public speaking challenges might belong in this model of the theatre arts class—a discussion that frequently boiled down to assignment design.

In the context of the proposed Pathways Initiative– which would mean real changes to prioritization of Speech Communications courses within the CUNY curriculum– it is important to go beyond oral communications as something that can be “tacked on” to any discipline with ease, and to ask real questions about the actual needs of students, not disciplinary divisions. (And this post is in no way meant to be reflecting simultaneously on Pathways, although I invite thoughts on how it relates.) The CLASP panel is looking at intersections between theatre practice and speech not because intersections are all the rage, but because it is the divisions that have proven unproductive with time. For the individual instructor, the most important challenge becomes seeing beyond the intimidating gaps separating that “Other” discipline, and rather to see shared goals between the two.

This reminded me of a rueful little joke I told myself when I was on the job market this spring and odds were looking very long. I decided that if I did not find an academic job I’d tell my family that I had decided on a new career and was moving to LA to write screenplays. What I thought was funny about this, if it isn’t obvious, was that a teaching job was not something I expected to have as long odds, and require as many years of no-wage (research) and low-wage (adjunct) labor. And I didn’t think that choosing to work towards a career as a professor meant I had the same kind of ego and tenacity it takes to make it in Hollywood. Now I’m not so sure. Fitzpatrick’s outline of the new career path for academics predicts that this ratio will grow, and her prescription for academics is that we adapt and, I guess in turn, continue to support this work structure. In her speech on “Communicative Capitalism,” political scientist Jodi Dean claims that currently we’re working less for a wage and more for a prize—we work not to be paid but for the opportunity to compete, and the chance to win, pay. While I disagree with many of the points Dean makes in this talk, this particular point seemed to hit the mark.

In a recent conversation with a few colleagues, though, we all agreed to nix high salaries for full professors, decrease top salaries to 70 thousand or so, and pay graduate teachers about 30 grand to start. This would mean much less grad student debt. It has been remarked before that any incentive to change the university labor system dies once one reaches tenure. We’ve got our eyes on the prize. 

Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” seemed worn and wan when I first read it—it was a play that seemed very relevant to my father, though. But, with the current Broadway revival, and Dean’s speech, I saw a new resonance in the line “I am not a dime a dozen. I am Willy Loman!” Has my choice of career with such long odds, that demands unpaid work, been the result of a privileged sense of what my opportunities should be? Am I doing this because I think I’m special, and deserve a special, rare career? In this case, do I “pay” for the privilege of this special job through unpaid labor? Or, is my job choice situated in a context in which the wish to “do good,” to use my labor not only to provide for myself, but also to be part of a collaborative, ethically engaged project alienated?

To put it more simply, it is harder to find this kind of work, and I have come to take that fact as a given. But, I wonder if academics’ sense of the privilege of this kind of work is part of what allows this exploitation to happen. If so, are we right? Are we paying for a privilege? Do long odds come with the nature of the reward? Or are we being exploited?

I think that this proliferation of news sources is a wonderful thing. Of course, unfortunately, the internet isn’t a public sphere; one in five Americans are offline and will never see this post or this or this. Yet, still, I think that the mainstream media’s picking up of stories via social media and alternative outlets also spreads to television and local news.

I began thinking about the spread of news via mainstream and untraditional sources when I saw this on a friend’s Facebook wall:

No news from Iceland… why?
How come we hear everything that happens in Egypt but no news about what’s happening in Iceland:
…
In Iceland, the people has made the government resign, the primary banks have been nationalized, it was decided to not pay the debt that these created with Great Britain and Holland due to their bad financial politics and a public assembly has been created to rewrite the constitution.
And all of this in a peaceful way.
A whole revolution against the powers that have created the current crisis. This is why there hasn’t been any publicity during the last two years: What would happen if the rest of the EU citizens took this as an example? What would happen if the US citizens took this as an example.
This is a summary of the facts:
2008. The main bank of the country is nationalized.
The Krona, the currency of Iceland devaluates and the stock market stops.
The country is in bankruptcy
2008. The citizens protest in front of parliament and manage to get new elections that make the resignation of the prime minister and his whole government.
The country is in bad economic situation.
A law proposes paying back the debt to Great Britain and Holland through the payment of 3,500 million euros, which will be paid by the people of Iceland monthly during the next 15 years, with a 5.5% interest.
2010. The people go out in the streets and demand a referendum. In January 2010 the president denies the approval and announces a popular meeting.
In March the referendum and the denial of payment is voted in by 93%. Meanwhile the government has initiated an investigation to bring to justice those responsible for the crisis, and many high level executives and bankers are arrested. The Interpol dictates an order that make all the implicated parties leave the country.
In this crisis an assembly is elected to rewrite a new Constitution which can include the lessons learned from this, and which will substitute the current one (a copy of the Danish Constitution).
25 citizens are chosen, with no political affiliation, out of the 522 candidates. For candidacy all that was needed was to be an adult and have the support of 30 people. The constitutional assembly starts in February of 2011 to present the ‘carta magna’ from the recommendations given by the different assemblies happening throughout the country. It must be approved by the current Parliament and by the one constituted through the next legislative elections.
So in summary of the Icelandic revolution:
-resignation of the whole government
-nationalization of the bank.
-referendum so that the people can decide over the economic decisions.
-incarcerating the responsible parties
-rewriting of the constitution by its people

Have we been informed of this through the media?
Has any political program in radio or TV commented on this?
No!
The Icelandic people have been able to show that there is a way to beat the system and has given a democracy lesson to the world

From my own experience online, I actually have to agree somewhat that the mainstream media didn’t really give much intense coverage of the Icelandic revolution. I personally wasn’t really aware of this whole saga–all I had really seen were headlines on Iceland’s financial crisis and all I’d really heard were rumblings in conversation about Iceland’s financial problems. But a revolution? No, I feel like I missed that story.

The above post brought up a lot of questions for me. They include “Wow, how did I not see more stories about this?” “How did I miss this story?” “Why wasn’t it as closely covered as Middle Eastern revolutions?”

I looked around online and tried to recreate the story. What I found interesting was that the most complete source on what happened in Iceland seemed to be Wikipedia articles, the sources of which were mostly Icelandic news sources. While there was coverage, not just of the financial crisis but of Iceland’s political upheavals, in mainstream US media–this video on Iceland’s “crowdsourced Constitution,” an article where the Icelandic president talks about social media transforming democracy, a short article on the trial of Iceland’s former PM–I found most US articles to be lacking in context, and they didn’t refer to any sort of revolution, when in fact, in my understanding, what occurred was the ousting of the ruling party, the reorganizing of the financial system, and the public rewriting of the constitution–actions resulting from public protests and which I think should be granted the term “revolution.”

I think that the news media failed here–they failed to piece various events together, they failed in terms of framing and interpreting these events. For me, I think this reveals how much power we consumers of news really give our news outlets–we expect them to provide us with the proper contextual information, we expect them to angle the story, essentially to spoonfeed it to us.

Is this uneven coverage of the Icelandic revolution a conspiracy? No, I don’t think so. I think that the Facebook post is wrong–we also aren’t hearing about everything that is happening in Egypt. I don’t know what date the post originated on, but at this point, the mainstream U.S. news media isn’t focused on Egypt, even though Tahrir Square is still full.

Despite the obsession with Brangelina’s upcoming nuptials, I don’t think the American news media is entirely solipsistic. Rather, I think it is just intellectually limited and short-sighted. The story of the Icelandic revolution was complex–it didn’t fit that neatly into a short news cycle, and maybe it was difficult to discern as being a “revolution” considering the protests were linked to the financial crisis and the president himself didn’t resign. What we have is a conspiracy of ignorance. Of course, one could also play devil’s advocate and congratulate the media for not “manufacturing” a revolution out of a series of events. Personally, though, whether one wants to call it a revolution or an upheaval, I still think what happened in Iceland was poorly framed by the U.S. news media. The more we become aware of the limitations of the mainstream media, the more we can take it upon ourselves to supplement its blind spots.

2008 Icelandic Protests

My high school, Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, was a participant in the Massachusetts High School Drama Guild Festival, which we simply called “Festival.” I remember the competition rules exactly: Each high school sent a forty-minute production to compete. Five minutes were allowed for set-up and for strike. These time limits were strictly enforced and exceeding them meant disqualification. I remember practicing one year, over and over, to ensure the set-up of a fairly massive stage design in under five minutes. Putting up the set was as precisely choreographed as the show itself.

Comic and Tragic Masks: The MHSDG Logo

There were three rounds of competition in Massachusetts. The preliminary round took place among schools in neighboring towns. From each of these sets of eight productions, three were sent on to semi-finals, which could be anywhere in the state. The final round took place at the Dorothy Quincy Suite in downtown Boston, with fifteen schools performing. Of these, two schools would be selected state winners and would travel to the New England Drama Festival, which brought together the winners from the all the regional states.

I remember the year we won. We took a bus up to Vermont (or was it New Hampshire?) and stayed all in a hotel. Coming from an urban public school, this was an incredible experience for us. Also, keep in mind that this would be the fourth round of performance for that particular production, an adaptation of Ionesco’s Jeux de Massacre (The Killing Game) directed by our extraordinary teacher, Gerry Speca. The show had already been performed at prelims, semis, and finals, winning every time. Each round was separated by some weeks, during which we could rehearse and revise the show. This stretched the process out to several months. How often does this kind of “workshopping” occur at the high school level?

There is plenty of information online about this extraordinary Festival. There is even a comedy by John Wells called Competition Piece that was sometimes performed in the festival itself as the ultimate “in” joke. For a great sense of what festival was like, watch the trailer to my friend Jim Isler’s documentary about Maine’s version of Festival.

Still from FESTIVAL, a documentary by Jim and Tom Isler

I was thinking about Festival recently because, two weeks ago, I proposed to my Introduction to Theatre class at the College of Staten Island that we structure the day as a competition. We had been reading Peter Brook’s chapter on “rough theater” and I wanted to make some by temporarily emphasizing quantity over quality, speed over subtlety, and commitment over long-term planning.

The class went extraordinarily well. It may have been one of the best teaching days I’ve ever had. I could tell this long before the students almost unanimously affirmed how great it had been for them. I could tell by the way they took up the challenge, huddling together in their competitive groups, planning their scenes. There were nine rounds of performances. Each student directed one scene. Each scene was in response to a theme, such as “love” or “tragedy” or “the ocean.” They had exactly five minutes to rehearse before each performance.

The day went so well that I began to think: What would it look like to structure an entire semester of Introduction to Theatre around these kinds of competitions? What if I gave up my personal interest in holy theater, political theater, tragic theater, radical experimental theater, and allowed roughness to reign? What if I gave them what they wanted? Would things fall apart? Would the competitive edge become too sharp, and feelings get hurt? Already in one day I was uncomfortable with the trash-talking that sprang up, although it seemed friendly enough and as far as I could tell no one’s feelings were hurt. But I wonder if this was possible because we were already two months into the semester and the students were already friends. If I started with this on day one, would they be as considerate to each other?

"Conference of the Birds," by Farid ud-Din Attar (1177)

I’m interested in this idea. I feel a loathing for the reduction of performance to measurable judgment, as in the culture of American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance. But this wasn’t my experience of Festival, after all. I never felt our work was viewed in a shallow way, even when we didn’t win. My freshman year, our production of Peter Brook’s adaptation of Conference of the Birds only made it to semi-finals. I was disappointed, but it didn’t matter. That production remains with me as one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in theatre. The beginning of something that is still ongoing.

I remember a conversation that I had during my senior year of high school, with our wonderful technical director. He had mentioned the idea that our school might stop participating in Festival, precisely because they were concerned about the competitive feelings it provoked. I was upset: How could we not do Festival? Didn’t he understand that the competition was what fueled our dedication and what made the work so good? No, he said. What made the work so good was the strict rules we had to follow. The time limit of forty minutes allowed much greater precision than our other main stage productions, which could last for two hours or even longer. In addition, there was the process, as described above: multiple rounds, with time in between to rehearse and revise. This is what gave Festival it’s magic, not the competition itself.

Steve Hall — if you are out there — am I quoting you correctly? Do you still think this is true? Isn’t there a certain kind of energy that is stirred up by competition itself? If I have my students compete in multiple rounds, with strict time limits and short rehearsal periods, but I don’t name any team the winner, will it work just as well? Isn’t competition part of what fuels the incredible energy not just of American Idol but of baseball, football, and sports in general? And, after all, don’t the oldest plays in the European canon come from nothing less than a dramatic competition — a festival? What then is the relationship between competition, arts, and education?

Comic and Tragic Masks: From Hadrian's Villa Mosaic

I intend to find out by experiment exactly what works. I know that I want to see that look on their faces when they are completely focused on the work and not thinking about anything else. I know that day was special because we worked on the scenes for over two hours and nobody checked their phones or had to go to the bathroom. Where did that intensity come from? Has anyone experimented with competitive pedagogies in literature or other fields? What kind of effects did you find?

A few days after my last post, I came across news of a study from the Archives of Internal Medicine which proposed that red meat, even in small quantities, can increase the risk associated with an early death. While there has frequently been talk about meat consumption and health issues prior to this article, it seemed as though no research had ever posited such a strong link. In fact, and according to the article, even a single serving of processed, red meat (i.e., 2 strips of bacon) is enough to considerably raise one’s risk of dying from heart disease or cancer.

Given the potentially large implications of this research, I posted this article to my Facebook profile, mainly to get the attention of my meat-eating friends. Almost immediately, I received tremendous backlash and defensive comments. To my meat-eating friends, I was simply pushing the vegetarian agenda (despite the fact that I am actually not a vegetarian–well, not yet at least). They provided numerous reasons why red meat was in fact beneficial. Like much of the Internet reaction in response to this article, people became defensive on a level I never expected.

Naturally, in the days following my contentious post, I honestly thought I’d get emails with pictures of my friends eating a quadruple hamburger (or whatever it is–okay, so I’m not a vegetarian but I haven’t eaten red meat in 20 years, so pardon my lack of proper terminology here), or links to counter-research proving this article’s research faulty or erroneous. Interestingly, however, I received neither. Even more interesting and surprising was the emails that I did receive. Several of my most vocal Facebook commenter friends actually emailed me that they had some alternative meal, red meat-free, since they saw the article.

As a researcher of health risk perception, I became fascinated with the interesting turn of events that I witnessed. Why were people changing their behavior, even after acting like staunch advocates for not changing their behavior? Furthermore, how long would this article affect people’s behavior with regards to red meat consumption? Whatever the answers may be, something seemed to have worked. In today’s day and age of constant bombardment of messages in the media, how did my post get through to some people? Perhaps it was the little scare people felt when reading that post, as they made a connection they never before thought of. Maybe the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is doing something right with its graphic and vivid antismoking ads (after all, smoking rates are down to record low numbers). It may be interesting to wait and see what happens with soda drinking rates, too.

Marc Prensky, who coined the term digital native in 2001, defines digital natives as members of the generation that were born in the digital age and were surrounded by computers, the internet, digital media, cell phones and video games. The main characteristics of digital natives, as opposed to digital immigrants (e.g. people who had to learn new technologies later in life), are the constant usage of the internet, instant messaging, digital music and electronic libraries and little patience for lectures and traditional classroom instructions.

The book “Educating the Net Generation” suggests that digital natives feel very comfortable with technology. In fact often times they do not consider the Internet or Instant Messenger as technologies but see them as tools; at the same time they see only the latest applications as technology. They are able to understand visual information better than textual one and prefer hyperlinks to linear text. Prensky believes that digital natives think and process information fundamentally differently from previous generation: digital technology influences the digital natives’ ability to parallel process and multitask.

In spite of these advantages , the HBR article states that digital natives lack interpersonal skills and may not be able to perform as good as digital immigrants in jobs that require face to face interaction such as consulting, financial advising, and diplomacy.

As educators we may emphasize the importance of interpersonal communication skills and encourage more interaction in our classrooms. The coordinated effort across all disciplines may inspire digital natives to be more interested in face to face communication and better prepare them for jobs that require social contact.

Oxycontin or "hillbilly heroin" is really strong stuff. Creative Commons License photo credit: Redfishingboat.com

Similar cases have been brought in France and also in the US. Google maintains that they have not violated any laws.  I have been well aware of this issue since 2009 when I discovered that the top autocomplete suggestions for my own name were “arrested” and “Oxycontin”

Today, thankfully, “arrested” is no longer an option, but “Oxycontin” still is. In 2009, I discovered there was another Jonathan Stillo, 10 years younger than me, blonde, living in Jersey who also shared my love of grappling. The internet felt too small for two of us. I had just won four dissertation research grants, was living in Romania researching TB and for the first time in my life, making a footprint on the internet with my scholarly activities. At the same time, the other Jonathan Stillo was in New Jersey getting arrested along with his father and older brother for allegedly running a 1000 pill a week Oxycontin ring.

My namesake eventually completed a diversionary program and had his record cleared. His father and brother are still awaiting trial. For people with common names like Joe Smith, being found on the internet is difficult, they melt into the woodwork. But in a case like this where there are only two of us it is more complicated. Jonathan W. Stillo was captain of the wrestling team at Centenary College, but mixed in with his achievements are a couple of my own (much less impressive) high school wrestling results and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition wins.

Just when I thought that a recent summer in Romania which generated internet stories from the US Embassy, major Romanian newspapers and other media had finally pushed the other Jonathan’s alleged prescription drug ring involvement out of my top search results he went and upped the ante by allegedly crossing into opposing traffic and driving headfirst into an oncoming car in January 2012.  I can’t speak to his motive but if it was not alcohol or drug related maybe it could be Fight Club style enlightenment seeking.

Stop trying to control everything and just let go

I am starting to realize that as long as Google’s algorithms favor arrests and car crashes over academic results there is no way my name will get top billing. The good news is that the other Jonathan even after sustaining head injuries, seems to have recovered from the crash.

I spent most of my life with the assumption that I was the only Jonathan Stillo. I grew up in a pre-internet era and the only people I knew who shared my last name were my immediate family. With the growth of search engines like Google, the digitizing of old newspapers and the fact that virtually everything one does makes some sort of mark on the internet these days, my own world has grown quite a bit. I feel a bit like one of these newly discovered tiny chameleons.

© Frank Glaw Tiny chameleons discovered on Madagascar.

They were happily living in Madagascar in on tree branches 4” inches from the ground and managed to go completely unnoticed.

While searching Google results for this post I also discovered that Samuel Stillo an assistant mayor in Illinois pleaded guilty to bribery charges in 2006 and Patrick Stillo an asphalt foreman in Illinois was arrested for corruption in 2004. And then there is John F. Stillo who according to the who according to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office was released from prison in 2009 for “Gross Sexual Imposition” and is a “Child Victim Predator.” I don’t know what all that means, (and also question the logic behind these online sex offender registries)  but I am happy that I go by Jonathan. So far as I can tell, these Stillos are (thankfully) not related to me.  However, I can’t help feeling a hint of pride that someone with my family name (more commonly held by masons, construction workers and security guards) was actually able to become an assistant mayor in the first place.

As I am writing this I’m chuckling to myself wondering if Jonathan W. Stillo is ever annoyed at me for cluttering up his internet search results with all of my tuberculosis advocacy  the way his wrestling results, car crash and arrest distract from mine?

In my own effort to win greater control of my identity on the internet, I recently purchased the domain names www.jonathanstillo.com and www.jonathanstillo.org, though I have little idea how to actually turn the “parked” websites into actual pages with content, it does my heart good to know that I have at least staked a claim and put up a virtual fence around it.

Following Jonathan W. Stillo’s life on the internet, I can’t help but feel for him. His family has hit a rough patch and after that car accident he is lucky to be alive. He seems like an all right guy, but at the same time I wonder if one of my students or a prospective employer might get us confused. Sure with within a few minutes one can easily tell that our ages and locations don’t match up, but will the searcher put in enough effort to discover this? Like much of the potential risk and benefits of new web-based technologies, all of this is unknowable at this point but we ought to seriously consider the implications that negative information (even if incorrect or about someone with the same name) on the internet can have on one’s future prospects, be they aspiring young professors or their alleged drug-dealer and child victim predator namesakes.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to find the language to write about something that happened in my Composition 2 class, a class that revolves around the theme, “Pay Attention: Or, What is our Brain on the Internet?” Thus far, we’ve spent the semester working through texts that focus on our relationship with the Internet—how the web changes the way we interact with the basic tenets of a traditional composition classroom—writing and reading and thinking. We began by reading Nicholas Carr, who clearly states, “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving steam of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”)

I’m not sure that I agree with Carr’s point, yet when faced with my first batch of papers to grade, I literally didn’t know what to do. After weeks of reading and writing together, and after weeks of conversation and thinking together, I was at a total loss. I had no idea what to do with this stack of twenty-eight, typed and printed (12pt. font/double-spaced), three to five page papers. I find myself thinking about how, in this class, we use technology, we blog, but we also write papers and every single student must purchase the required books for the class—the print books—no e-readers, we hold the books in our hands, the pages are turned and folded, and we explore a world where those things might no longer exist. It feels crucial to me that I do not fully abandon the formal typed paper, but what do I do with them? And, how do I approach reading this form of writing, when I am so accustomed to the experience of reading the student blogs—the low stakes posts they make on a regular basis. Has the internet done something to my assessing brain? Why now?

A few thoughts (in which I tip my hat to Cathy Davidson, whose Now You See It is required reading in this course, and whose NY Times response helped me think through the issue at hand:

•  One of my priorities when creating essay assignments is that they should be either student-generated, or at least should propose a question that is open enough so that no two papers will deal with the same idea or argument.
• If my modus operandi behind assignment design is to privilege student input and curiosities, why not do the same with my assessment process?
• Baruch students almost always ask for a rubric so they can see “how” they are being evaluated–they seem accustomed to rubric-based grading, and might even “like” it.

After thinking through these things, I decided to see what would happen if I asked my students to design their own rubric, to give them a chance to really think through how they are graded and how they wish they were graded.

The above image is what the class decided to do after being asked to write about their experiences being graded on their writing. As a class, they decided to generated a list of terms that felt important and put it all up on the board. I tried to relinquish my authority to the class–and basically kept silent as they generated this list. I want to point to a few terms that I was interested in and surprised by–effort, creativity, compelling, arouse curiosity.

The class then decided to take their “key terms” and organize them by category–they then turned these categories into the prose that filled the boxes of the rubric.

Again, I was surprised and fascinated by the decisions the class made–particularly in the category of “writing style” and its link to “organization.”I felt as though the rubric the class wanted and created was far better than any rubric I’ve used in the past.

But, in the piece of process writing we did after creating the rubric, a number of students expressed frustration with the task–they wanted the teacher to tell them what to do, despite the fact that those who voiced displeasure were the same students who demanded that terms like “creativity” be included.

I’m still not totally sure what to make of this experience. But, I do wonder if the same issues raised in the panel discussion I attended (online writing, the “end of privacy” when all writing is public) might have something to do with the way the class handled the task at hand. Do students now value their own ability to create more than ever? Are students learning to take responsibility for what they write and  how they write it (since they are essentially producing more language than ever)? What does this mean for the world of assessment and high stakes assignments? And, what do we do as writing teachers?

To recap what has been all over the public radio, theatre, technology, and business blogs, Chicago Public Media/Public Radio International’s This American Life program “retracted” the episode by Mike Daisey based on his stage monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (so my links in previous posts to this episode will not work). The retraction was itself the basis of an episode of This American Life, released online earlier than its air-date and coinciding (intentionally or accidentally?) with the release of Apple’s new iPad on March 16. For two weeks, Daisey claimed dramatic license in his fabrication of details that led to this retraction. This American Life claims that Daisey lied during their fact-checking interviews, which led to misleading listeners as to what was truth and what was not.

photo credit: Im Kelsi

Daisey’s claim was that while some of the incidents related in his monologue did not happen to him, they had been documented by other, journalistic as opposed to dramatic, sources. Therefore, according to Daisey, the deeper truth of the monologue and its ability to spark empathy trumped the surface details of his actual visit to China.

At the heart of this conflict is the question of truth, genre, and audience.

Besides changing the media from theatre to radio, Daisey’s performance also straddles the uncomfortable divide between monologue storytelling and documentary drama, two theatrical genres that have their own problematic histories with “the truth.”

photo credit: Image Editor

The question of a storyteller’s report being taken for truth goes back to Ancient Greece—that source of so many tropes used by white males when justifying their theatrical choices. The mime (an ancient embodied storyteller, not the white-faced mime) or the epic poet were both held in ill repute by Plato. All artists were at fault for attempting to replicate the world through lies, according to the philosopher. (I might also make the observation that another element to the story of Daisey and This American Life traces its lineage back to Ancient Greek theatre: hubris)

Daisey’s particular form of stage monologue has a much more recent precedent in the sit-at-a-table-and-read-a-monologue: the late Spalding Gray. Both Daisey and Gray came from the off-off-Broadway world of experimental theatre. Both were able to command larger audiences (and larger box office receipts) of New York’s largest off-Broadway houses at the Public Theatre and Lincoln Center.

Unlike Gray, however, Daisey does not restrict his source material only to his personal life—regardless of how the monologue presents that information. In the dramatic genre called documentary theatre (or its British equivalent verbatim theatre), exact words from sources are reported to the audience in order to create a story. The audience knows these words are sourced and easily could verify the sources if they wanted to do the research. It is the arrangement of these out-of-context quotes where the fictionalized version of reality enters into the theatre. Daisey, on the other hand, presented all of his researched material as first-person accounts that happened to him. Factual events placed in a fictionalized version of reality, but without citing the sources.

[An earlier controversy with Mike Daisey's 2007 monologue, Invincible Summer]

Previous Daisey monologues also included words spoken by a character “Mike Daisey” that the writer Mike Daisey did not himself experience, but they were not subject to the same scrutiny as The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Perhaps this is why Daisey felt he did not need to explain every detail and cite every word. However, as the This American Life/The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs saga shows, you can’t always expect a new audience to understand the conventions of your previous work. As I tell my students, always cite your sources.

[As I was writing this response, Daisey posted an apology. Rather than continuing to defend his position in the tradition of storytelling, Daisey acknowledged that he “fell short” of his own expectations for telling the “truth.”]

I use the word “truth” a lot in my work. These words from the opening scene of How Theater Failed America come to mind:

Some of you are hoping tonight that the rarest of things will happen: that someone is actually going to tell the truth.

That’s rare. That’s hen’s teeth.

You should know better.

And so should I. Because that’s what I’m looking for—every time I come back to this place, and all the places like it. Looking for the truth: that rare, random descent, like a feather across the back of your hand.

I speak about truth because it is what I aspire to. All my stories, even when I’ve fallen short, have been attempts to experience the truth with my audiences.

I am sorry for where I have failed. I will look closer, be more patient, and listen more clearly.

I will be humble before the work.

The students seemed frustrated that analysis was a potentially endless process. How could we know whether anyone’s reading was right? Was the man drinking alone by moonlight sad and lonely, or genuinely delighted to dance with his own shadow? Or was he just simply drunk?  Did he yearn for society or was he more content in nature? “Which one is it?” they seemed to beg of me.

This fear of ever-multiplying meanings that poetry inspires strikes me as connected to another fear of multiplicity that I’ve been thinking and reading about recently: the fear of a highly developed and thus potentially overextended moral sympathy. My research at the moment is taking me through the ins-and-outs of Victorian conceptions of sympathy, which often draw heavily from an Enlightenment argument that ethics and sympathy are interrelated. George Eliot, for example, famously believed in the ethical obligation to try to imagine other people and even enter with them into their consciousness,  feelings, and desires and to thereby treat them as people in their own right, not just as objects of one’s own isolated perceptions. The danger, though, and the fear that I am alluding to, was a fear that this would wear away at the fiber of one’s being. That it would cause one’s own self to deteriorate. That, in Nietzschean terms, it would cause a depletion of will. That, in sillier terms, it would be like making a face and having it get stuck that way (an argument many a parent has used with their tongue-screwed-to-finger-screwed-to-cheek children).

To imagine others too much, too well, too often, as Eliot would have us do, might cause us to lose ourselves, people feared.

On the other hand, it might cause us to stick our noses where they’re not wanted, or to imagine we’ve achieved some kind of connection when in fact we’ve done nothing of the sort. Wordsworth noticed this very thing in his poem “Resolution and Independence,” in which a young man, consumed with himself and with his own lyrical and self-absorbed thoughts, happens upon an old man, “The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.” The younger man is as happy as can be. Everything seems to reflect the sunshine and to echo his happiness, but right before meeting the old man, he admits to an abstract knowledge, based on the early deaths of other poets, that “there may come another day to me– / solitude, pain of heart, distress, poverty.” The appearance, then, of an old and poor man is just the thing that, if sympathy and ethics work the way they ought, will wake him from his complacency and self-absorption and will get him to think of poverty and age in terms not just self-directed.

This is not what happens, though. The old man graciously responds to the narrator’s questions, telling about his employment as a leech gatherer who has roamed “from pond to pond.” The young narrator hardly listens, allowing his own previous thoughts to meld with and distract from the leech gatherer’s words, and again and again he has to ask the leech gatherer to repeat himself. Rather than achieve a new ethical knowledge, the narrator has simply burrowed further into his own self. He has achieved a sort of sympathy — allowing the leech gatherer’s words to meld with his own thoughts and thus to influence him — but that form of sympathy hasn’t resulted in any ethical shift. He doesn’t help the leech gatherer. He doesn’t slip him a few shillings. He can’t even manage to have a conversation with him. He simply inserts the leech gatherer into the internal monologue he’s been having all day.

I think it was exactly these  fears — of losing oneself, and, conversely, of becoming too much oneself — that my students were afraid of in approaching poetry. Either an analysis represented a dissipation of meaning (i.e. this flower represents a whale’s vagina) or it represented a private meaning that isn’t accessible to everyone and therefore can’t be “true” (i.e. this reminds me of my mother/brother/Starbucks barista).

What would “Resolution and Independence” have been like if instead of carrying on with his internal monologue, the narrator had entered into conversation with the leech gatherer (not just asking questions and ignoring the answers, but really conversing)? Since my class is a seminar, meaning we mostly converse, I decided that during the second class period we were scheduled to spend on Chinese poetry, I’d invite a conversation and confront these questions about the analysis of poetry explicitly.  The discussion completely surprised me. It was so spirited, so wide-ranging (yes, we discussed the Jay-Z and Kanye song that samples Will Ferrell’s Blades of Glory: “I don’t even know what that means.” “No one knows what it means but it’s provocative…gets the people going.”) that the silence at the beginning of the first class now strikes me as having been a silence of suspicion, but not one of dismissal and rejection. In our previous discussion, we had looked at a poem by T’ao Ch’ien about a hermit who seems genuinely content to “renounce the carriages of the great,” and one of the difficulties of interpretation had been simply believing that anyone could really be happy alone. One student, in our second discussion, offered a suggestion for how to consider reading poetry and related it to her own difficulty in believing that a hermit could be happy. She said, “I think this poem shows us that we have to relearn everything we’ve learned.”  Fitting words for the work of sympathy, and for the interpretation of poetry.

I’m sorry but the tone of this article just REEKS of agenda, specifically the veggie/peta agenda. The message is get them used to rejecting RED meat and then go after them and GET them to quit eating all meat. We’ll use the health excuse since the moral outrage hasn’t/isn’t working.

So it’s all a vegetarian conspiracy. Nice work! Pass the tofurkey. But really, that was an extreme example, but so many of the comments basically derided the study without having much concrete knowledge about how it was conducted. While I find skepticism refreshing, I also think that this type of skepticism is just another form of ignorance. It rejects scientific findings without really engaging with the scientific process. Of course, MSNBC doesn’t have the space to inform its readers about the exact process of the study, and not all of its readers are versed in research methods–these limitations almost render the article useless, just there to spoonfeed information. So is internet skepticism healthy or dangerous? Just like different sources of information, skepticism can run the gamut.

Here, to contrast with the above example, is in my opinion an example of healthy skepticism. A woman whose family is from Uganda is suspicious of the Kony 2012 video:

She brings up some good points:  Kony isn’t a current concern to Ugandans, only 30% of Invisible Children’s donations go to Uganda, there are many other pressing issues in the world, and there are concerns about increased militarization.

But then, if we dismiss Invisible Children, aren’t we partly just giving in to cold cynicism, like the hipster barista meme?

I guess my feelings about Kony 2012 are ambivalent. For one thing, like the woman above, I question why so much money needs to go into making videos, posters, and stickers–is it really okay that the main goal of a charity is to produce flashy media? Doesn’t it become a gimmick? Also, the exact intentions of the video are suspect–it seems to move rather uncomfortably around the fact that it is advocating violence.

Kony 2012 is a bit of a paradox because the same qualities that encouraged its viral spread also created skepticism and a number of backlashes. VICE, which is in the vanguard of independent gonzo journalism, threw one of the earliest punches. The Ugandan PM might have just issued a final blow.

I’m convinced by this that the internet isn’t just a soup of information and misinformation–it can also serve as a kind of information vetting system. Instead of testing students on the reliability of different online sources, it might make sense to approach the internet as a place where knowledge is continually constructed and deconstructed. Often we hear about the bad side of the internet–that Google is making us stupid, short-circuiting our thinking process. However, I think the whole Kony phenomenon should make us a bit optimistic. Maybe the internet isn’t just a place where things go viral; it can also be a place where simple messages are complicated, where difficult and complex views are weighed against easy answers.

In the past couple of semesters, I’ve revised how I approach teaching COM 1010, especially in the design of the assignments.  It’s an ongoing experiment, fed by what I’m learning as a Fellow at BLSCI.  We now have a shared project, which is communicating about New York City (a topic that everyone in the class has experience with, although in wonderfully divergent ways).  I’ve started assigning about four to five additional, fairly short texts each semester about New York that we read in addition to the textbook chapters when starting a new segment.   This at least provides some baseline content to ground us and to refer back to, but doesn’t make a huge difference in their workload.   So, for example, this semester we did an oral interpretation assignment using a selection we’d read from Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts, in which students attempted to communicate audience and purpose through vocal variation alone.  Then we listened to how Alec Baldwin did it and talked about what worked and what didn’t.  (You can listen here.)

I’ve also drawn on the assignments I help Business Policy students with and translated them into a persuasive group assignment for COM 1010.   As I helped BPL students think about the audience for their presentations and how that audience’s needs could shape the way they present their message, I realized that I’d not really given my COM students practice in adapting their work to an audience other than their peers.  Now, to work on speaking persuasively, students get assigned a group, a NYC non-profit, and a funder.  As representatives of the non-profit, their challenge is to work together to create a presentation that convinces their particular audience (the funder, which they need to research to find out its mission and funding priorities) to give them funding for their next project.

My approach to teaching oral communication continues to evolve and the experiment in ongoing.  I’m very curious to hear from others how they deal with teaching courses like these.