This I Believe: informed citizenship and informed citizenry

Here's an inalienable right for you: the right to informed citizenship.

Citizenship, the informed kind, has two distinct angles to it. The first is the personal: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to the information that allows us to act in a civic and socially responsible way, and Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The second is the social: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to live in a society populated by informed citizens. We have a right to live among an informed citizenry, and any policy, law, or practice that restricts this right exists in opposition to a free and functional democracy.

In America, we embrace the right to informed citizenship; or, more accurately, we shout our support of informed citizenship up to the very rafters. Then we give Big Business a million incendiary devices to burn down that house.

There are explosives, like the recent SCOTUS decision knocking down campaign finance laws and giving corporate lobbyists unfettered access to our legislative and executive branches (and, by extension, the judicial branch as well).

Then there's the kindling, the petrol, the oxygen that keeps the fire blazing. Among the most powerful of these is the news paywall, which sequesters off information to which citizens have an absolute right. In theory, paywalls are no different from their precursors, subscription fees and newsstand prices. But two things have changed--our model of citizenship, and our access to circulated information--since those pre-internet days.

For example: In 1990-1991, during the first Gulf War, news was circulated fairly evenly across multiple platforms. An American who didn't want to pay for a newspaper could still gather information through television and radio. She could walk into a library and read the news for free. Certainly this wasn't a utopian ideal of a free press on every street corner, but the news that enabled a citizen to act was available through multiple outlets.

Today, the speed and reach of internet news sources make them by far the dominant news circulation platform. Indeed, the speed and reach of internet news are part of why a new model of citizenship is emerging. If there was ever a time when it was possible to measure civic engagement by looking at voter turnout on Election Day, that time is long past. Today's civically engaged citizen is the one who is aware of Facebook's abominable approach to privacy and has made decisions about how (or whether) to use Facebook as a result of this knowledge. Today's informed citizen may not know how many electoral votes are needed for a candidate to win the presidency, but she knows how to find that information when necessary. She votes on Election Day, sure, but she also votes with her feet and her eyeballs and her fingertips, constantly making informed decisions about how to parcel out her energy and time, when to dance along with corporate and political influences and when to resist, when to leave the dance floor entirely.

Paywalls make it harder for an informed citizen to stay informed, which in turn restricts my right to live among an informed citizenry. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the news that sticks is the news that spreads--via blogs, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and news aggregating sites like Boingboing. News that's stuck behind a paywall is news that can't spread and is therefore news that dies.

And that's not all: I believe that news paywalls are likely to have long-term effects on citizenship, as well, since I agree with James Seddon's point in his recent Wired article that young people who grow up without unfettered access to local news are likely to grow up without a sense of social and civic connection to their communities.

I recognize that the current business model for print journalism isn't working. I recognize that newspapers need to do something if they want to try to save their jobs. But in America, the eight-year reign of Baby Bush notwithstanding, we don't let business interests trump fundamental human rights.

I'm rooting for newspapers, I really am. I hope they survive this challenge. But news paywalls are in direct opposition to our fundamental right to informed citizenship, and my message to the print media folks is this: Find another way.

VozMob: a neat project working in support of immigrant rights

I just got back from a work-related meeting in Arizona, and I'm therefore feeling a need to counteract my willingness to visit a state whose newly passed anti-immigration law is one of the most deeply and overtly mean-spirited, evil-minded, and willfully ignorant pieces of legislation I can imagine.

Here's a neat project I heard about while I was in Arizona: VozMob, or Voces Moviles, which I was introduced to by Ben Stokes, in comparison to whom I feel woefully inadequate. Here's the description of this effort to give voice to undocumented immigrants and day laborers, according to the VozMob website:

Voces Moviles (vozmob) es una plataforma para que trabajadores y trabajadoras inmigrantes en Los Ángeles puedan crear historias sobre sus vidas y comunidades directamente desde sus teléfonos celulares. Vozmob le ayuda a la gente lograr una participación más amplia en la esfera pública digital.

Here's a rough translation into English:

Mobile Voices (VozMob) is a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from their mobile phones. VozMob helps people achieve wider participation in the digital public sphere.

According to Ben, one of the goals of this project is to fight bigoted, anti-immigrant rhetoric of the sort exhibited by the site daylaborers.org, whose members drive around looking for groups of immigrants, then taunt them, call them names, and otherwise antagonize them by engaging in incredibly juvenile and embarrassing behavior. When the targets of their abuse respond in anger, someone takes a picture and tosses it up online, using it as proof positive! that immigrants are rapists and murderers!

This is a beautiful project, one that appears to do real, important work in supporting immigrants' ability and willingness to name and claim their experiences.

how to penalize good citizens

In case you're wondering how a little guy like me ended up so mouthy, I want to show you the remnants of a fight my mom had with city officials in her local community.

My mom, Janet McWilliams, recently discovered that the toilet in an unfinished area of her basement had a slow leak. She got it fixed right away, but because the plumbing is tucked off in a little-used corner of her house, the toilet had already been running--refilling and refilling and refilling--for several weeks straight. The result: Instead of her usual $40 monthly water bill, she received a bill for $1,274.07.

My mom lives in metro Detroit, an area hit hard by the recession. Houses stand empty in her neighborhood. Schools are getting shut down. Unemployment has ripped through the region. My mom has suffered right alongside everyone else. So she was hoping for a little help from the people who are in a position to offer it. She was hoping for some understanding, for some way to work out a less painful cost for her mistake.

She went through the appropriate channels. She called the township. In January, she sent a letter appealing her case to the township supervisor, to the treasurer, to others. She didn't hear a thing for months. In March, she called to find out the status of her request and was told that nobody knew where her letter even was. Call back when the treasurer is here. Call back when the supervisor is here. Call back, call back, call back.

In late March, my mom was finally informed that while the township would accept payment in monthly installations and waive late fees, there would be no forgiveness of even a portion of her water bill. Keep in mind that my mom has been a resident of the township for almost 15 years. She owns her home, free and clear, and has never been late on a single utility payment in all that time. She pays her taxes. She votes. She is a faithful subscriber to the local newspaper, even though I've explained to her that print media platforms are not viable.

Keep in mind, too, that my mom's house is surrounded by properties for which the township is not recouping a penny on utility usage, because the houses stand empty, the former owners gone. At a time like this, you'd think municipalities would be looking for ways to support their remaining residents. You'd think they'd be looking for ways to help residents keep their heads above water. You'd think they'd be looking for ways to cultivate positive relationships with community members.

Yet at least on the face of it, it doesn't look like Redford Township officials are interested in doing any of those things. After my mom exhausted every channel, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Redford Observer explaining her frustration. Out of that came an article, which you can read here.

In the article, my mom says that she found the township's decision not to budge "rational." I disagree. Sticking to tradition, sticking to a set of rules that may well work fine in times of prosperity without paying any attention to the fact that things have changed, treating residents like interchangeable units instead of like the valuable, important assets they actually are--that's deeply irrational. It's that kind of short-sighted thinking that got us into this economic mess in the first place.

In hiring or electing representatives to act on our behalf (and let's never forget that this is exactly the role that local officials are intended to play), we expect them to act in good faith, with all due honesty and fairness. We expect them to try to avoid bureaucracy and to avoid behaving like bureaucrats when whenever possible.

And though I think we've lowered our expectations some after too many disappointments, it's time we started expecting our local officials to behave with empathy and to treat the system of rules and regulations as what they are: guidelines designed to support, not to penalize, good citizens.

Letter from a Bloomington high school student to the students of Aurora Alternative High School

Today, the Bloomington Herald-Times published a guest column written by Victoria Ison, a student at Bloomington High School North. The column is framed as a letter to students at Aurora Alternative High School, which is slated for closure at the end of this school year as a money-saving measure.

This piece, like almost all of the Herald-Times' content, is not available to the general public, as the paper has made the foolish decision to erect a paywall. Yet another lesson to learn from the ongoing issue of budget cuts across the MCCSC school system is that more access to information is better than less access, and in times like these, the Herald-Times' paywall begins to look increasingly obstructive. Forcing people to pay to access information about issues that directly affect them is a barrier to civic engagement, plain and simple, and the Herald-Times should be ashamed of itself.

On a related note, I've decided to run the entire text of Victoria Ison's letter below.

Please be aware that Ison is a high school student and that this column addresses a difficult and emotionally charged issue. On the Herald-Times site, several readers posted what I consider to be cruel and hurtful comments in response to Ison's post, and I'm not going to let that happen here. Whatever you think of her columnn, Ison should be commended for her honesty and willingness to present her ideas on a complicated debate.


COMMENTARY
Opinion: Aurora students impress a student who doesn’t know them
March 3, 2010


To the students of Aurora Alternative High School:

We’re pretty much the same ages, you and I. I don’t really know any of you, but that’s not uncommon; there are thousands of youth in this community, after all. If you went to North, I might know you. Or I might not. There are a lot of kids.

But now, I need you to forgive me.

You see, before the budget crisis — or at least, before the public was aware of the budget crisis — I didn’t think about you very much. Hardly at all, actually.

Sure, I saw articles in the newspaper at times. You were involved with Martin Luther King Jr. Day volunteer activities. You stuffed a bus and wrapped gifts for Fairview kids. Your Facebook page popped up in my Newsfeed.

But I didn’t become a fan. You were far away — if not in miles, in accessibility. My everyday life was a blur: home and school and back again. You never crossed my mind. Then I saw the name of your school on the proposed list of our district’s budget cuts. And still, I gave it just a passing glance.

It wasn’t until the Tuesday night board meeting that I thought any more about you. I was sitting there with my teacher/mother, listening to the public comments and half-heartedly taking U.S. history notes. Occasionally, I would look up and look around, noticing the appearances of the various impassioned speakers.

I was surprised to see you there. I was surprised by some of your hats, your earrings, your fashion statements. I was most surprised to see your tears.

Some of you got up and spoke. Eloquently. Emotionally. It was so evident that you were fighting for something you believed in, something you needed.

You talked about being “broken,” about being hurt. You talked about needing an escape, wanting to run away. You talked about having to attend any other high school — including my very own North — with measures of overwhelming dread.

I didn’t want to listen to you.

I didn’t want to see your pain and have to admit my ignorance. I didn’t want to have to struggle to try not to judge you.

Because I was. I was sitting confidently in my seat, wearing my track team sweatshirt, doing homework for a class that I have an A grade and a zillion friends in, judging you.

And I am sorry.

I am sorry for being self-absorbed into oblivion, for not noticing your pain or having empathy for your problems. Before you spoke, I didn’t realize that high school could be such a terrible kind of place. I didn’t realize that teenagers — people my own age — could feel hopeless like you said you did. I am sorry for anything I’ve done to make North such a hard place to be.

I am sorry for fitting in and forgetting you.

I need to make it up to you, and I need you to tell me how. Your school is going to be inside my school’s building next year. If you want to be left alone, I’ll understand. But know I’ll still be thinking about you, wondering about you, rooting for you. You’ve impressed me with your passion, humbled me with your tears. There’s no forgetting you now.

And if you’re willing, well, our schools are going to be much closer now. And we’re pretty much the same ages, you and I. We should be friends.

Victoria Ison is a junior at Bloomington High School North and a former biweekly correspondent for The Herald-Times “In School” section. She can be reached at victoria.ison@gmail.com.

I made a t-shirt.

In case you're wondering why, go here and here and here. (Also here and here.)

I'm thinking about selling the shirt and donating the proceeds to Aurora Alternative High School, a public school of choice in the Monroe County Community School Corporation. Recently, in what I consider to be a cruel, short-sighted and deeply inequitable money-saving decision, the school board decided to shut the school and funnel its students into one of the district's large public high schools.

Also, the board decided to boot all elementary and middle school librarians. Keep the libraries open, but get rid of the librarians. Smart choice, that. This way, the kids who have been exposed to reading and books at home will still have access to all the books they could want, while the less lucky kids who haven't received support for reading at home will just walk right on by. And nobody benefits from the guided support for accessing online and electronic information that librarians and media specialists have gotten so good at offering.

Fantastic.

notes on the MCCSC public hearing on proposed budget cuts

Last night, the Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC) school board held a public hearing on the sweeping budget cuts the board plans to make across the district. I was one of hundreds in attendance; we filled Bloomington High School South's Carmichael Auditorium. I also live tweeted the event and took copious notes during the 5-hour meeting, and I want to offer up my observations.

A note on MCCSC Board members
First, I want to say that in the handful of years I spent as a local newspaper reporter, I spent a lot of time sitting in school board meetings. In those meetings, I encountered a very small minority of school administrators and officials who truly seemed not to care about the schools they represented and who acted in ways that really did seem sort of...vile. But based on my experience last night, I can say that nobody on the MCCSC school board is among that minority. These are people who care about schools and who care about the damage the proposed cuts will do to the district, the community, and the state. Before opening up the floor to public comments, each board member spoke eloquently and with deep emotion about how painful it was to have to make the kinds of decisions they were faced with. The MCCSC Superintendent, John Coopman, said that he believes things will get worse before they get better; he expects the budget crisis to worsen through 2011 and 2012. His fear, he said, is that the damage this crisis is doing to public education will be irreversible.

The audience was a smart crowd. They could simultaneously empathize with the board and hold board members' feet to the fire. The most common criticism I heard last night was about transparency: Audience members felt that decisions about the proposed cuts were made without sufficient input from MCCSC teachers, administrators, and staff. They felt that things were happening far too quickly--the proposed cuts were announced on Friday, Feb. 12, with a final vote planned for Friday, Feb. 19, which was a postponement from the original plan to vote at last night's meeting.

On the scarcity of information about the proposed cuts
Many people took issue with the paucity of information about the proposed cuts. Several members of the teachers' union, the Monroe County Education Association (MCEA), spoke with anger about only receiving a hard copy of the planned cuts for the first time last night. At the district meeting held to announce the cuts last Friday, they said, nothing was given to attendees and they had to rely on their notes and their memories in summarizing the proposed cuts.

This seems like a fairly legitimate complaint, given that I have been unable to find any primary-source documentation of the proposed cuts. The only information I've been able to find has come from secondary sources, including a recent article in the Herald-Times. I should point out, too, that while the Herald-Times article does a good job of summarizing the proposed cuts, the article is stuck behind a paywall--only subscribers to the paper can access the details. In case you're keeping count, this is yet another reason the Herald-Times should drop their ridiculous paywall.

Since I believe in the importance of spreading all available information about these proposed cuts, I have helpfully lifted generously from the Herald-Times article and carried it over the paywall by pasting it at the end of this post. Here's hoping the HT lets this information stay out in public, where it belongs.


Send your comments all the way to the top
I did my best to take note of the general theme of every comment during the public hearing, and I'll summarize my observations below. Before I do that, though, I want to add that the general theme of the evening was: Blame the state government for this travesty. Because I'm a new resident of Indiana, I don't pretend to know all the details of just how we ended up with the ceiling caving in while the floor drops out from under us, but the basic story is that a change was made in how schools receive funding, resulting in an enormous drop in revenue. Indiana's governor, Republican Mitch Daniels, despite insisting he's committed to supporting public education, has repeatedly refused to consider raising taxes to make up for the shortfall.

Complain to Mitch Daniels and State Superintendent of Schools Tony Bennett. This was a common plea, from board members and audience members alike. Tell them how angry you are. Offer them your suggestions. And for godsake, let's get a referendum going to reverse this downward spiral.

I don't know how, if, or when a referendum would be initiated, but I can certainly offer up contact information for Mitch Daniels and Tony Bennett. Here it is:

To send a comment to Mitch Daniels, you can fill out a form at what I can only assume is an ironically named website, "my man mitch," at http://www.mymanmitch.com/email_mitch.html; or you can complete a form on his official Indiana government page at http://www.in.gov/gov/2631.htm.

To send a comment to State Superintendent Tony Bennett, email him directly at tbennett@doe.in.gov.


Public comments
I did my best to keep accurate, thorough count of all comments, but it was a fairly hectic (and long) evening. I am absolutely open to the possibility that I've forgotten, overlooked, or misinterpreted various comments, and I hope that anyone who was in attendance at the meeting will let me know if they think I've missed something important. You can submit comments below; or, if you prefer, you can email me directly with comments, questions, or suggestions at jennamcjenna(at)gmail(dot)com.

I counted 92 comments, given over the course of about 4 1/2 hours. Speakers were limited to 3 minutes each. One final caveat: I was one of the commenters, and I spoke in support of Aurora Alternative High School, which would be closed if the proposed cuts are passed. I've been working at Aurora for nearly two years and feel a deep sense of passion and pride in the educational work of the Aurora community. That's my bias, though this bias should not detract from the strong outpouring of support for Aurora demonstrated in last night's meeting. Current Aurora students, alumni, parents, teachers, and administrators showed up in droves to stand in support of their school, and it showed in the number of pro-Aurora comments registered during this meeting.

By the end of the meeting, I was pretty much exhausted, and my notes got kind of sparse. I did tweet during board members' closing comments, though, that it seemed that the board had already made up its mind to pass the proposed cuts. I don't remember specifically what led me to this conclusion, but I hope it's inaccurate. Given the time and energy the MCCSC community devoted to last night's hearing, I believe it would not only be a travesty but a violation of the public trust for the board to simply pass the cuts as proposed.


The Breakdown
Total comments: 92
Breakdown by theme: (note that several people spoke in support of more than one item)

1. Save Aurora Alternative High School (and the Teen Learning Center): 39 comments. The support for Aurora came largely from current students and alumni, who spoke about how important the school had been for them. Over and over, we heard stories of students who would not have graduated, who would not have had the opportunities they now have, were it not for Aurora. Teachers and parents also spoke in support of Aurora, and many argued that moving the program into one of the existing public high schools would effectively destroy Aurora.

2. Save the libraries / librarians and media specialists are the heart of their schools: 28 comments. Libraries, parents, students, and community members spoke in favor of MCCSC's library programs. Several people argued that cutting librarians and media specialists would be disastrous to students, leading to a decrease in literacy rates, a drop in development of 21st-century skills, and a drop in support of teachers' work outside of the libraries.

3. Let's have a referendum: 20-24 comments. This was a difficult category to count, since even though many people didn't specifically speak up in support of a referendum, their comments and attitudes seemed to suggest they would stand behind one. The board, too, seemed to support a referendum; the problem is that the board suggested that the community would need to initiate the referendum, while the audience seemed to believe it needed to be initiated by the board.

4. We need / want / demand more input: 17 comments. These comments came largely from teachers and members of the teachers' union. As I noted above, many people argued that they had not been given ample opportunity to offer input and that they had not received enough information in a timely enough manner to be able to respond adequately to the proposed cuts. (As a side note, if anyone has a copy of the proposal, I would be thrilled to post it here or link to it on another site. Please let me know.)

5. Please don't raise class size: 16 comments. The general consensus was: Classes are big enough already; making them bigger won't solve a single thing. Many Aurora students and alumni hinted at this in their comments, pointing out that before they came to Aurora they struggled with being noticed or heard or getting the attention they needed from teachers and administrators at the larger public high schools.

6. Please don't cut the elementary strings program: 10 comments. Many former students and parents spoke with great emotion about the value of the elementary string program, which they argued was key to their academic success and growth as people. One former student said, looking at the Aurora students sitting together on one side of the auditorium: "What Aurora is to you, the strings program was to me."

7. Think about utilization rates: 6 comments. I'm still not quite clear what utilization rates are, and I hope someone can clarify for me, but people who spoke about utilization rates spoke about how space was being used in the schools. One new elementary school, according to one speaker, is operating at only 40% capacity; another speaker talked about how well his school (I'm fairly sure he said it was Bloomington South) is using space and argued that administrators should take a look at what his school was doing.

8. Save outdoor education (Honey Creek / Bradford Woods): 6 comments. Speakers in favor of these programs spoke about the value of these places to their children's or their own education, and argued for a reconsideration of the proposal to close these programs.

8. Save foreign language education: 5 comments. One speaker pointed out that Indiana University requires three years of a foreign language, and that cutting middle school foreign language programs will make it harder for students to meet that requirement. "You'd have to know in 9th grade that you want to go to college," she said. "And believe me, lots of kids don't know in 9th grade."

9. Save Family and Consumer Science: 4 comments. Several teachers spoke in favor of this program, arguing for its deep educational value for all students.

9. I volunteer to (work for free, get paid through grants, write grants, find ways to fund my position) if you give me one more year: 4 comments. It's too bad that this item is buried so far down the list, because I admire so deeply the people who made it into this category. People actually stood up and said: Give me one year to find alternate funding for my position or program, and I'll find that funding and keep my program going. I can't imagine a better deal for the MCCSC board, and I can't imagine how or why they would refuse these people.

10. Save the middle school youth outreach program: 2 comments. Two educators affiliated with this program spoke about its value. They argued that it's the only program of its kind for middle school students who have been expelled, and that as such it's an essential support program for the district.

10. Please don't close the swimming pools: 2 comments. The people who spoke in support of keeping the swimming pools open year-round volunteered to raise funds in order to make this happen. Again, if people are willing to reach into their own pockets to pay for something extra like this, I can't imagine why they would be refused.

11. Please don't cut ATS: 1 comment. ATS is an afterschool suspension program affiliated with the Teen Learning Center, but I'm including it as a separate category because the commenter who spoke in favor of this program made one important point: With the proposed increase in class size, do you think student behavior is going to improve? She argued that a program like ATS is essential given the types of cuts that are proposed.

11. Please don't slander the Project School: 1 comment. One parent whose daughter attends the Project School, a new charter school in Bloomington, spoke up against what she perceived as negative comments toward the school. Project School families are encouraged by their school's staff to support the MCCSC, she said, and she hoped to see the same kind of support from MCCSC toward Project School families.

Below, I've included the details of the recommended cuts, as described by the Herald-Times. If anyone has more information, please include in comments below or contact me directly; I would be thrilled to provide as many details about this issue as possible.



ADMINISTRATION RECOMMENDATIONS (as described by the Herald-Times)

• Increase class-size ratio, generating approximately 45 certified staff (teaching) cuts.
• Eliminate elementary and middle school media specialists.
• Eliminate middle school foreign language.
• Eliminate middle school Family and Consumer Science.
• Eliminate one assistant, part-time athletic director at each high school.
• Reduce high school assistant coaches (no specific numbers or areas revealed)
• Possibly reduce extracurricular activities (brain game, spell bowl, etc.) at high schools and middle schools.
• Eliminate six elementary assistant principal positions for 2011-12.
• Eliminate the unfilled assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction job and the secretarial job for that post.
• Eliminate the healthy school coordinator position.
• Freeze all administrative salaries.
• Reduce school board salaries.
• Consolidate Aurora Alternative High School into an existing high school with some reduction to staff.
• Close the Teen Learning Center.
• Close Alternative to Suspension.
• Close Youth Outreach.
• Eliminate the Bradford Woods.
• Eliminate Honey Creek School.
• Eliminate elementary strings program.
• Drain the high school pools out of season.
• Eliminate Batchelor Middle School pool and fill it in.
• Eliminate substitutes for building secretaries.
• Eliminate summer school.

OTHER NONPERSONNEL ITEMS

• Move NWEA (testing) costs from general fund to capital projects fund ($85,000).
• Eliminate corporation cell phones.
• Reduce energy costs through the Energy Education Inc. program.
• Move maintenance materials and supplies from general fund to capital projects fund.
• Reduce instruction materials and supplies by 10 percent.
• Reduce administrative materials and supplies by 10 percent.
• Reduce travel expenses by 10 percent.
• Reduce vehicle purchases.
• Eliminate the district’s supplemental share of band uniform purchases.
• Reduce each school’s allocation for substitutes for teacher and staff professional development opportunities.
• Eliminate staff development costs from the general fund that are not (state law) PL 221 required.
• Eliminate the general fund’s portion of purchasing library books and periodicals.

george w. bush reaches one rotting hand from the grave

I believe campaign finance reform is the most important issue in contemporary American politics. The unfettered ability of corporate and interest-based groups to maintain or remove politicians is the reason behind every evil, bigoted, and short-sighted law our legislative bodies pass. It's the reason behind the slow pace of the political machine. It's the reason so many Americans feel there's no point in voting since they don't really have much of a say in who wins anyway. (And they're right to feel so.)

Now the Supreme Court of the United States has cleared the way for lobbyists and Big Business to grab even more control of our laws and our land by ruling, 5-4, to overturn previous campaign finance reform laws limiting the amount organizations could donate to political candidates.

President Obama said the ruling was "a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans."

Obama is right. This is a dark, dismal day for American politics. The Supreme Court's ruling has plummeted us back into the cesspool of corruption that we've spent a century trying to clamber our way out of.

The Bush administration, with its installation of a pair of corrupt, rightwing and deeply shortsighted justices, can claim its credit for this ruling. History will label the Bush tenure the last bastion of an era of brazen corruption, greed, and reckless narcissism. For those of us who loathed George W. Bush and his lackeys from the get-go, this cannot come soon enough.

It also won't feel anything at all like sweet revenge. We're all mired in the shit now, regardless of who we voted for.

smacking down Jaron Lanier & 'World Wide Mush'

Normally, I wouldn't take on such a revered, well credentialed authority as Jaron Lanier,* but his recent Wall Street Journal piece on why the movement toward collectivism, collaboration, and openness is doomed to failure leaves him cruising for a bruising.

"Most people know me as the 'father of Virtual Reality technology'," Lanier announces. (This boast is repeated in his presumably self-crafted or at least author-approved bio at the bottom of the article.) He was also, however,

part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future. Our dream came true, in part. It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. On the other hand, we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity. I am appalled that our old fantasies have become so entrenched that it's hard to get anyone to remember that there are alternatives to a framework that isn't working. 

 The "mistake" of making participation in online communities free and unpaid is only the first half of Lanier's frustration. He also hates what he calls the "collectivist" nature of online communities:

Here's one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn't want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.

Lanier's first mistake is treating Wikipedia culture--or, as Stephen Colbert puts it, Wikiality--as a stand-in for all forms of collective problem-solving. Lanier of all people should know that the often anonymous, often trivial and often problematic Wikipedia model is only one approach to collaboration, and one that works--and often works very well--for fairly low-stakes and longer-term goals. You don't cite Wikipedia in a White House briefing on Islam in Nigeria, for example, but you do cite Wikipedia in proving to your brother-in-law that Breakfast at Tiffany's was released just at the very beginning of the 1960's, just like you said it was. (Did you get that, Dean? 1961.)

Lanier also finds Google Wave problematic because he sees it as another iteration of wikiality; it "encourages you to blur personal boundaries by editing what someone else has said in a conversation with you, and you can watch each other as you type so nobody gets a private moment to consider a thought before posting.

"And if you listen to music online," he continues, "there's a good chance your listening will be guided by statistical analysis of Internet crowd preferences."

Ultimately, I suppose, and in true Wikipedia form, we all get the reality we expect to perceive. Lanier, in his mistrust of collective action, zeroes in on specific communities and specific features of specific resources that he believes prove that collectivism is a terrible, dehumanizing mistake. Along the way, he ignores the vast variety of successful projects of collective action, including:

• This year's DARPA challenge winners, based out of Sandy Pentland's Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT, who successfully crowdsourced the search and retrieval of 100 red balloons hidden across America in a flabbergasting 8 hours and 52 minutes (researcher Riley Crane points out that while the balloons themselves were an arbitrary target, the process by which the balloons were retrieved might be applicable to more significant social problems);
• The recent Netflix Prize, which crowdsourced the development of a more accurate system for identifying Netflix members' potential interests based on previous titles viewed;
• And, oh yeah, the entire open source software movement, starring Linux, WordPress, Mozilla Firefox, Ubuntu, and a host of lesser characters playing supporting roles.

And those are just the easily identified successes of collective action. It's more challenging, but equally important, to identify and champion local or concentrated examples of collective action. When people learned of a proposed bill in Uganda that would legalize execution of homosexuals, they spread the word. Bad press for any country, even worse when prominent Americans appear to be involved behind the scenes. Video of Rachel Maddow brutally smacking down "ex-gay" evangelist Richard Cohen, suspected to have worked in support of the law, was viewed nearly 60,000 times on YouTube. While the bill is moving forward through Uganda's Parliament, the international outcry makes it more likely that a.) the law, if passed, will go largely unenforced; b.) international relations with Uganda, with governments or NGOs, will be strained; c.) any other country interested in passing a similar law will think twice about garnering such negative press; and d.) prominent anti-gay American politicians and evangelicals will think twice about joining up with a similar cause.

Over on Twitter, Dean Shareski announced he had been charged hundreds of dollars by his cellphone carrier when his daughter began texting new friends without adding them to the company's My5 plan. As he explains in a recent post, Twitter saved him $764.13: His tweets about the issue were retweeted by followers, and the company noticed and erased the extra charges.

Small and large, the possibility for collective action is empowering people to resist injustice, call for change in politics in attitudes, develop new tools to improve human lives. You don't get innovation? You can't foster creativity? I say bollocks to that.

Now for the second part of Lanier's argument, that the model of unpaid contribution has led to a general decline in quality and social and technological progress. He writes:

The "open" paradigm rests on the assumption that the way to get ahead is to give away your brain's work—your music, writing, computer code and so on—and earn kudos instead of money. You are then supposedly compensated because your occasional dollop of online recognition will help you get some kind of less cerebral work that can earn money. For instance, maybe you can sell custom branded T-shirts.

We're well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.

Yeah, sure, the economics of creativity are shifting--but what Lanier sees as a kind of serfication of the creative class (what? really? really? really?) others see as an equitable redistribution of socially valuable goods. John Brockman reminds us of the words of McLuhan himself:

McLuhan had pointed out that by inventing electric technology, we had externalized our central nervous systems; that is, our minds. (John) Cage went further to say that we now had to presume that 'there's only one mind, the one we all share.' Cage pointed out that we had to go beyond private and personal mind-sets and understand how radically things had changed. Mind had become socialized. 'We can't change our minds without changing the world,' he said. Mind as a man-made extension became our environment, which he characterized as 'the collective consciousness,' which we could tap into by creating 'a global utilities network.'

If you believe we are all part of one social mind, the world's mind (and remember that we get the reality we expect to perceive),  then it follows that the segmenting off of important ideas, the claiming ownership over ideas, the holding them separate from the rest of the social mind is the worst kind of sin: It is relentless and causeless self-abnegation, a sin against oneself.

It's true that some of the contributors to some of the projects I list here were paid for their participation; but they were paid for their time, and not for their ideas.  The rewards for joining in a collaborative effort are not, despite Lanier's assertion to the otherwise, reduced to either praise or money; the rewards are in contributing to a socially meaningful activity, in being a productive part of something larger than oneself.  Indeed, Lanier's very argument that "millions of people are ready to contribute" but that they are ready to do so even though their contributions are "unpaid, and often anonymous" shows that kudos or money are not the only motivators in collaborative spaces.

I'm an intermittent contributor to Wikipedia, and I do it without the expectation of money or kudos; I do it knowing nobody knows or cares about my contributions, except that what I add makes something neat a tiny bit better than it was before. There's value in that, to me and to the hordes of people who are perfectly comfortable contributing to collaborative projects anonymously and for free. Some things we do for money, after all, and some we do for love.






*jk jk jk I have absolutely no problem taking on such a revered, well credentialed authority as Jaron Lanier.

on lurkers, geeks, and pasty white men

I'm reading a fascinating new piece by Kate Crawford called "Following you: disciplines of listening in social media." Crawford, an Associate Professor in the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, suggests that we rethink our discourse around lurkers and less active participants in online affinity spaces; actually, she suggests we get away from that term "lurking," since "this term has hampered our understanding of online spaces, and...the concept of listening offers more open and critically productive ground."

Crawford points to a glorification of "voice" as the highest form of online participation. She is gently critical of "this privileging of voice, and particularly voice-as-democratic-participation," which dominates research and writing about online activity. She explains:

In Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn's Democracy and New Media, the authors argue that the Internet 'is politically important because it expands the range of voices that can be heard in a national debate, ensuring that no one voice can speak with unquestioned authority.' This 'speaking truth to power' model is a prominent feature of much media and cultural studies analysis, but it has limited the recognition of the variety and reach of the practices of listening online. Listening has not been given sufficient consideration as a significant practice of intimacy, connection, obligation and participation online; instead, it has often been considered as contributing little value to online communities, if not acting as an active drain on their growth.

By my lights, Crawford is both right and a little bit wrong. There is a strange trend among new media researchers to privilege those who speak loudest and carry the biggest sticks; we often hold up "geeking out," as Mimi Ito and her colleagues describe it in their recent book on youth and new media, as the gold standard of online participation. But geeking out is characterized by single-minded obsession, deep immersion into a hobby or pastime, often at the expense of other pursuits. The archetypal "geek" is often the pasty white man toiling in the dead of night in front of some terminal or circuit board or technology. In a recent post on animals' use of tools, HASTAC co-founded Cathy Davidson remarks on the recent discovery that certain types of octopus use coconut shells as tools. The post is called "Only Humans Use Tools (O, and Octopi Too)," and Davidson explains that the title is intentionally ironic:

Many, many animals--maybe even all of them, in fact--use tools if only humans could "see" that they do. We see tools very anthrocentrically in the same way that we hear animal "language." Unless the animals translate it for us, we don't believe it exists.

I think the same is true when it comes to talking about "geeking out." Because pasty white men have traditionally dominated geek culture, at least in America, their practices became the standard by which we measure all geeks. If it doesn't look like a geek, walk like a geek, or quack like a geek, then we argue that it's not a geek--unless geeks who don't fit the geek stereotype translate for us, we don't believe they exist either.

In this sense, Crawford's effort to re-position the lurker as a listener whose participation in online spaces is essential to the success of those spaces is both important and useful. (And by the way, this paper identifies three categories of listening: background listening, delegated listening, and reciprocal listening; and the work she does to discuss these categories offers nice strategies for reframing different approaches to listening.) But on the other hand...if you spend your entire life listening and never 'speaking truth to power,' then what's the point of listening at all?

The work of making cultural meaning, after all, depends on collaboration. It depends on the power of speech, the power of communication, and the willingness to take a stand when it matters. It may be perfectly legitimate to be a Twitter user who listens in but never tweets, but the hope is that this sort of Twitter user will feel empowered to speak up in another space somewhere else. Henry Jenkins says this about participatory culture:

Not all members must contribute, but all must feel free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

Lurking--or, if you prefer, listening--is certainly a legitimate form of participation. But if a person never moves beyond listening and begins to 'speak' (and keep in mind that 'speaking' may take a variety of forms in this strange and wacky era we call The New Media Age), then that person isn't engaging fully with the affordances of the technologies she is engaged with. Often, of course, the geeks--the ones that we readily recognize, and readily cede the floor to--drown out the voices of other types of participants. This is a problem we need to set about solving. But the solution is not to argue that listening is valid in the same ways and to the same power as is making your ideas heard.

Crawford's piece, along with others she references in her article, helps us to rethink how we describe listeners as participants in online spaces. The next step, in my opinion, is to find a way to empower them to speak when they feel they have something to say. Alongside this goal is the deep imperative to find ways of recognizing speech acts and other forms of communication that don't fit the archetypes and stereotypes that too often direct our thinking about these sorts of issues.

you heard it there first: the best reviews of Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation

If you've read even a post or two from this blog, you know that I'm going to fiercely oppose the main theories guiding Bauerlein's 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.

In a precise exercise in ridiculousness, Bauerlein's book is loaded up with sweeping claims like the following:

[M]ost young Americans possess little of the knowledge that makes for an informed citizen, and too few of them master the skills needed to negotiate an information-heavyt, communication-based society and economy. Furthermore, they avoid the resources and media that might enlighten them and boost their talents....

[Y]oung people do not understand the ideals of citizenship, they are disengaged from the political process, they lack the knowledge necessary for effective self-government, and their appreciation and support of American democracy is limited.

If that's what Bauerlein's selling, I don't want any.

I am, thanks be to god, not alone in my disgust at Bauerlein's dance of intellectual superiority. Many others have attacked his book and its tenets with grace, aplomb, and gusto. I give you a list of Reviews That Have Me Nodding My Head In Vigorous Agreement.

I begin with a smart and sassy Newsweek review by Sharon Begley and Jeneen Interlandi, who accuse Bauerlein of coming late to the party:

Really, don't we all know by now that finding examples of teens' and twentysomethings' ignorance is like shooting fish in a barrel?... From evidence such as a decline in adult literacy (40 percent of high-school grads had it in 1992; only 31 percent did in 2003) and a rise in geographic cluelessness (47 percent of the grads in 1950 could name the largest lake in North America, compared with 38 percent in 2002), for instance, Bauerlein concludes that "no cohort in human history has opened such a fissure between its material conditions and its intellectual attainments."

He is a little late to this party, of course. The old have been wringing their hands about the young's cultural wastelands and ignorance of history at least since admirers of Sophocles and Aeschylus bemoaned the popularity of Aristophanes ("The Frogs," for Zeussakes?!) as leading to the end of (Greek) civilization as they knew it. The Civil War generation was aghast at the lurid dime novels of the late 1800s. Victorian scholars considered Dickens, that plot-loving, sentimental ("A Christmas Carol") favorite, a lightweight compared with other authors of the time. Civilization, and culture high and low, survived it all. Can it survive a generation's ignorance of history? For those born from 1980 to 1997, Bauerlein lamented to us, "there is no memory of the past, just like when the Khmer Rouge said 'this is day zero.' Historical memory is essential to a free people. If you don't know which rights are protected in the First Amendment, how can you think critically about rights in the U.S.?" Fair enough, but we suspect that if young people don't know the Bill of Rights or the import of old COLORED ENTRANCE signs—and they absolutely should—it reflects not stupidity but a failure of the school system and of society (which is run by grown-ups) to require them to know it. Drawing on our own historical memory also compels us to note that philosopher George Santayana, too, despaired of a generation's historical ignorance, warning that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." That was in 1905.

Liz Losh, in a review titled Dumbest and Dumber, agrees with the above assertion that though Bauerlein would have us believe otherwise, the complaints of an emerging unprecedented era of ignorance are not new or particularly well founded; and besides, she adds,

how can you hate people under thirty with this much dripping bile and still work as a competent and professional faculty member? How would it be possible to teach your classes with this much misanthropy aimed at people of your students' ages? With this much contempt taking place in inner monologues that are so well-rehearsed, how can you not communicate it to the student seeking help on the other side of your desk? Well, based on his ratemyprofessor standings, it looks like he's an easier instructor than I am, ironically. So much for defending high standards of achievement for students.

Over at BlogCritics, Kevin Eagan acknowledges that some of the trends identified by Bauerlein are "disturbing" but wonders about the extent to which The Dumbest Generation offers only the evidence that fits the thesis. "Bauerlein seems to think things are different because the Internet has only given teens one more way to escape adult life," Eagen writes.

And to a certain extent, he's right; the Internet is not used by teens to further their intellectual pursuits, at least, not in the way educators would like. But as with all new technologies, the Internet is currently going through a teething stage, and it's too early to say if our new digital lives will mean the next generation will forever ignore civil discourse and become apathetic toward art and history as adults.... Bauerlein's approach reveals a one-sided argument, one that forgets that art is created on the fringes of society and that young people rarely get involved in these pursuits since, after all, they're too busy trying to impress their friends.

This last point, by the way, is also a lynchphin of Losh's position with respect to Bauerlein's argument. She finishes her post with this video, which she identifies as a "dizzying spectacle of racial and sexual stereotypes, romantic melodrama, consumerism, instant gratification, and commodity fetishism emptied of its destructive social directives and turned into a clever musical soup that is danceable and evocative of guilty nostalgias and heterogeneous pleasures that Bauerlein would have us condemn."



Writing in the LA Times, Lee Drutman agrees that Bauerlein is an alarmist whose call to arms against the rising tide of ignorant youth "seems at once overblown...and also yesterday's news"; but Drutman also offers that "amid the sometimes annoyingly frantic warning bells that ding throughout 'The Dumbest Generation,' there are also some keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents and other adults ignore at their peril."

Is Drutman right to find some kernel of useful information in the collection of histrionics that Bauerlein calls a "book"? Well, sure. It's probably not exactly good that young people don't like to read books. At the same time, however, we would do well to approach the gathering data from a somewhat more nuanced approach. Young people aren't spending their free time reading books; so what are they doing? They're not spending their free time learning about historical events; so what kind of history piques their interest? They don't know a whole lot about Constitutional law, the Supreme Court, or local politics; so how do you explain youth turnout in the 2008 Presidential election?

While I disagree with just about every argument Bauerlein makes,  I do agree--in principle, anyway--with Bauerlein's assertion that awareness of history and involvement in traditional political models are down, way way down. But unlike Bauerlein, I see no reason to cry into my imported beer over this. I believe that a new model of civic engagement is emerging, one that our current tests, surveys, and evaluative measures cannot yet identify or account for. The new civics is an everyday civics, one that may or may not include involvement in local, or state, or national politics; it's a kind of just-in-time civic engagement that emerges out of an immediate need. In the just-in-time model, knowing what (names, dates, definitions) is far less important than knowing how (how to access names, dates, definitions, when that type of information becomes relevant and necessary). Who cares if you can name every sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice if you're able to locate and verify a list of current Justices in ten seconds flat?

If you want to justify a conviction that young people are stupid, boring, and lazy, then you look to tests that measure knowing what. If you believe, as I do, that today's young people are as smart, fascinating, and engaged as any previous generation, then you start figuring out ways to measure knowing how.

the Bloomington Herald-Times doesn't get this 'social networking' thing.

I'm pretty sure the Herald-Times of Bloomington, IN, is a sub-par paper with a short-sighted business model.

I say I'm "pretty sure" because the Herald-Times has developed two strategies that prevent me from knowing for certain: a paywall that keeps me from looking into whether the quality and content merit the paywall; and an apparent "no comment" policy with respect to the paywall, circulation numbers, and long-term subscription strategies.

How do they ignore people? Let me count the ways.
I learned about the "no comment" strategy after several weeks of seeking response from the paper. I went about seeking this response in a deliberate way: First, I challenged the paper through Twitter, by posting links to reports and articles about other papers' efforts to make newspapers available for cheap or free to Bloomington college students; by linking to free versions of the walled-off stories posted via the paper's Twitter account; and by stating my case, 140 characters at a time, for the paywall to be dropped. I ended each tweet with this challenge:

what say you, @theheraldtimes?

Nothing.

Next, I published a blog post about the issue in which I argued that not only was the paywall a short-sighted business model, but also that the paper was misusing Twitter by linking followers to content for which they would be required to pay. I wrote:

[M]y first request to the Herald-Times is this: Be nice or leave. Either stop spamming us, or lock your Twitter account to all but paid subscribers to the paper. Twitter is not the place to hustle subscriptions.

My second request is this: Tear down the goddamned paywall. The Herald-Times is, for all intents and purposes, the only local newsdaily (though I'll offer alternative news sources below). This means it certainly can but absolutely should not erect a paywall for web content. The need to make local news available for free becomes more urgent when you consider the demographics of Bloomington. It's the home of Indiana University, a college town whose median age is 23 (.pdf).

I ended the post with this:

what say you, @theheraldtimes?

Nothing.

I circulated a link to the post on Twitter. "what say you, @theheraldtimes?" I asked each time I linked to it. @theheraldtimes had nothing to say.

So I emailed the managing editor, Andrea Murray, and the publisher, Mayer Maloney, requesting comment. My request was forwarded to another member of the Herald-Times staff, who ultimately informed me that the only person who would serve as the official spokesperson on this issue was Maloney himself. Clearly, then, Maloney's approach to his role as the official spokesperson is silence.

I sent a final request, informing the paper that I wanted to publish a follow-up post exploring approaches to gaining readership in a college town where, presumably, the future readers of newspapers are gaining their sea legs (or not, depending on the approach to gaining readers). You can guess, I bet, what kind of response I received to my request for comment.

Why ignoring angry social media users is a really bad idea

Since my multiple requests for comment have been met with stony silence, I can only guess at the paper's reasoning based on context clues. First, Maloney has made it clear on numerous occasions (presumably in interviews with people he considers "real" journalists) that he sees the paper's paywall as a roaring success (here, here). I don't see it that way--as I wrote in my previous post on this issue, I see paywalls as a short-term solution to a deeper, longer term problem that's actually worsened by paywalls. It's like dealing with burst plumbing by putting down paper towels to clean up the water.

I suspect, too, that Maloney doesn't see me as a big enough fish to waste his time on. After all, I'm just an obnoxious pup with a strangely titled blog that reaches maybe a few hundred people a day.

It's true: I am an obnoxious pup with a strangely titled blog that reaches maybe a few hundred people a day. I am also a member of a key demographic for the future of the Herald-Times: 12-99-year-olds who are comfortable broadcasting their opinions, supporting those opinions with evidence, and circulating those opinions to several hundred to several thousand people. (My blog had just over 2,000 unique visitors in November.) As we know, after all, opinions are made through loose association and vague understanding of issues. All it takes, sometimes, is a handful of angry tweets, maybe a quick skim of a blogpost, for a small group of people to decide how they feel about an issue or product. This is word-of-mouth marketing on steroids; only this time, it's the consumers, not the marketers, who decide what the message will be.

I'll use my experience as an example. Though my tweets and blog post never garnered a response from the Herald-Times, it did generate responses from several other members of my social networks, all of whom offered some version of this:

the H-T is a terrible paper with pretty shoddy business practices. Here's a list of some alternative news sources.

It shouldn't be news to anybody that with print media in its precarious state, the last thing a newspaper needs is for the above message to circulate across social networks. But this is exactly what's happening with respect to the Herald-Times. It doesn't help that the paper uses its Twitter feed not to contribute to the larger knowledge-building work of that platform but to direct people to content they have to pay for to access. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: This is against the very spirit of Twitter. It is unethical, inappropriate and unwanted.

The Herald-Times is building a bad name for itself for many reasons, which would be bad enough if it could counter this reputation by making it clear that the paper offered really solid local news reporting. But here's the thing about erecting a paywall around your content: People have to be given a good reason to pay. I imagine (I can't know for sure, since I'm swimming in this sea of silence) that publisher Maloney takes his subscription numbers and continued ad revenue as proof that people value what his paper has to offer. I counter that his subscription numbers and ad revenues, whatever they are, are only the product of a single key fact: that the Herald-Times is for all intents and purposes the only game in town.

But the game is changing. Yesterday, newspapers could assume they filled an important community function; today, newspapers have to prove (to readers and advertisers) that they fill an important community function. There is still a sizable chunk of the population who will continue to subscribe to print media outlets, but young people--especially those who have grown up surrounded by free information and take for granted that they shouldn't have to pay for what they can get for free--young people have to be given a reason to subscribe. They have to be shown the value of local reporting, of community newspapers. They have to be shown that their local paper fits into their understanding of what "community" means.

In sum:

• The paywall will contribute to the demise of the local newspaper, because it will produce a generation of young adults who have no interest in following local news. 
• Misuse of online social networks such as Twitter only makes the problem worse, because it turns off entire groups of potential readers.
• Ignoring angry social media users is a really bad idea because they have the tools to articulate their opinions, the platform for circulating their opinions and, often, the wherewithal to use the tools and platforms to do exactly this.
• The old model--that one unhappy customer tells ten people--is out the window. The average Twitter user has 126 followers. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, and MySpace users average around 180.

What say you, @theheraldtimes?

to the Bloomington Herald-Times: drop the paywall. now.

My local paper, the Bloomington Herald-Times, has, if you can believe it, instituted a paywall.

This news is not particularly new, as the paywall was erected back in 2003. In a recent interview with the Guardian (which is, by the way, committed to keeping its web content available for free), the Herald-Times' publisher, Mayer Maloney, said this:

"When we changed to a pay website, in what might be called the dark days of the paid content debate, I kind of expected the earth to open up and the fires of hell to consume us.... We had some complaints, we still do, but by and large, I think folks expect to pay for stuff they want to consume and I don't see why papers have been giving away their journalism for free."

I'll get to why papers have been giving away their journalism for free in a second. First, though, I want to point to an enormous gaffe by Herald-Times staff: using the official Herald-Times Twitter account to link to content that only subscribers can access. Here's a recent snippet from the paper's Twitter feed:

If you want to find out more about the alleged sexual assault, if you want to learn about the robbery of the dead man's house, if you want to learn about the bank robbery--in other words, if you're interested in engaging with your local news--you can head over to the Herald Times website, where you'll see a page like this:

Using Twitter--a platform whose existence relies on members' goodwill toward each other, on their willingness to serve as intelligent filters for each other--to link to content people have to pay for is what we like to call "spam." It's not appropriate. It's not appreciated. And it's not okay. The decision not to link directly to news stories is presumably the Herald-Times' strategy for making it look like they're not spamming their followers, but it doesn't work. "Woman reports sexual assault after separating from her family at the Red Lot to attend IU/PU game"? You bet I'm going to try to find out more. The very effort to offer 140-character mini-headlines is an attempt to make Twitter users try to find out more. And when they do, they smack up against the paywall.

So my first request to the Herald-Times is this: Be nice or leave. Either stop spamming us, or lock your Twitter account to all but paid subscribers to the paper. Twitter is not the place to hustle subscriptions.

My second request is this: Tear down the goddamned paywall. The Herald-Times is, for all intents and purposes, the only local newsdaily (though I'll offer alternative news sources below). This means it certainly can but absolutely should not erect a paywall for web content. The need to make local news available for free becomes more urgent when you consider the demographics of Bloomington. It's the home of Indiana University, a college town whose median age is 23 (.pdf). Publisher Maloney considers the paywall a roaring success, adding in the abovementioned Guardian article that

"The simple question is whether you're selling something that people want to buy. I think it's foolish to give away to one group what you're charging another group for."

You know what else is foolish? Substituting long-term survival with short-term cash. Sure, the paywall has worked for the last five years. And in that time, how many young people, potential lifelong subscribers to local newspapers, have been denied the chance to see the value of connecting with community events? How many people have formed a notion of civic engagement that completely excludes the role of local news?

Sure, the cost of subscription is fairly low--just $5.95 a month. But I won't pay it, and thousands of young people won't pay it either. What they may do is pick up one of the free newspapers made available on campus: The New York Times or USA Today, both of which also offer free online content. (In case you missed it, USA Today recently announced a pilot program in which an e-edition of the paper will be made available for free to university populations, and Indiana University is one participant in this pilot.) Though students don't pay each time they grab a 'free' paper, the service is not free. To cover the cost of the NYTimes, all students have a small fee tacked on to their bill--as near as I can tell, it's somewhere around $1.25 per semester, though I'll double-check on that and get back to you. The USA Today program is free for now, with future conversations about pay structures planned after the pilot ends.

Just for the record, I don't consider this fee structure to be analogous to a paywall. The cost is low, largely invisible, and distributed across all members of the university community. In my view this would be, if the Herald-Times wanted to know, a legitimate way to approach circulating their content to university students.

But look: we need to think, and think hard, about strategies for maintaining cultural interest in high-quality reporting, at the local, state, national, and international level. We want--we need--to cultivate in our young people a deep investment in news so that the news, in whatever form it ends up adopting once newspapers die off, carries and is carried by its community. This means dropping down anything that acts as a barrier between the community and its news, and this means making web content--which is, let's face it, the content that young people are more likely to access--available for free. Paywalls solve the problem for now, but they don't solve the problem for later.

What say you, @theheraldtimes?


coda: some Bloomington news alternatives
The Bloomington Alternative: http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/
The Indiana Daily Student (Indiana University's student-run newspaper): http://www.idsnews.com/news/headline.aspx
WFIU, Bloomington's Public Radio station: http://indianapublicmedia.org/radio/
Indiana Public Media news: http://indianapublicmedia.org/news/

i haz a mad.

Just 3 months into my graduate school career, I'm already tired of admiring the problem.

What is cognition? How do we measure learning? What can sociocultural theorists learn from cognitivists, and vice versa? What role should assessment play in supporting learning? Which methodologies are most useful for which purposes? I'm not saying I'm not interested in these and similar types of questions. I love my classes; I love my classmates; I love my professors and I love the ideas I'm immersed in.

But:

"you don't just give up / you don't just let things happen / you make a stand / you say no // you have the guts to do what's right when everyone else just runs away and"

Recently, in a conversation about Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Joshua Danish talked about the struggles of implementing critical literacy programs in underserved areas. The challenge, he said, was that a program that can arm young people with righteous anger about their living conditions can also fail to prepare those learners for the fallout of that anger: how go to on living in a society where the odds are stacked so heavily in favor of some at the expense of others. How do we, he wondered, equip kids with the tools to manage their growing awareness of the power structures that hem them in?

I've been wondering the same thing about angry young graduate students like me. The more I learn, the madder I get; and the madder I get, the harder I look for something to fucking do.

But there's nothing to do. It feels like there's nothing to do.

The problem is lovely from all angles. But my feet are falling asleep from all this sitting. I'm ready to stand up. I'm ready to start moving.

I worry that the internet will kill everything I love.

I am, I feel, often a couple of steps behind mass culture.

Actually, this appears to be true only about a subgroup of TV shows that we might label THE MOST AWESOME TV SHOWS EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

Among the TV shows I got around to watching after they'd finished their first time around: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly / Serenity, Jericho, Battlestar Galactica. And now: Dr. Who. I'm only five episodes in to the first season and I'm head over heels. (the special effects! the character development! the joy with which Rose and the Doctor thrust themselves toward adventure! those radiant, radiant smiles!)

But enough about me. Let's talk about Hulu.

More specifically, let's talk about the cheap and free media-streaming services that offer a kind of on-demand programming experience--movies, TV shows, digital shorts--to anyone with a computer and a moderately reliable internet connection. Hulu, a joint venture funded by NBC and Fox, is the second most popular video viewing site on the web. (YouTube was tops, but then again it's hard to beat the king.) It's not hard to figure out why. Hulu features a deep vault of new shows and older classics, and it offers links to streams of shows not hosted on Hulu. (Because it's affiliated with its parent networks, the Hulu-hosted offerings stick mainly to those owned by NBC, Fox and Hulu-affiliated networks.)

I still watch a few shows on TV so I can have that old-time "community of fans, in this together" experience (SAMCRO FTW), and I subscribe to Netflix, through which I receive about 2 DVDs a month and watch up to a dozen shows and movies online. But the rest--the rest comes for free, mainly through Hulu and other franchise-sponsored media sites.

Which is why I was so sad to hear that Hulu is considering a switch to a paid format for at least some of its content, at least according to News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey (News Corp. is a part-owner of Hulu).

who you calling 'we'? Part 2: Peggy Orenstein version

I, good little revolutionary that I am, have been reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Some of my colleagues find this fact cute. Cute like this: "Oh, lookit Jenna getting all outraged again. Now she's even carrying Freire around with her. That's so cute."

That's okay. Other cute things include: anteaters and baby pterodactyls.

Reading Freire can make a guy excessively aware of anything that gives off even the faintest whiff of colonizing tendencies: Actions or words that ignore, dismiss, or (intentionally or unintentionally) distort or misrepresent the interests of oppressed groups.

A good recent example of this is Peggy Orenstein's recent New York Times piece Stop Your Search Engines. The piece, which focuses on "our" struggle to control overwhelming levels of information inundation, offers a peek into how even the best writers so often end up re-colonizing marginalized voices by treating personal issues as if they were universal concerns. It's a common trend in writing about new media, which coincidentally happens to be the topic of Orenstein's piece. She explains that, much like the irresistible urge of the Sirens' call in Homer's The Odyssey, the internet and the knowledge contained therein can drain "our" spirit, energy, and very lifeforce away. "It is heartening," she writes,

that the yearning for learning is the most powerful of all human cravings (though it applies equally to obtaining the wisdom of Zeus or the YouTube video on how to peel a banana like a monkey). Yet the sea surrounding the Sirens was littered with corpses. Can increased knowledge really destroy us?

Well, yes.... [T]he trap is more of a bait and switch: the promise is of infinite knowledge, but what’s delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same. In that sense, Homer may have been the original neuropsychologist: centuries after his death, brain studies show that true learning is largely an unconscious process. If we’re inundated with data, our brains’ synthesizing functions are overwhelmed by the effort to keep up. And the original purpose — deeper knowledge of a subject — is lost, as surely as the corpses surrounding Sirenum scopuli.

There's a lot of "we"-ing and "us"-ing in this article. The piece, after all, is part of a regular feature called "The Way We Live Now," a feature intended to represent personal approaches to larger cultural issues. And this is exactly what Orenstein attempts to do. She cites Fred Stutzman, the inventor of an internet-blocking application called Freedom, as saying that "we’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud." (emphasis mine)

The internet, Orenstein argues, "has allowed us (emphasis mine) to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing 'everything that happens' and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones. (emphasis mine, emphasis mine, emphasis, emphasis mine)

We sure do spend a lot of time talking about what the internet means to us, don't we? I've been as guilty of this as the next guy--it's a nice rhetorical move, a way of enlisting allies around a cause and demonstrating an awareness of cultural trends.

It also silences people who aren't part of the "we" in question.

One of the most exciting aspects of the internet as an information and communication source is that it offers the promise of real revolution: of tools for dancing along with and in resistance and opposition to dominant cultural forces. We feel inundated, overwhelmed at times, by information, but when information is necessary, useful, and used it feels anything but. They--people who, for example, have used Twitter as a tool for revolution; who have used cellphones to document the most abominable acts of cruelty and degradation; who have used news sites and blogs and forums to gather information they couldn't otherwise access--are less likely than "we" are to feel like limits must be set, like too much knowledge is a dangerous thing, like "self-binding" is the only path to true productivity.

Pervasive among members of dominant groups, writes Paulo Freire, is a fear of freedom: a fear that liberating the oppressed--making possible true conscientizacao, or critical consciousness and the will to resist oppression--will threaten the status quo.

"We" would do well to remember that the internet serves many purposes, some revolutionary and others not, but the leisure and reflexivity with which many of "us" approach consistent internet access is a long, long ways from universal. It's the old Tree of Knowledge issue again: Eating the apple only constitutes a fall from grace if you had the luxury of grace in the first place.