if I can't be free of bullies, I don't want to be part of your revolution

In an interesting show of poor timing, the New York Times celebrates Mother's Day by considering why female executives are such obnoxious bullies.

It turns out female bosses are perceived as bullies almost as commonly as male bosses are. A full 40 percent of workplace bullies are women, and 70 percent of the time, they choose women as their targets.

This, of course, comes as no surprise to most working stiffs out there. Bullying from bosses knows no gender and is therefore not constrained by it. But when it comes to an examination of why women are viewed as bullies, and how their "bullying" behavior compares to the behavior of male bosses, it gets a little complicated.

The Times first considers this phenomenon from a pure numbers standpoint. One reason women bully may be because it's still excruciatingly difficult for them to break into the upper echelons of the country's top corporations:

After five decades of striving for equality, women make up more than 50 percent of management, professional and related occupations, says Catalyst, the nonprofit research group. And yet, its 2008 census found, only 15.7 percent of Fortune 500 officers and 15.2 percent of directors were women.

The article also suggests, though, that gender stereotypes makes us more likely to see a female boss as "overly aggressive" than we might perceive a male boss engaging in the same kind of behavior.

Research on gender stereotyping from Catalyst suggests that no matter how women choose to lead, they are perceived as “never just right.” What’s more, the group found, women must work twice as hard as men to achieve the same level of recognition and prove they can lead.

Yes, okay, fair enough. But let's look at it another way: While assertive or aggressive female bosses are more likely to be perceived as bullies, then we can assume that the female employees who largely perceive themselves as targets are also victims of stereotypes. If female bosses are perceived as bitchy or pushy if they assert themselves too strongly, then female employees are likely to be perceived as whiny or gossipy for complaining about behavior that feels inappropriate or excessively spiteful or unjust. This is why lots of woman-on-woman bullying, I believe, never gets reported. Or, if it does, it gets reported when the working relationship is so bad that one or both women are probably on their way out.

Then there's the issue of the male heads of organizations, the people who often adjudicate bullying complaints. Many of these men self-identify as either feminist or sympathetic to the feminist movement. Many have done what they could to help their female employees advance. They know how hard it is to be a female boss, and because of this they're likely to support an embattled woman even in the face of multiple accusations of bullying. First, they may carry around that father complex, the one that makes them want to take care of the ladies who need them; second, their politics require them to defend the woman from charges of bullying because it's just so hard to be a female boss. This, we might say, is the soft bigotry of kneejerk feminism.

Fortunately, a change is on the horizon. The emergence of participatory cultures and new valued practices means we can and must develop new models for formal and informal organizations. Increasingly, effective collaboration, collective meaning-making, and the ability to tap into expertise that's distributed across networks of people and tools are far more important than being the single visionary of a company. The old, single-genius model is less and less relevant, and bosses--male or female--who adhere to this model will bully themselves right out of a job as the social revolution takes hold.

brb smacking down Rupert Murdoch: Why a pay-per-view approach to online content won't work

**update: 5/09/09: I got featured in a BBC radio interview opposite Nieman Lab Director Joshua Benton! They called me a "young blogger for the Guardian." Neatness.**

You guys, I've mentioned in an earlier post that I got picked up by the Guardian, a UK newspaper, to write for their internet division. I feel like a young Della Frye, except for the part where she's stuck in the middle of a ridiculous movie and my life is really happening. I'm also shorter than she is.

The following post went live at the Guardian's Comment is Free section today! You can view it here. A lively debate has picked up quickly; it turns out those Brits get all up in arms when it comes to Rupert Murdoch. Who knew?


Here's the post. They edited the American English out of it and made some other tweaks; this is it in its original form.


In further proof of why old people should not be allowed to run media conglomerates, media magnate Rupert Murdoch recently announced that News Corporation's newspaper websites will begin charging for access within a year.

The move to charge for accessing online content is an effort to keep newspapers profitable amid declining subscriptions and ad revenues. Murdoch called the current model, in which newspaper websites offer their content for free, a "malfunctioning" model, and one that's unsustainable.

Murdoch also opposed the recent decision by the New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Washington Post to work with Amazon to develop a version of the e-reader the Kindle tailored for reading newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals.

The issue here is not whether the current model of offering free content to all is financially viable--clearly, it's not. The issue is the odious assumption implicit in Murdoch's stance: that centralized control of information flow is somehow better than the decentralized model embraced by the public.

Murdoch and others subscribe to the notion that leveling the playing field by offering free access to content was a regrettable mistake. Here's how the New York Times put it in a recent piece about the Kindle:

Perhaps most appealing about this new class of reading gadgets is the opportunity they offer publishers to rethink their strategy in a rapidly evolving digital world. The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions.

You know how the movement toward mass literacy was spearheaded by the church, in an effort to get the word of God into the hands, mouths, and minds of every citizen? I wonder if church officials called it a "critical blunder" when they figured out that learning how to read meant being able to make decisions about what to read, and when, and how. While it may not necessarily be true that mass literacy leads to a better society, it's certainly the case that if your power rests on the ability to tell people what to think, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And a lot of knowledge is explosive.

We're in the middle of a revolution made possible through the rapid spread of and relatively easy access to a vast store of human knowledge. Newspapers' decision to make their material available online for free--what print media types are now calling a "critical blunder"--was a crucial factor in making the revolution possible. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time: For journalists, after all, news is important, and more access by more people to more news could only be better for everyone, right?

Clay Shirky writes that "it's not a revolution if nobody loses," and the first losers in this particular revolution were broadcast media outlets (TV, newspapers, magazines) and cultural elites whose social status relied on the ability to control who had access to the news, what stories they had access to, and what they did with that information.

Murdoch asserted that "[t]he current days of the internet will soon be over." If he's right, it will only be because a small handful of corporations own the vast majority of media outlets. My sense, though, is that he's wrong: That even if newspapers return to a pay-for-view model, the people will rise up against and then roll right over it by making the same content available for free elsewhere online and developing new uses for social media that subvert the efforts of Murdoch and others.

If print media executives want to keep pace with the social revolution, they need to begin by letting go of the outdated assumption that their job is to first filter and then broadcast information for the public good. From now on, we'll decide what matters, thank you very much, and if newspapers know what's good for them, they'll do what they can to not get in the way.

I can't believe the Boston Globe is staying open

because now I not only have to change the titles of two recent blogposts, but I have to rail against the lameness of going through all this work to keep something open based purely on its nostalgia factor.

The announcement of the Globe's continued, if tenuous, existence came after parties on each side of the dispute--New York Times, Inc., the conglomerate that owns the paper, on one side; union representatives on the other--offered up a series of hefty concessions. It seems likely, in fact, that the entire hullaballoo over the potential closure of New England's largest paper was intended to generate exactly the kind of public sentiment it garnered: Outrage, disbelief, incredulity and the stubborn insistence that a community isn't a community without a newspaper to bind it.

Nostalgia only takes an argument--or a money pit, even when it's black, white, and read all over--so far. Eventually you come up against some cold, hard truths: That newspapers aren't economically viable, and haven't been for years; that whatever statistics people may pull out, people just don't read newspapers anymore; and that even with the decrease in newspaper readership, we still have by most accounts a better informed and more civically engaged public than we've ever seen.

It's hard to see this, of course, if you depend on traditional models of "informed" and "civically engaged." Today's citizen is more likely to comment on a news story or publish a blogpost than to vote. Today's citizen is more likely to sign an online petition via Facebook or MySpace than to attend a rally. Today's citizen is more likely to post a video to YouTube than to write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper. These actions may not seem like "civic engagement" to the old-school journalist (cf. Russell Crowe in State of Play), but these activities are leading to a real shift in how and when the elites--corporations, school boards, government officials, and so on--both can and choose to listen to the people.

"Society doesn't need newspapers," says Clay Shirky. "What we need is journalism." Okay, sure, the Boston Globe will stick around, at least for now. But media moguls, analysts, and the general public need to stop asking what needs to happen to make newspapers viable. That's no longer a relevant question. The new question is: What journalistic models can replace the traditional newspaper model, and what effects will this have on the public? This is a question that's already being answered, if the so-called "media experts" would just put down their end-is-nigh megaphones and listen to what's going on around them.

thank goodness the Boston Globe is shutting down

or I'd have to smack it down big-time for this editorial arguing that we shouldn't standardize and measure achievement on so-called 21st-century skills. The op-ed offers further proof--as if we needed it--that the Globe's editorial board has no idea how the playing field has been utterly transformed by participatory culture.

The impetus behind the op-ed is a move by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to put its money where its mouth is. The department recently awarded a $146 million contract to the designer of the MCAS, the standardized test mandated in the commonwealth of Massachusetts by No Child Left Behind, and part of that money is earmarked for integration of 21st-century skills assessment. This is a problem, as the Globe's editorial board will point out momentarily.

But first, it uses state MCAS scores as proof of public school rigor. As it explains,

Massachusetts stands apart in public education precisely because it created high academic standards, developed an objective measure of student performance and progress through the MCAS test, and required a passing grade in order to graduate. Students, as a result, rank at or near the top of standardized testing not just nationally but on tough international achievement tests in math and science. Any retreat from this strategy would be a profound mistake.

So to summarize: Massachusetts students are among the top in the nation because their achievement on standardized tests prepares them to...score well on standardized tests. It's like the iconic example of circular reasoning: The MCAS is useful because it prepares them for future learning. How do you know? Because Massachusetts students do well on other standardized tests. What prepares them to do well on those tests? Doing well on standardized tests, of course.

Given the Globe's wholehearted genuflection at the altar of bubble tests, one wonders why this editorial might oppose integrating assessment of 21st-century skills in addition to traditional subjects. It turns out their concern is less about whether we should measure 21st century skills than it is about how doing so on the MCAS will affect test scores in general. As the editorial points out,

[s]tate education officials have done a generally poor job of defining 21st-century skills - which can include interdisciplinary thinking and media literacy - or explaining how to test them statewide.

The problem for the Globe, it turns out, is that if we develop mediocre assessment strategies it'll ruin the MCAS for all of us. Because 21st-century skills can only be measured subjectively, the Globe argues, an "objective" test like the MCAS is an inappropriate place to assess achievement. Instead,

MCAS testers should concentrate on accurately measuring math ability and reading comprehension, which surely correlate with a student's success in the workplace.

Let's leave, just for now, the outrageous assumption that a standardized test could conceivably be considered "objective." Let's leave the assumption that a standardized test could "accurately" measure student ability in anything other than the ability to engage in the weird and peculiar game of test-taking. Which leaves just one last question:

In what world can anybody make the argument that achievement in math and reading without the accompanying facility with 21st-century proficiencies prepares any learning for any workplace worth the energy of applying for employment in the first place?

It's such a weird argument to make, that literacy practices like reading, writing, and doing math can be somehow isolated from the 21st-century contexts that make them meaningful. It's like asking someone if she knows how to tie her shoe, then making her
prove it by writing a detailed step-by-step description of how to do it. It's like asking someone to prove he can build a fire: But is the fire for warmth, for signaling for help, or for burning the whole house down?

Same with math: Knowing how to "do" fractions doesn't mean a learner is equipped to, say, resize a .jpg for a blogpost.

Arguing that we should keep 21st-century skills out of standardized tests in order to keep the tests objective is as lame as the argument that standardized tests are objective in the first place. Neither one makes any logical sense. Neither one gets you anywhere.

Awesomeness: Project New Media Literacies' spring conference: Learning in a Participatory Culture

There was awesomeness going on at MIT this weekend, as my colleagues and I at Project New Media Literacies put on a conference called Learning in a Participatory Culture.

If you've never planned a conference before, I can't say I recommend the experience--though when one goes well, as this conference did, the stress and exhaustion that pile on top of you in the lead-up suddenly turn into a fair trade-off. All day, my coworkers and I got to be surrounded by the smartest educators and educational researchers ever, and we got to hear them say all kinds of insanely awesome things.

As part and parcel of the pure awesomeness of the day, I scored two key personal / professional victories: First, I slam-dunked an opening presentation on design and development of Project NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide, garnering not one, not two, but three separate thumbs-ups from the people I most hoped to impress: My sensei Dan Hickey, my boss Henry Jenkins, and my close, close friend, colleague, and fellow Fireside Moonbat Katie Clinton. I only wish Katie had received more recognition for her contribution to the project--somehow, I've been given her share of the credit and I want to find a way to put it back where it belongs.

I've included a QuickTime version of my presentation below, though it admittedly loses something without the audio. I'll see what I can do about adding the audio in once we have it processed from the day.



A second key victory was in getting a back channel going, via a #NML09 hashtag on Twitter, for the day. We had set up a TweetGrid and the hashtag going into the conference but had no specific plans for supporting and integrating the technology, but before I gave my opening presentation I offered up a quick tutorial on how to Tweet using hashtags and my colleagues and I spent the day monitoring and engaging in a rapidfire Twitter conversation that extended participation in really nice ways. As the man Henry Jenkins himself said to me midway through the day, the fact that we didn't need to plan for or organize participation in social media but that it worked anyway when the tools and the energies were in place proves something important about the nature of participatory culture.

This is the artifact of my tutorial:

Finally, I want to shout out to all the participants who made the conference such a roaring success. Energy, enthusiasm, and engagement were high from beginning to end. I don't have the words to articulate what an amazing experience it was.

Hurry up and say goodbye to the Boston Globe

It looks like the Boston Globe's days are numbered after down-to-the-wire negotiations between the Globe's union and its parent company, New York Times, Inc., failed to produce a tenable solution to the budget crunch stemming from faltering subscriptions and ad revenue.

Readers of this blog know how I feel about newspapers' old-media attempts to remain viable in the midst of a new media revolution (hint: annoyed and dismissive). This doesn't, of course, mean that I'm a fan of media outlets shutting down entirely; after all, it's true that new media journalism models rely on the work of reporters in the field, gathering stories and reporting them via some platform. But the traditional approach to journalism--two to three major papers in every major city--is no longer viable and may be unnecessary in a culture where everyone's a potential media outlet. We don't yet know what kinds of journalistic models are sustainable, or what approaches to reporting will matter to those who are joining the social revolution.

In related news, my blog got noticed by an editor at The Guardian, who solicited me to write for an online section of the paper called Comment is Free. My first post, a condensed version of my review of State of Play, is up here. I don't find my thrill at the awesomeness of getting picked up by a major media outlet at all contradictory to my stance on print media.

RIP Augusto Boal

"Oppression is a relationship in which there is only monologue. Not dialogue."

Brazilian theater director, playwright, and activist Augusto Boal has died of respiratory failure at the age of 78.

Boal was best known for his work in establishing the "Theatre of the Oppressed," an approach to public performance intended to draw spectators in to the action. In becoming active members of the live theatre, the public, the nominal "oppressed," have the chance to participate in and transform the conditions of their everyday lives.

Boal wrote:

TO (Theatre of the Oppressed) was used by peasants and workers; later, by teachers and students; now, also by artists, social workers, psychotherapists, NGOs... At first, in small, almost clandestine places. Now in the streets, schools, churches, trade-unions, regular theatres, prisons...

Theatre of the Oppressed is the Game of Dialogue: we play and learn together. All kinds of Games must have Discipline - clear rules that we must follow. At the same time, Games have absolute need of creativity and Freedom. TO is the perfect synthesis between the antithetic Discipline and Freedom. Without Discipline, there is no Social Life; without Freedom, there is no Life.

The Discipline of our Game is our belief that we that we must re-establish the right of everyone to exist in dignity. We believe that all of us are more, and much better, than what we think we are. We believe in solidarity.

The world got Augusto Boal for 78 years, and all it had to do was work to confront injustice and oppression. What a bargain.