why educated elites are lame, by a member of the educated elite

Great piece this morning at Technollama about the struggle between technophobia and technophilia.


The blog's author, Andres Guadamuz, cites a quote he attributes to Douglas Adams:

“There’s a set of rules that anything that was in the world when you were born is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you’ll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”

(If Adams is right, then I better speed up my tech-immersion: I turn 32 on Monday. Also, I'm officially putting all innovative technology designers on notice: Everything awesome must be designed and made public within the next three years.)

The Adams quote aligns with that old political axiom: If you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart; if you're not conservative when you're old, you have no brains.

Both point to a key characteristic of most humans: the impulse toward self-preservation. For all their whinging about the dangers of participatory media, many if not most anti-tech curmudgeons will, when backed into a corner, acknowledge the democratic possibilities of new media, even if they're not sure those possibilities will ever be realized. As I explained in a recent post, I believe that people who engage in pro/con debates about social media become more strident in public than they are in private.

Guadamuz addresses a key issue of what he calls "the war between old media and the internet": the fact that when everyone is a potential media outlet, a lot of what gets published is drivel and dross. He writes:

We will always need some authoritative and well-written version of events, and for that the traditional publishing mechanisms will continue to exist. However, social media has come to allow more people’s voices to be made available. Is this a good thing? I personally think that it is a fundamental and empowering change in society, one that could potentially create a more participative and rich intellectual environment. Is there a lot of dross out there? Certainly! But there is also a lot of dross in traditional media, as any thinking person who picks up a copy of Heat magazine will attest to.

Guadamuz is right, of course. But, more importantly, the dross that exists on the internet has always existed; it's just that until the emergence of participatory media, the educated elites never had to lower themselves to engaging with it. Lame ideas, poorly designed creative works, ignorant or bigoted political stances, and individual identity work had no avenue for widespread expression, and so the people in charge got to act like none of the above actually existed. And, for all cultural intents and purposes, none of the above actually did exist.

Let me put a finer point on this: The decline-in-quality argument is an elitist stance in reaction to the transformative democratic potential of social media for the unwashed masses. I say this as an educated elite, as someone who has benefited as much as the next guy from the ability to participate in the dominant group's dominant Discourse.

People have always had stupid ideas and uninformed opinions; but what makes social media so powerfully transformative is that it allows people to not only communicate but also to refine, clarify, and potentially reject those ideas and opinions. Private opinions brought out in the sun are nearly always better than private opinions, privately held--especially when nearly everybody has approximately the same ability to express and circulate their beliefs.

This does not, by the way, make me an uncritical utopianist. I am aware that participatory media platforms allow stupid ideas to gain adherents and to therefore gain power. I'm also aware that these platforms make it so that more stupid ideas are more readily available, and that it becomes increasingly difficult--both individually and culturally--to separate the wheat from the chaff.

That's ok by me. Worrying about how to filter more opinions is way better than worrying about how to provide more people with platforms for expressing their opinions.*



*Note: We still need to worry about how to provide more people with platforms for expressing their opinions.

"Things fall apart"? SRSLY?

Over at the HASTAC blog, Cathy Davidson has posted a fantastic piece about a so-called "Facebook Exodus."

Davidson's post is called "Is Facebook the Technology from Hell?" and it tackles a New York Times article by Virginia Heffernan that suggests that

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters.... [W]hile people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.

Davidson, while acknowledging her affinity for other Heffernan-authored pieces, rightly attacks this article for sloppy research and a bald-faced refusal to interpret data rationally. First, Davidson explains,

The "small but noticeable group" she documents are her friends. Their reasons are the ones that any wise FB user needs to be cautious of. Privacy, mostly. Of course FB is datamining. It's "free," right? Well, no. As every Cat in the Stack user knows by now, the "information is free" fantasy has been over for a long, long time. If it is free, they are gathering information that they can sell on the backend. There is no free lunch and no free Internet.

While it's certainly true, Davidson adds, that Facebook's popularity is declining among the younger demographic and it likely won't remain the behemoth it is now for the rest of time, there's no reason to think it will turn into the "online ghost town" Heffernan believes it's doomed to become--a ghost town, by the way, "run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit."

But Davidson's most important point is this:

methodology, people! We have to hold mainstream media responsible in the same way we hold the Internet bloggers and writers responsible. One's five friends are not necessarily the best filter on the world.

It is passing peculiar that the journalistic revolution--everybody, Clay Shirky writes, is a potential media outlet--is being covered by journalism's old guard, the very people whose vocations are threatened by new media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, blogging applications and forums. Humans have consistently proven their ability to see only what they want to see and ignore the rest; print journalists, for all their training in "objectivity" and "fairness," are really no different.

Of course not all print journalists are focused on studiously ignoring the social revolution, despite the overwhelming likelihood that it will come at the cost of their entire field as we know it today. For proof, just follow any journalist who actively uses Twitter as god intended it (I recommend David Carr, David Pogue, and Rachel Maddow).

Still, the question remains: Given the inherent bias of print media outlets toward print media outlets, how do we decide what to trust? Is it true that Facebook, Twitter and the like are suffering from a decline in popularity, that online reportage is less reliable than print outlets, or, indeed, that print journalism is really in the dire straits it purports to be?

my late-entry sxsw panel proposal: plz to vote for me

File under: shameless self-promotion

This year, the South by Southwest Interactive Festival is crowdsourcing its lineup of panelists by allowing people to vote thumbsup or thumbdown on panel proposals.

I recently submitted my proposal, which is on the Free / Libre / Open Education (FLOE) movement.

You guys, I really really want to get accepted. Will you go to the site and vote for me?

You can read my proposal here.

RIP Ed Rondthaler, foenetic speler

Edward Rondthaler, who died August 19 at the age of 104, was a lifelong typophilic and a champion of the movement to simply the English language by simplifying, and phoneticizing, word spellings.

why I chose openness: David Wiley, I've completed my homework assignment!

In a recent post on his blog iterating toward openness, David Wiley makes a request of all adherents to the "openness" movement who read his blog:

Without any special authority to do so, may I please give you a homework assignment? Would you please blog about why you choose to be open? What is the fundamental, underlying goal or goals you hope to accomplish by being open? What keeps you motivated? Why do you spend your precious little free time on my blog, reading this post and this question? If each of us put some thought and some public reflective writing into this question, the field would likely be greatly served. The more honest and open you are in your response, the more useful the exercise will be for you and for us.

The assigmnent is the result of a previous post in which Wiley wrote:

While I think everyone in the field of “open education” is dedicated to increasing access to educational opportunity, there is an increasingly radical element within the field – good old-fashioned guillotine and molotov type revolutionaries. At the conference I heard a number of people say that things would be greatly improved if we could just get rid of all the institutions of formal education. I once heard a follow up comment, “and governments, too.” I turned to laugh at his joke, but saw that he was serious. This “burn it all down” attitude really scares me.

As you can imagine if you know even a small chunk of the history of projects like the Free / Libre / Open Source Software movement (it keeps getting more words tacked onto it for a reason), Wiley's post generated some fierce responses. So the request, and Wiley's decision to back away from his initial stance, appears to be an effort to consider the broad range of issues that attract people to the openness movement in general, and open education in particular.

Back in 1984, Seymour Papert said this:

There won't be schools in the future.... I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum-- all of that. The whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible with the presence of the computer... But this will happen only in communities of children who have access to computers on a sufficient scale.

Twenty-five years later, we are forced to conclude that one of the following is probably true:

• The computer didn't actually blow up anything at all; schools are basically the same as they always were, with the same curricula, approaches, and values; or
• The computer did blow up the school, but nobody noticed that the school was blown to bits, and kept operating as if education continues to serve the purpose it served 50, 100, or more years ago.

Either way, the results are the same: schools equip kids with a set of mindsets and skillsets that prepare them increasingly less well for the culture into which they will emerge.

Perhaps Papert's mistake was in attributing intention to the computer; if, to further extend the metaphor, the computer really was an explosive device, then it had no ability to decide how, when, and here to detonate.

I was drawn to the open education movement because it attempts to do on purpose what we thought computers would do by default: blow wide open the walls, and therefore the constraints, surrounding education. In arguing against the binary nature of the notion of "openness," Wiley argues that "[i]n the eyes of the defenders of the 'open source' brand, if you’re not open enough you’re not open at all.... It is just as inappropriate for you to try to force your goals on others as it is for others to try to force their goals on you."

Of course he's right, but on the other hand, things aren't always quite so clearcut in the field of education. I shouldn't be able to force my values on educators, researchers, and administrators who disagree with my approach to teaching and learning; but if I leave them be, then they are free to inculcate young people with exactly the wrong set of skills, ideals, and values--the kind that reify outdated, unfair, and wrongheaded assumptions about how the world can, does, and should work.

I am, as I hope I have made clear, an increasingly radical element within the field. I am a revolutionary. And this is precisely what drew me to openness as a movement. In fact, I wish the open education movement would embrace a more inclusive name, perhaps something like Free / Libre / Open Education, or FLOE. In fact, I think I'll start calling it exactly that.

I agree with Wiley that the term "open" is problematic, but for the exact opposite reason that Wiley gives. I think people are too likely to call almost anything open, even if the door is only open a centimeter. If it's open exactly that far, and there's a doorstop behind it preventing it from opening any further, then that door is effectively closed.

Related posts by other writers:
David Wiley: A few notes about openness (and a request)
Jeremy Brown: Bard Quest 2: Wiley’s motivation, Tomaševski’s motivation, and the real reason people get into Open Education
Jared Spurbeck: Why my creative work is "open"
davidp:Optimal, not ideal

why I am a technological determinist

I'm fascinated by danah boyd's recent post intended for the New Media Consortium's upcoming Symposium for the Future. In her post, she cautions new media theorists to avoid what she labels "technological determinism." She explains:

Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations. It's really easy to get in the habit of seeing a new shiny piece of technology and just assume that we can dump it into an educational setting and !voila! miracles will happen. Yet, we also know that the field of dreams is merely that, a dream. Dumping laptops into a classroom does no good if a teacher doesn't know how to leverage the technology for educational purposes. Building virtual worlds serves no educational purpose without curricula that connects a lesson plan with the affordances of the technology. Without educators, technology in the classroom is useless.

boyd's point is well taken, though I'd be hard pressed to find a single new media scholar who embraces the kind of technological determinism she describes in the above passage. There may have been a time when the "if we build it, they will come" mindset was commonplace, but virtually no serious thinker I have encountered, either in person or in text, actually believes that new media technologies can or should offer quick fixes to society's ills.

The problem, as I see it, is a two-part one. The first issue is one of terminology: Increasingly, we talk about "technology" as this set of tools, platforms, and communication devices that have emerged from the rise of the internet. This is useful insofar as it allows new media thinkers to converge as members of a field (typically labeled something like digital media and learning or the like), but it does so at the expense of the deep, complicated and deeply intertwined history of technologies and what we call "human progress." In truth, social media platforms are an extension of communications technologies that reach back to the beginning of human development--before computers, television, motion pictures, radio, before word processing equipment, to telegraphs, typewriters, Morse code, pencils, paper, the printing press...all the way back to the very first communication technology, language itself.

"Technology" is not a monolith, and there is a distinct danger in presenting it as such, as boyd does in her final paragraph:

As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense.

The second problem is a rhetorical one. New media theorists have found themselves engaged in a mutually antagonistic dance with those who prefer to focus on what they see as the negative cultural effects of digital technologies. For better or worse, people engaged directly in this dance find themselves coming down more firmly than they might otherwise in one of these camps and, because the best defense is a good offense, staking out a more strident position than they might take in private or among more like-minded thinkers. Thus, those who dislike Twitter feign disdain, repulsion, or fear and are labeled (or label themselves) luddites; and those who like Twitter find themselves arguing for its astronomical revolutionary potential and are labeled (or label themselves) uncritical utopianists.

In fact, media theorists have been targets of the "technological determinism" accusation for so long that they refuse to acknowledge that technologies actually can and often do determine practice. Homeric verse took the structure it did because the cadences were easy for pre-literate poets and orators to remember. The sentences of Hemingway, Faulkner, and many of their literary contemporaries shortened up because they needed to be sent by telegraph--leading to a key characteristic of the Modernist movement. The emergence of wikis (especially, let's face it, Wikipedia) has led to a change in how we think about information, encyclopedias, knowledge, and expertise.

A more accurate--but more complex and therefore more fraught--way to think about the relationship between humans and their technologies is that each acts on the other: We design technologies that help us to communicate, which in turn impact how we communicate, and when, and why, and with whom. Then we design new technologies to meet our changing communications needs.

Again, virtually no media theorist that I know of would really disagree with this characterization of our relationship to technologies--yet say it too loudly in mixed company, and you're likely to get slapped with the technological determinism label. I say this as someone who has been accused more than once, and in my view wrongly, of technological determinism.

Overly deterministic or not, however, I agree with boyd that technologies do not offer a panacea. More importantly, she argues against the use of terms like "digital natives" and, presumably, its complement, "digital immigrants." These are easy terms that let us off the hook: people under 30 get something that people over 30 will never understand, and there's nothing you can do about this divide. As boyd explains,

Just because many of today's youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don't. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There's an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it's also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like "digital natives" obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.

The key question on the minds of researchers in digital media and learning is not (or should not be) how we can get computers in the hands of every student but how we can support participation in the valued practices, mindsets, and skillsets that go along with a networked, digital society. To get this question answered right requires an ability to engage in the complex, thorny, and socially charged issues that boyd and others have identified in their research and writings. It requires development of a common language within the broad digital media and learning community and an ability to communicate that language to the vast range of stakeholders who are paying attention to what we say and how we say it.


Related posts by other writers:
danah boyd: Some thoughts on technophilia
Kevin Kelly: Technophilia

eppur si muove: a defense of Twitter

Recently, media scholar (and, full disclosure, my former boss) Henry Jenkins published a new post on his always-mind-blowing blog, Confessions of an Aca/Fan. This post focuses on the affordances and, in his view, the limitations of Twitter.

The post itself is the result of a Twitter exchange wherein one of Henry's followers, @aramique, wrote: "you theorize on participatory models over spectatorial but i've noticed your whole twitter feed is monologue." Ultimately, Henry responded with this: "yr questions get Twt's strengths, limits. but answer won't fit in character limits. Watch for blog post soon." Then, in his blogpost, he begins with this:

I will admit that there is a certain irony about having to refer people to my blog for an exchange that started on Twitter but couldn't really be played out within the character limits of that platform. But then, note that armique's very first post had to be broken into two tweets just to convey the emotional nuances he needed. And that's part of my point.

From the start, I've questioned whether Twitter was the right medium for me to do my work. I've always said that as a writer, I am a marathon runner and not a sprinter. I am scarcely blogging here by traditional standards given the average length of my posts. Yet I believe this blog has experimented with how academics might better interface with a broader public and how we can expand who has access to ideas that surface through our teaching and research.

Jenkins, who makes it clear that his blog is his primary focus for online communication and that Twitter is a space for him to both direct traffic to his blog and track who follows his links, and when, and how, argues that though Twitter has its value as a social media platform, it has resulted in some losses. His main concerns are linked to a core issue with the key feature of Twitter: its brevity. As it grows in popularity, he explains, deep, thoughtful commentary on his blogposts has decreased:

Most often, the retweets simply condense and pass along my original Tweet. At best, I get a few additional words on the level of "Awesome" or "Inspiring" or "Interesting." So, in so far as Twitter replaces blogs, we are impoverishing the discourse which occurs on line.

"[I]n so far as people are using (Twitter) to take on functions once played on blogs," he writes, "there is a serious loss to digital culture."

I guess I'm approximately as serious about blogging as a medium as the next guy who posts tens of thousands of words each month, but I'm not sure I share Henry's concern. There were, after all, those who worried that blogs would lead to the decline of serious and thoughtful intellectual conversation. But as Henry's blog (and hundreds or thousands of others like it) demonstrates, blogs can in fact afford both a higher level of expression and a greater capacity for circulation of those ideas. The phenomenon of the blog also--and this was a key element of the initial concern about the decline and fall of civilization at the hands of the weblog--means anybody with internet access, basic typing skills, and a couple of ideas about anything at all can express, post and circulate them. Blogs even support cirulation of the most ignorant, repulsive claptrap a person can imagine. The onus is therefore on the consumer, and no longer the producer, to filter out the white noise in search of real music. The fear, real or imagined, was that the general public would not be able to filter intelligently and would therefore accept any nonsense they read online.

Actually, this fear is not a new one. The same anxiety was prevalent among educated elites when the universal literacy movement began to take hold. It was the same fear that gripped members of "high culture" when movies, then radio, then television, then YouTube became increasingly popular and available. See, that's the peculiar feature of democratizing technologies: Elites no longer get to decide what's culturally valuable and filter it out before it reaches the unwashed masses. Now we all get to decide, and that's precisely what leads the privileged class--even members of this class who are pro-democracy--to react so strongly that they try to stamp it out.

It's the same cry I hear from people who oppose Twitter: There's so much meaningless noise. It's leading to a decline in critical thinking. Jenkins writes that

there is an awful lot of relatively trivial and personal chatter intended to strengthen our social and emotional ties to other members of our community. The information value of someone telling me what s/he had for breakfast is relatively low and I tend to scan pretty quickly past these tweets in search of the links that are my primary interests. And if the signal to noise ration is too low, I start to ponder how much of a social gaff I would commit if i unsubscribed from someone's account.

Twitter, for all its seeming triviality, is one of the most complex, nuanced social media environments I've ever participated in. It's layered over with the kind of community expertise required for authentic, valued participation in a vast range of social networking sites, both online and offline. Add to that the fact that Twitter users bring to their engagement with the site any number of social motivations; multiply that by the nearly limitless number of possible subsets of Twitter followers the typical user might communicate with; and square that by the breathtaking creativity that the 140-character limit both supports and fosters.

This is what's most difficult to explain to a new Twitter user, and what's nearly intuitive for those who have internalized the tacit norms of the space: No tweet can be interpreted in isolation. No Twitter stream exists wholly independently of any other. Twitter's depth exists precisely in the delicate intertwining of inanity with complexity. Yes, most of the time I skip over people's breakfast tweets. But I don't always skip over them. Much of the time I click on the links Henry posts. But I don't always click on them.

Sure, Twitter is no substitute for a series of deep, thoughtful blogposts. But my sense is that the vast majority of Twitter users know this, and don't bother trying to turn Twitter into a blog, or even a microblog--though it may seem like it on the surface.

And even if some users really are trying to do exactly that, it's much easier to focus on Twitter's constraints than on the deep, breathtaking creativity it affords. I follow lots of Twitter users who are very good at linking to interesting, useful websites; and I follow a smaller number of users who are very good at the more difficult work of leveraging the technology in infinitely creative ways.

I wanted to offer an example of this creativity, but it's impossible to demonstrate outside of its context. You'd have to follow users' hashtags, or see how they fit an idea into 140 characters, or read a surprising tweet exactly in context.

Here's the closest I can come:

@jennamcjenna can someone link me to an article that tells me something completely mind-blowing? It doesn't matter what topic.8:52 PM Jun 16th from web

@dizzyjosh: @jennamcjenna try http://bit.ly/eQf3m http://bit.ly/zCUQM http://bit.ly/Sh06v http://bit.ly/Ks9qG http://bit.ly/PgNqT http://bit.ly/PgNqT

Related posts by other writers:
danah boyd: Twitter: "pointless babble" or peripheral awareness + social grooming?
Henry Jenkins: The Message of Twitter: "Here It Is" and "Here I Am"

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