This is the not-original-with-me understanding of linking that I share with the web writers in my class. (more…)

People complain about social media in one breathe and confess they haven’t used it in the next. Here’s Tina Fey doing that particular two-step in a video shared by a blogger who confesses to having once danced that prejudicial dance himself. At the end of his posting, Jonathan Chait delivers a good comment about the real nature of the beast–in this case, Twitter:

Like Fey, I started with a distrust/misunderstanding of Twitter, but quickly found it to be a super-efficient system for filtering out the crap I don’t want to wade through on the Internet and delivering the stuff I want to read, written or recommended by my favorite writers, to me. I also like to use it to trade quips. I’ve quickly grown addicted to it. I’ve seen enough writers go through the process — hate Twitter, get reluctantly dragooned on to it, discover you can’t live without it — that I attribute basically all hatred of Twitter to a lack of familiarity.

In other words, people filter the massive output of all the world’s typists and share the best of it through links and annotations on Twitter. It’s like a science fiction movie with thousands of brains in jars calculating something that will bring on the new utopia–or dystopia, sure, why not? Twitter is a great jar-field of floating brains sorting the world’s texts for use by the ones who still walk about. [Via @atrembath.]

Dutch ecologist Frans Vera describes the experience of proposing a new vision for wilderness in Oostvaardersplassen, a region of land reclaimed from the North Sea and eventually turned over to grazing herds as a nature preserve. Reporter Elizabeth Kolbert presents his comment about the challenging process of changing someone’s opinion:

“Mostly there’s no trouble as long as you are within the borders of an accepted paradigm,” Vera told me. “But be aware when you start to discuss the paradigm. Then it starts to be only twenty-five per cent discussion of facts and seventy-five per cent psychology. The thing that I heard most often was, ‘Who do you think you are?’” (52)

The old idea is woven pretty deeply into the psychology of the public, it appears–and so it is no wonder that change often comes only after many encounters with a new idea, as well as under circumstances that encourage taking a fresh look. In the civil rights movement, relatively passive Americans were energized by televised pictures of Southern violence, for example; in Kolbert’s article, some progress is made as people see a chance for a very familiar monetary reward for creating nature preserves of a new kind. Other gratifications and motivations are wrapped around the core logic of change.

(“Recall of the Wild, The New Yorker, 12/24-31/2012)

In On Democracy, an orderly primer on the history and elements of democratic practice, Robert A. Dahl helps challenge the fatalism or perhaps complacency implied by the large percentage of passive citizens in many western democracies. For one thing, the basic history is alarming:

Looking back on the rise and decline of democracy, it is clear that we cannot count on historical forces to ensure that democracy will always advance or even survive.

But armed with more knowledge, citizens might do better than pay admiring lip-service to their country’s vulnerable and imperfect institutions:

With adequate understanding of what democracy requires, and the will to meet its requirements, we can act to preserve, and what is more, to advance democratic ideas and practices.

But how? I will keep reading the book and see where these early quotations eventually lead.

In an NPR interview with Jacki Lydon, songwriter Beck explores the changes when he released not a new album but a collection of new sheet music. The songs live a different sort of life, less isolated within the private realm of the composer or expert, with more input from those usually thought of as the audience:

BECK: You know, when you write a song and you put out a record, it’s kind of, you know, sending a message in a bottle. It’s kind of a lonely activity. You don’t really get a lot of feedback. This is a way of sending that song out. You just get literally thousands of bottles sent back to you. So it’s interesting that way to me. It’s a completely different way of, you know, relating to one of your songs.

The former audience accepts the invitation to participate on their own terms:

BECK: You know, I think when I was putting the arrangements together, I mean, I was really trying to make the songs stylistically as transparent as possible so somebody could do a kind of Beatles version of that or, you know, they could do something more folky or blues, like that. You know, hopefully, the songs can be taken in different directions and, you know, people will take liberties with them.

And the songs become richer as they are recreated, adding value even for the original artist, the expert:

BECK: Well, I think that era’s songwriters, I mean, – they constructed their songs. They were architects of a certain kind of song that was meant for many people to play, you know? And that was something that I think I learned in this project. You know, like that last song you played me, there was a – there were a few things melodically that aren’t in the original song that I thought were better than what was in the song, you know? And I think that as I hear these versions back to me, and I think I’ll probably learn a lot about my songwriting or kind of open me up to possibilities that I hadn’t really thought of.

(Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, 12/29/12)

Comedian Julie Klausner, in her “How Was Your Week?” podcast, suggested in passing that there are some things–some words–that are of use nowhere but in college.

In one episode she says “prurient,” then pauses for a confession. “I never learned to pronounce that word, because you shouldn’t,” Ms. Klausner said, preparing for the pivot. “You should only write it in a term paper, then graduate and stop spending your parents’ money.” (Jason Zinoman, “A Comedian’s Podcast,” NY Times, 1/1/13)

It makes a miniature portrait of the college student playing at adulthood with toys that are of no use in the rest of life, and implies a general failure of academics to make their special language connect with the world.

In Anne Applebaum’s NYROB essay* on the ways Communists locked down civil society in Poland shortly after World War II, the general mechanism is described and illustrated by example. First, the general mechanism:

…the elimination of all remaining independent social or civic institutions, along with the exclusion from public life of anyone who might still sympathize with them. (39)

How far does this process extend? Applebaum describes one official being horrified at the existence of a substantial number of chess clubs not tied to Communist organizations, for example. But more chilling is this interlude during a congress of diverse youth groups:

[Some] of the more radical Communist delegates held a meeting in a side room, during which one of them complained about the church group leaders [present at the conference]. He thought they should be expelled. The Communist officials told him not to worry, the religious young people would be kept under control: “We will give the churches ten blows a day until they lie on the ground. When we need them again, we will stroke them a little until their wounds are healed.” (39)

One begins to see a rather full toolkit available to the ruling party, ranging from labor camp sentences for troublemakers to the banning of independent organizations even of the seemingly most benign kind. In time the population comes to expect no social or civic openings for meaningful free expression, and they are defeated.

In “The Power of the Powerless,” Vaclav Havel theorizes about the forms of expression that undermine this kind of power, even when there is no overtly political content, as we might see in some forms of music. He describes eastern Europe a half generation or so later than Applebaum’s essay, a time when the enforcements of Soviet bloc life were very powerful but the ideological façade of the bloc was widely understood to be a sleight of hand enforced essentially by threat of poverty, prison, or, in the case of countries, invasion. Nevertheless, for Havel the problem has much to do with the ability of the society to enforce silence and of the populace to find ways to speak.

I cannot find a direct link between the two generations of silencing in the Soviet bloc and the apathy of American voters, but the seemingly insurmountable indifference of a society (of government? of companies and markets? of social systems such as education?) to a mass of its people’s woes will, often enough, silence them rather than provoke them into speaking. That’s one lesson I take from the beaten-down parts of rust belt cities like ours. Somehow silence is the norm in both kinds of society, one that seeks it with the help of cunning and force and one that pledges openness in all its credos. Go figure.

*(“How the Communists Inexorably Changed Life,” NYROB, 11/22/12, in print or online for subscribers only, it appears. See also Applebaum’s nearly simultaneous NY Times piece on “The Dead Weight of Past Dictatorships | After Tyrants, the People Must Act.”)

A character in an old Cary Grant movie shares a blunt opinion about the academy.

You’re a professor and it’s hard to make you understand anything that ain’t in a book… Well, most of what goes on in the world ain’t in a book. (“People Will Talk”)

I have five new postings on the reborn American Democracy Project site at IU South Bend, small entries with links to recent articles and podcasts that give interesting clues to things that influence the quality of democracy.

In a lively and thoughtful video interview, Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat talks about drawing political cartoons, countering fear, and having his hands broken by militia attempting to intimidate him:

“The cartoonist doesn’t only present events but also gives an opinion of them. It is about me, how I think and how I should present my idea in the drawing.”

“I use satire to draw dictators who use oppressive methods. I try to marginalize them and make them less important to people. This gives people hope that these dictators are empty and gives people courage to continue to demonstrate and be critical. This is why drawing, for me, carries human causes and moral causes, to encourage the people to transcend their pain into hope.”

“It was forbidden to draw the president, so when I crossed that line people felt encouraged.”

The video’s final section recounts the attack of the militia in 2011.