A review in The Economist touches on one role of silence in government:

“In 1988 General Augusto Pinochet organised a plebiscite that he was confident would grant him another eight years of absolute power. Ricardo Lagos, a hitherto little-known Socialist leader, used a live television programme—the first to feature opposition politicians since Pinochet’s military coup of 1973—to defy the climate of fear that was the dictator’s most powerful political weapon. Pointing his finger at the camera, he addressed [Pinochet] directly, saying that it was inadmissible that he sought to remain in power. Ignoring the presenter’s attempt to cut him off, Mr Lagos said ‘I am speaking for 15 years of silence.’”

Dictatorship is the pure case, when it comes to silence, but the powerful usually love, or at least are happy to enjoy, the silence of others.

PS. AL notes, however, their similar love of surveillance.

I thought I might share here the chalkboard notes from the first day of a new class on Literacy, Social Media, and Active Citizenship. here goes:

Chalkboard Notes, Day 1

What do we know about literacy already as we start the course?

Literacy involves reading, writing, and interpretation. Visual forms may be a partner or cousin, and have many of the traits of print literacy, such as the need for interpretation.

We must learn to recognize letters and from letters, words, but this process continues beyond the mechanical recognition until it reaches understanding (ideally). Literacy is not, in that sense, particularly similar to handing a coin over to another person. Contexts are involved, interpretations are required, persuasion is necessary.

Literacy is a practical art of communication, as in a stop sign. Yet our experience with stop signs shows that even the simplest, most direct communication involves judgment, human weakness and character, possibilities for error. See the behavior of Michiana residents at four-way stops, for example.

Literacy can be found at many different levels of skill and sophistication. Different cultures and cultural groups have, to some degree, their own literacies, their own ways of interpreting, and this poses problems in communication. It may also create opportunities for stretching one’s understanding of the world.

Literacy can become a profound part of a person’s life, something loved and cherished. Or not. Literacy may be a direct clue or link to some forms of intelligence.

 

Discussion of the election blogger, Benjamin Franklin, and the Singlejack mission statement. What issues are raised by these three short readings? What clues do they give us about the nature of a strong public voice?

There are times when some individuals and groups feel alienated, cut off from the promises of their society, or the system may not seem to work on their behalf. They admire the spirit of hope in their society, and feel some of it themselves, but they also feel alienation. They may, in fact, feel that they are essentially silenced.

Alienation may come in part from a society that promises equality but produces a substantial amount of hierarchy—class divisions and rewards that may or may not be open to all. We recognize the role of individual responsibility—taking the “get over it” advice of Dear Abby, a person strives for individual accomplishments. But we also encounter structural divisions that seem to solidify the hierarchy.

The writers call for representation of two kinds. We want to be represented in government—we want our votes to count and our elected officials to speak on our behalf. But we also want our stories to be told in the wider society—we want our lives to be represented in journalism and the arts, to become a recognized and valued part of our culture.  In an age of multiplying media platforms, there is a difference, too, between telling one’s story and having it be heard. In an age of big-money government, the structure may be unresponsive to voters, too.

There is a “but / yet” tension in many of these ideas. We feel hope and recognize its importance but we also recognize legitimate reasons for alienation, perhaps. We recognize some openness in society yet we might not be persuaded that opportunities are equally presented to different groups of citizens. It is a mistake to insist upon one side of the paired terms when both contain some truth. The path to understanding probably requires, at times, the tension of knowing that “both x and y contain some elements of the full truth we’ll need to arrive at understanding,” even though at first glance x and y seems contradictory.

One theory about healthy democracy involves a social structure that widens the fruitful opportunities for speech and breaks down any parts of the structure that encourage or enforce the silence of different groups of citizens. What kind of speech, though? We tried out the terms “positive” and “proactive” in a brief discussion that questioned a certain passive model of citizenship based mainly on complaining rather than acting. Perhaps those two terms didn’t quite clarify the issue but we hope to keep them in mind and see if we can do so. The question lurking here is whether a good number of citizens have a pretty faulty model of citizenship, thus undermining, perhaps, both their own chances and the quality of democracy? What model of citizenship should / could replace that one? And how might that change be accomplished?

That better model of citizenship is, we imagined, a constructive one. But looking ahead to Frederick Douglass, whose account of literacy in slavery we read for next class, the question arises: what does it mean to be constructive in bad times? What kind of public writing or speech is constructive when challenging injustice? A question for next time, perhaps.

One trait of a better model of citizenship seems to be the opportunity for affiliation—for joining with others in public speech and action. A contrast was made between simply grouping together in shared interests and grouping together in ways that produces structures and groups that endure. We will see examples of lightning-fast affiliation on the Internet, which may or may not endure, but a classmate shared an example of a group that created a magazine to give continuity and focus to their efforts to follow out their values in caring for the diet of their pets. Affilation, enduring or not, virtual or worldly, seems central to a more far-reaching model of citizenship.

Many of the elements of literacy and citizenship in the discussion returned to the question of social structures that endure. The person, alone, the solo voice, the private life—conceived of in this way, the citizen does not contribute much to the quality of democratic exchange, and this might even be a sign of unhealthy democracy. That idea would need to be tested.

Structures do seem to reflect the quality of democracy. In growing up before the Internet, a person living in a big city might get news from one or two newspapers, a radio station or two, a handful of tv stations representing national networks, but these media broadcast to masses of people; they do not make much room for conversation with different groups or among different groups. In the broadcast age, people with tv stations and printing presses had strong public voices, and others had very little public voice. The citizen’s most likely way of speaking was to vote, and more people voted then.

But in the Internet era, people can affiliate and converse without relying on broadcast media. The new media are social, and this has produced a structural change that seems to be changing the quality of democracy. We will investigate these structures more closely in some of the units of the course. The new model of citizenship may take special advantage of social media, but how will that work?

Examples of the new social media will be worth our attention, such as KONY videos that have gone viral. Just the idea that someone, not a large media organization, might be able to make a video or blog post that goes viral, indicates a structural shift that we need to think more about.

 

What about the “Silence is the basic mode” handout?

This handout suggests that one model of citizenship undermines democracy. This model focuses on a citizen who is unable to shape a strong public voice and who therefore lapses into a focus on the private life. It was suggested that an additional reason that this might happen is fear, and that the idea of fear should be added to the model.

 

What about Twitter? Everyone is required to set up a Twitter account, but what is Twitter for?

Social media connect people on their own terms; social media are about affiliation, sharing information, promoting ideas and movements. We are trying out Twitter as a form of investigation of the role of social media in active citizenship—once again, literacy, evolving in new social structures, influencing citizenship, a central topic of our course.

Twitter is good for lightning-fast publicizing events, things you or your group has published on its website, and worthy articles or resources you’ve found elsewhere. These three things make your Twitter feed a useful resource for people interested in your issue, and so they “follow” you (subscribe to your Twitter account) and read your posts, and maybe they choose to join with you on your issue—they affiliate.

Twitter also supports a certain amount of fast-paced conversation and exchange between people who care about an issue.

Twitter has two forms of search function. If you enter a word in the search box, Twitter behaves more or less like Google and gives you a computer-driven set of related entries. Machine-driven search has its advantages of speed and completeness, but it can also swamp you in material.

If you use hashtags, you get involved in human-driven searching. When a Twitter post has a “#” sign in it, that means that the writer wants to participate in human-driven searching of the key term that follows the #. If you click on a #hashtag, Twitter will deliver all the recent postings that other people have marked with the same #hashtag. In this way you share in the judgments and commitments of those writers, who are telling you, via Twitter, that you share an interest in the particular term.

For example, this tweet (single Twitter message) contains one hashtag that will probably lead you to other kindred spirits writing on the same topic:

New #animalrights laws under consideration in several state legislatures. (link to article)

Please notice that the #hashtag words need to be grouped together without spaces, so #hashtags are usually short. Notice, too, that links to resources are vital on Twitter.

It is important to see what #hashtags are being used by people involved with your issue. It is possible to invent a new #hashtag and have it catch on, but if you use one that is already popular your postings will be found much more quickly by people who care about your issue.

The assignment for Day 2 calls for everyone to try some searching on an issue you care about, to see where the action is on Twitter on your topic and, importantly, to see what #hashtags are in use. What happens when you click on those #hashtags for your issue? How good are the human-driven search results?

I had no television in my college apartment, so I walked a couple of blocks to Iowa City’s Hilltop Tavern to watch the national election results come in. Very early in the evening one of the networks “called” the presidential race, announcing, based on voter surveys and early eastern returns, that one candidate could already be projected as the winner in enough states to guarantee victory in the electoral college. A patron seated further down the bar was also following the news, and he was outraged. “I voted less than thirty minutes ago,” he said. “Polls in Iowa aren’t even closed yet, my vote hasn’t even been counted, and they say it’s over. My vote means nothing. I will never vote again.”

It’s one example–kind of classic in its focus and clarity, really–of alienation. Rightly or wrongly, a person comes to believe that institutions do not function on his or her behalf.

“Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy days as well as working days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints, without working one, one single miracle with them?”

I found that question in the Commonplace Book of E. M. Forster today, and this is how I hear it:

We treat the fossilized learning handed down to us as though it were miraculous and we rarely find a way to make it so. We possess only the bones of the old learning–the life has been drained out–yet we still worship there instead of finding something alive that will much better serve us.

Something like that, anyway. We are entitled to demand that the relics work, but we don’t demand it, and the rituals around them continue. The guardians of the rituals all continue to be paid.

Something about the alienated nature of the learning. How many of us would struggle to recall that feeling from our school days, anyway? And some of our jobs? And phases of our political scene?

From The Daily Beast, the furor over Limbaugh’s recent outbursts:

Just as the technology-driven fragmentation of the landscape allowed partisan media to proliferate, a new technological development is providing the tools to take it down. Social media is making it possible to create a grassroots movement very quickly, voicing grievances very quickly and getting heard at the top of corporate headquarters.

Question: how do we move through these stages: citizens not knowing such a thing is possible, to knowing it can happen somehow, to knowing how it happens, to knowing how to help it happen.

A quick Q & A with Jay Rosen from his Tumblr site:

akakensmith asked: Your clearly show journalism disrupted by a changing world and journalists inventing very new versions of their work for a new time. Just as clearly, you and others show active citizenship changing, too, driving other changes and responding to change. But the university seems to be getting off without much disruption to its familiar ways. Aren’t the social disruptions you study going to demand something of the university sometime soon? Can it make knowledge within its walled garden forever?

Jay Rosen: Yes, I think it’s coming. It’s happening at the lower end already. This is one reason I do so much of my “teaching” in public and for free, as with my Twitter feed and blogging, which I think of as a kind of journalism education. That’s not enough, but it is preparation for what’s ahead. Here’s someone whose experiments I am following closely.

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Addendum: An interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education a day or two later predicts that technology and economies of scale create opportunities for certain kinds of excellence that will sweep around universities unwilling to innovate and leave them to die. That’s still the university operating in its walled garden, I suspect, just now the garden is virtual.

In a brief book excerpt, the late and much lamented NYROB writer Tony Judt describes the role of the intellectual in times of concrete turmoil like our own:

All this is hard for intellectuals, most of whom imagine themselves defending and advancing large abstractions. But I think the way to defend and advance large abstractions in the generations to come will be to defend and protect institutions and laws and rules and practices that incarnate our best attempt at those large abstractions. And intellectuals who care about these will be the people who matter most. (March 22, 2012 — NYROB subscription required to view full article)

I have greatly admired Tony Judt’s writing for several years, but I wonder if this formulation overlooks any hope that we might find in the movements that use social media to inform and inquire and affiliate and widen the range of voices that come to matter in society? Elsewhere in the excerpt he speaks of the role of intellectuals being “to fill the space between … the governed and the governors,” not a very exact formulation but one that doesn’t imply any particular role for the governed. The university, as well as any one of its professors, would not seem to have to work out a relationship with “the governed” or be challenged by their knowledge and experience or collaborate with them. Is the public intellectual here someone who speaks well and knows better? I can’t quite tell, but that’s my hunch.

If the university considers its role primarily to be “the production of sanctioned professionals,” as Dave Hickey has written, then its faculty need not learn the new inquiry and affiliation skills of, say, the Arab Spring. Sadly, if the university has no need to adapt, neither must the professor working there, I presume. If so, then the fuzziness of the intellectual’s relationship to “the governed” in this NYROB excerpt looks backward to established norms rather than forward to mysterious new circumstances unfolding now around us.

Tony Judt’s book was written under excruciating difficulties in the final months of his life that did not leave room for him to explore those unfolding circumstances, but like his other writing it has many other virtues. Dave Hickey’s playful “Romancing the Looky-Loos” essay shows at least one intellectual who has had a chance to think more about social practices that foster “a mode of social discourse, a participatory republic, an accumulation of small, fragile, social occasions that provide the binding agent of fugitive communities”–something more specific that “the governed” and more interesting, too. See also “If you build it they will come,” Tim Dunlop’s foundational essay claiming that our new media allow us to concentrate on public intellectual practice rather than the credentials often associated with the work in the past.

Happily retired, as far as I can tell, colleague Ellen Maher recently noted this: “I look back at some of my sociology syllabi and wonder whether some of the disciplinary sacred cows might not have been better left slaughtered in grad school.”

We were chatting on Facebook at the time. My reply: “Ellen, I think you are onto something. Do we tend to teach undergraduates as if they were going to get MA degrees and MA students as if they were going to get doctoral degrees, when there might be very interesting versions of our majors that are for people not headed down that particular path? This has to be true for English, my field, where we are entrusted with two of the great wonders of human society, language and literature, both of which enrich and ennoble and enable much in our lives besides that narrow path to the doctorate. Surely there must be a dazzlingly interesting BA degree in English that is not a warm-up for the MA and then the Ph.D. I suspect that with all their interest in creative writing majors and minors our students are trying to tell us the very same thing.

At an event at the Natatorium today, four community leaders were honored as Trailblazers–individuals who broke ground for South Bend in areas such as desegregated employment and education. Mayor PeteButtigieg talked about how these individuals had helped change what had been unthinkable to something the absence of which would be unthinkable a single generation later. He went on to remind us that trails, having been blazed, need to be kept open–for the future of our community, worthy accomplishments need to be maintained and developed.

The setting for the celebration was itself a great symbol of transformation, South Bend’s former public natatorium, a swimming pool where segregation long reigned, a building which is now a community center and home of the Civil Rights Heritage Center and a marker of a public university’s commitment to all the people of its region. I am proud to be on the faculty of IU South Bend in part because of its commitment to the Natatorium.

I am still thinking about Dave Winer’s book, even though it’s none of my business. I wonder if there are models that suit a serious blogger’s writing methods and style to be discovered in the field of natural history. Chapters with small sub-chapters in a loose progression and grouped somewhat informally, each one focusing on one or two examples or anecdotes and a concept. In other words, not so different from blog posts but accumulating in a way that adds focus and energy. A little different energy from the blog because it does strive to be a book with a single focus and many related subtopics.

Why natural history? Because that field* works in part by accumulation of observations, I believe, as does blogging.

Some parts of DW’s written work fit natural history very well. Imagine 15 short entries about the life cycle of a tech project, say. A few entries about the early stages, a few about the relationship of the tech innovation to the marketplace and to users, a few about the maturation and old age of a tech innovation, a few about the natural enemies of tech innovation, one or two about the wider ecology that supports this innovation, one or two about what the innovation does to the wider social and economic ecology, etc. I know that DW has written about most of these things already or spoken about them in podcasts. Pull those already existing pieces out, arrange them in a progression, and see what examples and what parts of the life cycle of a tech innovation still need to be added to the story. You have a chapter or more underway.

Or take a post from last week, when DW said this:

On the net, your feed is you.

The links you push through this tool will be rendered in many different contexts. That’s why the way you render it is not important. The point of the tool is to connect your linkflow with all the places you might want your links to flow. That’s the reality in 2011, and any blogging tool must take this into account.

Today there are: feeds, rivers and renderers.

This all but sets out the organization for a progression of sub-sections of a chapter, written not so differently than blog entries, based on observations of the nature of the three creatures: feeds, rivers, and renderers. Maybe some of the sub-sections might address these parts of the wider topic:

Things meant to be read by humans. Things meant to be read by machines. Feeds as a hybrid of the two.

Feeds you own. When somebody else owns your feed. When you own your feed. To what degree you can really own your feed. Political implications of feed ownership. Economic implications of feed ownership. Social implications.

How machines read feeds and render them for human eyes. The important differences between various renderers and where they reside. Who creates and who owns the renderers? Why it matters.

Rivers. How they differ from other websites. What they require. What they offer. Why they matter.

Implicit in so much of DW’s work and in these topics is a question: What is the real creative opportunity of the web? [Though he is a technologist, DW plainly sees this as a blend of technological and social creativity.] Where and how is it misunderstood? Where and how is it threatened? How can it be protected? How can we take part in its best opportunities? There should be a chapter that directly discusses these things, but DW would probably not be able to discuss feeds and rivers and other topics without revealing this wider philosophy along the way, too.

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*”Traditional natural history, deriving from Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides, had flourished in the late Renaissance. It involved the mapping of nature through the classification of plants and animals and the assembling of information about their uses and habits. This traditional natural history continued throughout the 17th century and reached its zenith in the 18th century in the work of the likes of Carl Linnaeus.” (Peter Anstey)