Brains Trusting, the Pappy O’Dan’l Way

A few weeks ago, students began circulating a petition at our kids’ high school, asking for a day off.

Their reasoning? Surrounding school districts were cancelling school because a virulent flu bug swarming the area had caused more than 20% of the districts’ students to be absent from school.

Other schools were cancelling due to bad weather and closed roads.

Nevermind that absenteeism due to illness in our district wasn’t anywhere near the levels of the other districts – which are in many cases small enough fewer than 100 absent students could mean an absence of 20% of the student body. Nor did it matter that the only difficulties related to road conditions were in the foothills where buses were struggling on one route to pick up and drop off students. Students at our kids’ high school wanted a day off.

Direct democracy, some said, should be applauded. Power to the people. And a pox – in this case, literally – on a deaf administration not listening to the needs and wants of its constituency.

Of course, the petition at its foundation was stupid. Direct democracy doesn’t necessarily mean the wants and needs are reasonable or unlaughable.

And yes, representative democracy – or republics – have their own problems. But reading this article in Wired magazine today got me to thinking that if we jump on any populist or direct democracy bandwagon, we ought to do a lot of due diligence to find out who’s paying for the wagon, the oxen hauling it, and who has got the wagon-master in his or her pocket.

What played out in the Coen Brothers’ 2000 film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” played out in Italy not long afterward: Politically-motivated individuals latched themselves to the star (or five stars) of a popular entertainer and turned the world upside down in the process, while paddlin’ a little Italian behind in the process.



Pappy O’Daniel, in Italy, turned out to be a techno-utopian guru named Gianroberto Casaleggio.

He probably would have signed the high schoolers’ petition. And then taken over the movement to promote his own schemes.

Please stop reading this and read the article linked above. It’s an education on the pitfalls of direct democracy, and the democratization of a lot of things thanks to the Internet. It’s a story of how easily we are influenced by those behind the scenes who want to take populist movements and steer them in the direction they want them to go, often against the wishes or ideals of the movement in the first place.

We’re kinda seeing this firsthand with our own governance. Italy’s showing us what it’s like when that direct democracy is controlled by the same kinds of special interests that are controlling state or party or media or what have you.

A striking line from the article:

“[T]his was Casaleggio Associates’ modus operandi when it came to online votes: Provide a ‘cosmetic’ appearance of choice while pushing for a particular option.”

And it all reminds me of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

"Gentlemen," concluded Napoleon, "I will give you the same toast as before, but in a different form. Fill your glasses to the brim. Gentlemen, here is my toast: To the prosperity of The Manor Farm!" 

There was the same hearty cheering as before, and the mugs were emptied to the dregs. But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs? Clover's old dim eyes flitted from one face to another. Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three. But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing? Then, the applause having come to an end, the company took up their cards and continued the game that had been interrupted, and the animals crept silently away. 

But they had not gone twenty yards when they stopped short. An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously. 

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

I don’t know what the solution is.

Probably internet-directed direct democracy can work. But as rules are being set by such movements, rules also ought to be set by those considering joining them:

1. Find out who is pulling the strings.

2. Be wary of any popular entertainer or guru or any other corporeal entity suddenly spouting politics. Because popularity in one area doesn’t equate to adequacy – or even mediocrity – in other areas. I’m looking at you, Scott Adams.

3. Watch for leadership. I’ve been wary of “leaderless” missions since Occupy Wall Street, where spokespeople didn’t exist because everyone was their own spokesman. I’m seeing this in France’s gilets jaunes, and it’s not helping them in any way. Even direct democracies need leadership.

4. Find out who’s got the money.

5. Don’t ignore traditional politics’ or media warnings. Sure, they may very well be working with their own interests in mind. But a wary mind is an open mind, willing to listen to detractors.

I realize by doing this I have taken a tiny goose-step into, well, something. But nothing will come of it because I’m a nobody in a sea of nobodies. I’m pulling my own string and wishing I could start a petition to get a day off of work. I have no ace of spades up my sleeve.

Anyway, beware the cognitive surplus.

Beware the Cognitive Surplus

The more weird things happen on the Internet, the more it comes down to the Shirky Principle.

More specifically, it comes down to the cognitive surplus described by New York University writer in residence Clay Shirky, in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” but outlined even more clearly in his TED talk “How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World.”



Shirky’s basic premise is that the Internet affords the “ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global projects.”

Now, that’s the big view.

On a smaller scale, cognitive surplus is:

1. The world’s free time and talents
2. Our ability to produce, rather than merely consume, content.

“The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” as Shirky says. For the purpose of his TED talk, he identifies LOLcats as the stupidest possible creative act. It takes little effort. It generally has a wide audience. And it’s everywhere.

We could be using our cognitive surplus and the freedom afforded by the Internet as an outlet for our content by, say, producing quality content. I’m working on fantasy novels. But they’re hard. In the meantime, I blog and share funny and stupid stuff on social media with friends who also generally favor funny and stupid stuff.

But just as the harmless stuff we do – quoting MASH episodes, amusing each other with obscure references from Bloom County and other aspects of shared culture – is easy, so is the less-than-nice stuff that goes on online.

Thus the weird and stupid crapola we now see on the Internet.

Conor Friedersdorf, writing at The Atlantic, is in a way asking us to consider our use of cognitive surplus as we interact with a great sink of cognitive surplus: Online shaming. He writes:

I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this. Imagine that a man sitting at a nearby table spilled his coffee, got a phone call just afterward, and simply left, so that staff had to clean up his mess, a scene that culminated in a haggard-looking barista drooping her shoulders in frustration. Was the call a true emergency? We don’t know. But if not, almost everyone would agree that the man behaved badly.

Yet almost all of you would react with discomfort or opprobrium if I followed the man back to his office, learned his name, spent a half hour waiting to see his boss, adopted an outraged tone, explained his transgression, felt righteous, then commenced a week-long mission to alert his extended network of friends, family, and professional contacts to his behavior, all the while telling masses of strangers about it, too.

On the other hand, if that man spilled his coffee, leaving that same haggard barista to clean it up, and if I captured the whole thing on my phone camera and posted it to Twitter with a snarky comment about the need to better respect service workers, some nontrivial percentage of the public would help make the clip go viral, join in the shaming, and expend effort to “snitch-tag” various people in the man’s personal life. Some would quietly raise an eyebrow at my role in that public shaming, but I mostly wouldn’t be treated as a transgressor.

One cannot help but wonder whether there are better norms. The internet isn’t restoring what was lost when we left the village, but today’s version is eroding the compensating benefit of getting to live fluidly across domains, in part because digital norms seem uninterested in protecting it.

Snark and shame are mediocre commodities, easily created and easily shared online. And snark and shame can come from the simplest thing: Our outrage that someone else on the internet doesn’t think like we do.*

But we’re seeing more and more proof that this kind of sink for our cognitive surplus is generally unhelpful, and often incomplete and frequently deceptive.

We score snark points. Yay for us!

But as Friedersdorf laments, we lose a lot in the execution, because our ability to compartmentalize (and here I’ll quibble and say we should not have norms that deviate so much from one compartment to the next that a breach in containment will result in irreparable damage) our lives is eroding. Make one slip-up that doesn’t fit with the prevailing digital norms, and you’re dead meat.

“Each day on Twitter one person is the star,” wrote a wise person, probably on Twitter. “The goal each day is to not be it.”

A parallel axiom, also likely from Twitter: “The internet can give you your fifteen minutes of fame, even if you don’t want it.”

So good luck with that. There’s a lot of cognitive surplus out there waiting to make you an unwitting star.

It would be good for us to remember what Edward R. Murrow said about Senator Joseph McCarthy:



“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Good night, and good luck.”

*Even the use of this comic has the chance of spurring outrage in some of the more brittle communities. The same artists write and draw the BC comic strip, once written and drawn by Johnny Hart, who let his Christianity bleed from the church domain into the comic strip domain a bit too often to keep the peace.

Ethical Users

A few things bring me to this notable Ian Malcolm moment from Jurassic Park.

First, the film “Fat Man and Little Boy” (more on that later), the story of the Manhattan Project told by Paul Newman and Dwight Schultz.

The war in Europe was over, and there was no chance the Japanese could develop an atomic bomb. Robert Oppenheimer, then, saw no reason for the United States to pursue such a weapon.

But the United States forged onward (if the ethics and timeline of this movie are to be believed), developed the atomic bomb, and dropped two of them on Japan to end the war.

Thus began the Cold War.

Would it have begun regardless?

I don’t know. Because the Americans had their German scientists, as did the Russians. Was one government more ethical than the other?

I’m not smart enough to know.

Then there’s this: A toolkit developed for app developers and web designers and unicorn-creators, meant to put the should into the could of Silicon Valley.

Its purveyors tout the toolkit’s ability – properly and thoughfully executed will help companies avoid the should/could “dormroom conundrum,” though there are ifs and whens big enough in their program to drive a truck through.

Can such toolkits help avoid unintended consequences?

Maybe they can make them less likely, but eliminate them? Not hardly. Humankind, in all its ingenuity, kindness, guile and ugliness will always find a way to twist what’s made to their own ends, be the ends good or evil.

For the same reason Ian Malcolm chides the scientists of Isla Nublar: There was no discipline to attain [the use].

Before the Everyone Can Publish days of the Internet, there was discipline, in the form of gatekeepers, agents, bosses, editors, and the weeding of the mediocre from the great.* There was discipline in getting the kind of job that would get you on the air, listening to editors and agents to the point your book could get published.

No more. Now anyone with a wild thought and a little bit of cash and talent can get “published,” without the discipline that once ruled the universe. Or at least throttled it to a great extent.

The genie of the Internet won’t go back into the DARPA-opened bottle.

The idea of EthicalOS is laudable – when companies apply it dispassionately. I’m sure, taking this back to Zuckerberg or any of the big Internet poohbahs of today, they’d claim their product would pass the test with flying colors. Or at least have slightly better than dormroom reasons to support the blind spots they didn’t see in their own products.

The magic of the Internet is its freedom. That is also its curse. And users and companies – complicit or blind to their own unethical practices – will always find ways to usurp the tools created.

And we as users have changed. We’re willing to give up things – like data – in exchange for things like Facebook or Instagram.

We could well come up with an EthicalUser checklist, wherein we outline what we’re willing to give up in favor of what benefits we receive.

That checklist could include a willingness to develop deeper thinking and analytical skills so we can detect and avoid the fake news – at least the fake news we disagree with, because pick anyone, and there’s fake news they want to believe.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what Clay Shirky has to say – pre-Trump:

There's no way to get Cronkite-like consensus without someone like Cronkite, and there's no way to get someone like Cronkite in a world with an Internet; there will be no more men like him, because there will be no more jobs like his. To assume that this situation can be reversed, and everyone else will voluntarily sign on to the beliefs of some culturally dominant group, is a fantasy. To assume that they should, or at least that they should hold their tongue when they don't, is Napoleonic in its self-regard. Yet this is what the people who long for the clarity of the old days are longing for.

(Shirky’s piece is well worth reading in full.)

The genie that is the Internet isn’t going back into the bottle. Users have to decide what tradeoffs they’re willing to make, whether they’re dealing with EthicalOS or the Wild West.

*Which doesn’t explain Terry Brooks, but you see what I mean.

Oh Tra La-La-Lally . . .

I’ve been listening to some old Clay Shirky videos on YouTube, and have stumbled across something I’m sure I’d heard before but now has great implications for me as I want to write and publish books.

He says the following in a presentation he gives on cognitive surplus, arguing that the Internet is leading people to use their surplus time and brain power to share, create, and collaborate in ways we’ve never seen before.

First, there’s this:

Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

So, how to include readers in the worlds I write about? I don’t know.

Then he says this:

We’re going to look at every place that a user or a reader or a listener or a viewer has been locked out, has been served up a passive or fixed or canned experience and ask ourselves: If we carved out a little bit of the cognitive surplus we now recognize we can deploy, could we make a good thing happen? And I’m betting the answer is yes.

Again, reinforcing that a shared, collaborative environment is going to be part of any creative endeavor.

But not any creative endeavor.

First, I think a creative endeavor has to have a critical mass of followers. Until that mass is achieved, writers can get by easily with Amazon and GoodReads reviews, occasional presence there, as well as presence on blogs and social media. When the audience reaches a critical mass – and I have no idea what that mass might look like – the writer has to create his or her own space for the mass to congregate. Creating Rivendell will have to wait until there are many elves to populate it. And if they ever come at all.

Better Student Writing -- Through Chaos

I’m grading my students’ research papers right now, and am wondering if there’s a better way to do this.

And by “this” I mean student peer review.

Here’s what I already know about peer review: The second I, the teacher, jump in with a comment, any other peer review stops. My word is the law. Students are obviously used to having the teacher have the final word – classes have been set up that way for a very, very, very long time. I do have, each semester, a few students – I can count them on less than five fingers – who challenge what I have to say regarding their papers. For the most part, they’re right. They catch me being inconsistent with the syllabus, or missing something that on second reading is obvious. 

The obvious solution seems to be to have a session of peer review, have me grade the paper, and then have another session of peer review following revisions.

But again that leads to another problem: In peer review, my word might be law, but I’ve noticed an interesting trend in revisions after I’ve graded: More often than not if a student is satisfied with the original grade, the “revised” paper typically contains revisions for grammar and punctuations, leaving the more fundamental feedback unresolved.

So: I can grade lower on the rough drafts and see, over time, if students remain satisfied with the lower grades rather than do the additional work, or if their work improves for better grades.

Another obvious solution: Provide examples.

But examples are limited in their uses. I can see, for example, an example of stop-motion animation. I can appreciate its beauty:

I can even watch tutorials on how to do my own stop-motion animation:

But proof is in the pudding. Even if I have the tools, do I have the experience?

I do not.

The example and the tutorial provide good frames of reference and good tools and instruction, but when it comes down to translating those references and instruction into my own stop-motion product, there is a lot lacking. Particularly the time needed to produce a good bit of film on a tight deadline.

So I need to find another solution for my writing students.

Maybe there’s a solution in what Clay Shirky says about open-source programming. I could try an experiment on open-source paper writing.

(There’s more on Shirky’s TED talk here.)

So what am I thinking?

For each essay, the students provide the example. And that example comes the same way open-source programming provides software: Open collaboration, with tracked edits linked back to individual authors (and the number of edits and the reasons given for the edits counting toward individual grades, with a portion of the individual grade coming from the end product, not from individual contributions.

Now, this sounds like a really odd thing coming from a person who despises co-authored books and committee writing. But that’s only because of that vision of the individual artist sitting alone and cloistered, writing a masterpiece. For some authors, that works.

But the students I’m working with, for the most part, are not authors. They’re looking for a grade. And that’s fine. We can’t all be Aardman Animation, after all.

We could obviously use GitHub for such writing, but any tool where a paper could be centrally-accessed and where changes could be tracked and attributed automatically would work. Microsoft Word has such capability, with Dropbox or iLearn being the repository. GitHub might eliminate certain training problems (though it might introduce others).

And, as Shirky says in the video, “More media always means more arguing.” We might see the collaborative writing process rile students up.

But maybe they’d learn more – because they’d be forced to justify their changes and concede when others make changes they might not necessarily agree with, due to deadline and grade pressure.

The longer I teach, the less I’m convinced that the key to better writing is more writing, but seeing the processes involved in good writing. As a writer myself, I know that it’s through reading and re-writing and letting writing simmer and then reading for the purpose of analyzing writing that is making me a better writer, not necessarily the act of sitting down to write long strings of stuff that might turn out to be a short story or a novel or what have you.  I’ve learned a lot just by studying the processes. My recent reading of the Pratchett/Baxter collaboration on The Long Earth sure taught me a lot.

Mere criticism isn’t doing a thing.

That’s what Nate Schumate at Lousy Book Covers discovered. So he created another website, Cover Critics, where people can submit book covers before they’re published, benefitting from critiques before the books end up at the other site.

Maybe a collaborative effort where I was able to chime in from time to time without halting any and all other edits by the students. Possibly the edits could be made anonymously, with numbers assigned to individuals rather than names (with those numbers being translated into names for grading purposes on the teachers’ end. They might not know it was me they were arguing against. Or for. If I played it right.

This is a deeper collaborative process than our current peer-editing model. With that deeper process, they might see how a “good” paper or essay comes together and actually learn as they go about things.

To take it a step further, maybe one assignment could be a collaborative effort, followed up by a solely individual effort in which they were graded on what they learned from the previous collaboration.

I’ll need to think more about this.

It’s Not the People who Do Nothing who Learn New Things.

We’re all trying something.

We plan things out. Or not. We work hard at things. Or not. And in a general sense we hope through our work that we get to see the end result of things. That’s why I’m working on the third draft of my novel Doleful Creatures, and why my wife and I volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America and why I teach part-time as well as work-full time as a technical writer.

It’s pretty much a given that most of what we touch won’t go anywhere. But I like to think we’ll find a success or two.

So I’m intrigued by this Code for America keynote that Clay Shirky gave last year, in which he discusses not only the value of listening to sincerely helpful critics, but also in simply trying things out so we can discover for ourselves what works, what doesn’t, and how we may have misunderstood the problem or task we have before us. Give it a listen.

He does kind of perambulate about his point – a Shirky trademark – but he does have some interesting things to say. First of all: Our biggest gift is the ability to change our minds:

All of this matters, this sorting out of the helpful from the corrosive criticism, and knowing the level of the problem you’re trying to take on, because the most important resource you’ve got isn’t your strategy, your plan, your tactics, it’s not your tools, your technology, or your project management. The most important resource you’ve got is your own ability to change your mind. That’s what matters over the long haul.

Shirky goes on to talk about two fellow New Yorkers, Patrick McConlogue and Leo Grand, one a minor figure at a venture capital firm and the other a homeless man living in a park that happened to be on McConlogue’s way to work. McConlogue decides to offer the guy $100 or a chance to learn how to code – and he accepts the coding challenge.

I remember when this happened, and how the Internet vomited on the idea, pointing out its impracticalities and pointlessness. I may have said a thing or two about it myself. But Shirky sees it in a significantly different light, a light that should ring true to anyone who has taken on a seemingly impossible project or dared call themselves a Christian (or any other religion in which we’re advised to watch out for our fellow man as we watch out for ourselves):

If things go well for Leo, it’s not going to be because this is a general solution to some problem of homelessness, this will be a fairy godmother story. The important part of the story is that [Patrick] McConlogue went from being a guy who felt comfortable characterizing people as the justly or the unjustly homeless, a guy who felt comfortable talking about the homeless without even bothering to learn the name of the guy he was targeting. He’s turned from that guy into a guy who takes time out of a work day to try to get his friend bailed out of jail. And I’ll tell you as a New Yorker, nobody voluntarily interacts with the NYPD. That’s a big change.

So far, things seem to be working out for Leo. And the events haven't been lost on McConlogue either. Shirky adds:

What is clear is that McConlogue would not have learned when he learned about the problems with homelessness if he hadn’t started out with the wrong idea and been willing to test it in the world. It’s not the people who do nothing who learn new things.

There's A Peck Here, and He's Got Marketing Experience Pointed Right At Me!

Thinking about ebook marketing, because I hope to have an ebook to publish within the next six months. And I’m listening to Clay Shirky speak at a LinkedIn symposium in which he’s talking about how social media is bringing an end to the traditional business thoughts of what constitutes “the audience.”

Learning some fascinating stuff.

Here’s the germ of his talk: Businesses need to figure out how to make their audience more than just potential transactions.

Here’s further eludication:

Amazon says if we give them a place to tell one another how much they love this book, it won’t be good for business in any kind of direct transactional sense this person has already bought the book and no one is going to buy the book based on the 6,021^st recommendation. What is happening here is that there’s a platform for human engagement which allows Amazon to have an audience that’s just more than an aggregate of potential transactions.

Robert Newton Peck hits upon this idea in his book on writing, “Secrets of Successful Fiction.”

He did it all physically, speaking wherever anyone invited him, taking whatever compensation was offered. He knew he wasn’t going to make a lot of money on these trips. But he knew that trip by trip he’d be able to sell books. Here’s what he said back in 1980, well before the opularity of the Internet, and long before social networking made this kind of thing a bit simpler to accomplish:

Knowing that I am far from ever being the most gifted novelist at Doubleday, Knopf, and Little, Brown, I decided to be their best salesman.

All over the country trots Peck, speaking at schools, libraries, colleges, and in many a damp church basement. I keynote almost every month at state conferences of librarians, teachers, and reading specialists.

I talk to groups of men, women, and children.

Do you know when the best time is to sell a book? I do. It’s right after you speak.

So wherever you go, take tons of books with you. I have twenty-five books out and they are all in print? Why? Because I huckster them with shameless abandon.

There you stand, in front of a hundred eager listeners, who want not just one of your books, but one of your autographed books. Sign a lot of books and you’ll sign a lot of checks. Writing is not an art: It’s a business. It’s what you do for a living.

Soooo, what are hucksters of ebooks to do?

Might be as simple as bringing a laptop, ensuring your location has a wi-fi connection, and directing folks to Amazon.com or your own book selling site. Or engaging in some kind of nifty ebook signing technomancy, like this.

Here’s how an Autography eBook “signing” will work: a reader poses with the author for a photograph, which can be taken with an iPad camera or an external camera. The image immediately appears on the author’s iPad (if it’s shot with an external camera, it’s sent to the iPad via Bluetooth). Then the author uses a stylus to scrawl a digital message below the photo. When finished, the author taps a button on the iPad that sends the fan an e-mail with a link to the image, which can then be downloaded into the eBook.

Now that is nifty.

Conversely, authors can be active on the social web. That’s certainly my intention. If I’m ever popular enough to attract even a small audience. Small or not, I’ll be there chatting with them, because who knows – that might sell a few more books.

Is that contrary to what Shirky says? Possibly. But if readers see value in the social web interactions and some of them see that as the end, not the means, then I’m fine with that. Others may notice their activity and come aboard, buy a book or two, and enjoy the conviviality as well.

How Do They Find the Time?

Clay Shirky, in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” makes a great deal of the amateur, volunteer effort that goes constantly into creating Wikipedia, the online Encyclopedia of Everything.

Thing is, it’s been done before. 

I’m currently reading Simon Winchester’s "The Professor and the Madman," subtitled “A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.” Therein, Winchester traces the history of the OED and how it came about. 

Winchester recounts the story of Richard Chenevix Trench, Anglican archbishop, dean of Westiminster, and poet who proposed, in 1857, that a new dictionary in which every word ever spoken in English be compiled. Here’s what he has to say, by way of Winchester. See if any of it sounds familiar: 

The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literature – and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals – must be instead “the combined action of many.” It would be necessary to recruit a team – moreover, a huge one – probably comprising of hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers. 

The audience murmured with surprise. Such an idea, obvious though it may sound today, had never been put forward before. But then, some members said as the meeting was breaking up, it did have some real merit. It had a rough, rather democratic appeal. It was an idea consonant with Trench’s underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.
 

I’m sure I’m not the only one to connect these dots, but it certainly is fascinating to think of. The time and effort and volunteer zeal was certainly there to help the OED go from idea to finished yet evolving product, just as with Wikipedia today. And the OED has its critics in that they say it is not as democratic as many would think – but the same can be said of Wikipedia.

It’s fascinating to think of volunteers scattered all over the English-speaking world making contributions to the OED. And they kind of hit a scatter plot as Shirky describes in his book – a handful of contributors add a pile of contributions, while many, many others just add a few.

Humans are an amazingly consistent species, no matter the technology used.

We ARE Kings of the Forest

Over at TIME.com, James Poniewozik has written a wonderful essay on the changing ways we consume media, thanks to the prevalence of cable TV networks, the internet, DVRs, and other such technology. Providing TIME doesn’t suddenly yank Poniewozik’s essay from the interwebs and make us travel back in time to read it, it’s worth your time.

Here’s the best of Poniewozik’s essay:

The surest sign that a medium is changing is that people start to romanticize the very features of it that used to be condemned. Back when there were only three TV networks with massive audiences, for instance, they were bemoaned for homogenizing the culture and playing to the lowest common denominator; now they’re recalled fondly as a “shared cultural experience” that we no longer have in the digital-cable era.

Likewise, the episodic structure of TV exists because of commercial considerations, not storytelling ones. Episodes end on cliffhangers to bring you back the next week. Subplots are resolved in an hour to give you a sense of completion as you wait for the next installment. “Acts” end on dramatic notes to keep you from channel-flipping through the commercials.

TV, in other words, takes its form from the conditions of its creation—which makes it no different from any other art form, such as the novel. Narratives changed when they went from lyrics, meant to be remembered and recited orally, to devices printed mechanically. Their subjects changed as more people became literate and had access to print. All of that matters–but it doesn’t mean that I’m spoiling The Iliad by reading it rather than having it recited to me by an old Greek man, or that if I’m not going to read Dickens once a week in the newspaper as he meant me to, I may as well not read him at all.

I see that romanticism a lot. I’ve participated in some of it. But there is a lot of truth in what he says. We have the right to consume content as we see fit, as it fits into our schedules and how it fits into our budgets – far more than those who manufacture our media could ever imagine we would, sometimes to their chagrin.

Used to be for our family watching The Wizard of Oz on TV was a big event because, well, it was on TV, man. We didn’t have to go to the video store to rent it, or sit around waiting until VHS tapes and VCRs were invented and available to rent to the unwashed masses such as ourselves. If, for example, the scouts were fooling about in the snow making snow caves to camp out in when Oz was on TV, we simply missed it on TV that year.

No more. Now I can watch it any time I want, because I have a DVD copy at home.

We’ve broken free of predetermined schedules. We’ve broken free of television – we haven’t had paid TV services in the house since we were married in 1997 – and we didn’t have it in the house I grew up in either. Four channels. All romanticized now. Ebooks mean we don’t necessarily have to go to the book store or the library to get books to read (though I’m cheap and still get most of my books, in physical form, from thrift stores). We don’t have to subscribe (generally) to magazines or newspapers any more because we have the internet. I don’t even have to have an unsightly antenna on my house to get our local TV stations, because their websites, well, they put everything they produce on them now.

I can still watch the news. Just when I want to. How I want to. And I can skip the stupid sports reports. That’s liberation right there.

As is this:

Beating down Ophelia, or Standing up to my Own El Guapo

Growing up, I continue to discover, is hard work.

Consider this: I’m a teacher. I teach. I teach online classes at Brigham Young University-Idaho. And I am at best, right now, a mediocre teacher.

Why is that?

Well, in our teaching group forums, we’ve focused a lot on curriculum: The rubrics are too vague. There is weak emphasis on revision in our student writing. Some of the assignments make no personal connection to the student, and are thus regarded as useless at worst or busywork at best.

There is, perhaps, a more fundamental problem. And Clay Shirky (yes, I write a lot about him, but that’s fine as he has a lot to say about such things) is coming to the rescue once again. But he’s only opening the door. I’m the one who has to walk in and fiddle with the bits to see what wobbles on the outside.

I’ll have to set this up a bit: Back in 2008, the government of South Korea faced unprecedented protests over reinstating US beef imports after a mad cow scare. People were out in Seoul in droves, protesting against their government’s forgetfulness in consulting them on the issue, Shirky writes in his book “Cognitive Surplus.” The people were sending a message:

In Seoul ordinary citizens used a communication medium [Internet forums] that neither respects nor enforces silence among The People Formerly Known as the Audience, as my NYU colleague Jay Rosen likes to call us. We are used to the media’s telling us things: the people on TV tell us that the South Korean government has banned US beef because of fears of mad cow disease, or that it’s lifted the ban.

With the Internet, with cell phones, and with ubiquitous user-generated content no longer controlled by the gatekeepers, Shirky says, the game has changed. He continues:

The old view of online as a separate space, cyberspace, apart from the real world, was an accident of history. Back when the online population was tiny, most of the people you knew in your daily life weren’t part of that population. Now that computers are increasingly computerlike phones have been broadly adopted, the whole notion of cyberspace is fading. Our social media tools aren’t an alternative to real life, they are part of it.

What does this have to do with teaching and, more importantly, with me being a mediocre teacher?

I’m still at the top, delivering thunderbolts, expecting students to toe the line, without really doing much asking of them, well, what do you want to get out of this? Part of that rigidity comes through the curriculum, which we are endeavoring to fix. But the lion’s share of it comes down to me as a teacher, being willing to participate more, up front, and to listen more to what my students are saying and not saying.

So part of me wants to go back to that first semester, where I interacted with the students a lot more. I felt like I was doing something for them, something with them. I was participating, not just being a blurker.

But it’s more than that. I have to remember that this class is part of their real life, and make it more a part of my real life too. And I have to foster their desire to make what they’re learning more valuable to them.

But that is a two-way street.

Early on in the course, the students read Thomas G. Plummer’s “Diagnosing and Treating the Ophelia Syndrome,” in which he urges students to develop the ability to think for themselves, rather than waiting for those thunderbolts from the teachers on high. He also offers this bit of advice for teachers:

In that same spirit, Wayne Booth in his book, The Vocation of a Teacher, asserts that regardless of whether a teacher lectures or runs discussions, the “teacher has failed if students leave the classroom assuming that the task of thinking through to the next step lies entirely with the teacher.” To this point, Booth adds three more principles that will help teachers and students avoid the Polonius role. Addressing instructors he writes,

1. You gotta get them talking to each other, not just to you or to the air.
2. You gotta get them talking about the subject, not just having a bull session in which nobody really listens to anybody else. This means insisting on at least the following rule in every discussion: Whether I call on you or you speak up spontaneously, please address the previous speaker, or give a reason for changing the subject. 3. You gotta find ways to prevent yourself from relapsing into a badly prepared lecturette, disguised as a discussion. Informal lectures are usually worse than prepared ones.

This is what I need to do more in class to encourage my students to realize that this class isn’t s separate space, but their reality, and that they are a part of it. How can I do that?

1. Beef up my weekly presence. I don’t have to dominate the conversation as I was accused this summer, but I can do some digging and sharing each week, preferably through a discussion post in a spot where they can’t ignore it, sharing some insight into the reading that week, or some outside source, to get them thinking and talking.
2. Get to know the curriculum better. That is self-explanatory.
3. Help to improve the curriculum. I’d like to see more real-life examples brought in, more multimedia (maybe one of Shirky’s TED talks).
4. Promise myself that next semester I won’t give up and quit the job, but strive to do better. 

I also need to do this: At the beginning of the semester, ask my students: What do you want out of this class? Then at midterm, ask them how am I doing? Are you getting what you want? What can I do to improve and to help you along on that goal?

Cognitive Surplus and the Simpsons

Maybe I don’t feel so bad “wasting” my time on blogs like the Treasury of Laughter and the Cokesbury Party Blog.

Here we see the efforts of an individual, albeit uninformed on the ins and outs of “The Wizard of Oz,” working as hard as he (and I have to hazard a guess it’s a he, and I think I’d be right) can to chronicle the vast array of cultural references in The Simpsons.

Clay Shirky talks about this kind of thing – clear evidence of a cognitive surplus (which is defined as individuals in today’s digital society finding more constructive ways to spend their free time than watching television, which he posits was the cognitive sinkhole of the post-World War II era).

There's lots of debate out there, however, over producing versus consuming and then when it gets to producing, the quality of what is produced. I'm not so sure I buy into the "quality" portion of the argument, because there's lots of stuff of dubious quality that gets published without ever first touching the Internet. The Internet has just opened the floodgates for all producers.

Real Signal

I’m thinking about social networks still – as always. How can we build Uncharted up? How can we find the people with the passion for what we do, as the makers of the Revelry social network have discovered for those who knit and crochet? As Facebook expands to 740 million users, as Google+ begins to tear it up among techies, what chances do we have, as microblips on the social networking radar, of becoming a force to be reckoned with?

Maybe Clay Shirky has the answer.

Part of what we want to do at Uncharted is to unite our users to do good, to do humanitarian things as our reach expands. And if we can develop the passionate user base that we hope to develop, we can accomplish great humanitarian things with thousands, not with the tens of thousands or millions that the behemoth social networks possess.

Shirky, in this short presentation, says that he’d like to see “more effort put into helping groups send real signal, rather than continuing to engage in competition in increasingly meaningless political noise.” What he means is that he’d rather see change wrought by a thousand letter-writers than spam coming from 2.5 million people whose most active political engagement comes from sending a form email. This goes back to what Michelle and I have talked about – in this day and age, what you’ve got to do to get attention is not to flood the mailboxes with stuff people won’t read, but show a much smaller, but much more committed group ready for action. Shirky talks about this in the guise of representation and voting, but I’m sure the same easily translates into other forms of social action.

Where Do People Find the Time?

I know I’ve been a little heavy on Clay Shirky these past few posts, but I keep stumbling across videos of these interesting talks he gives.

In this talk, Shirky discusses what he calls a cognitive surplus – a happy and unhappy byproduct of our era in which many more people than in the past are dealing with free time and how to fill it. He uses the post-World War II era as a trigger for the cognitive surplus and says that the situation comedy, or television in general, acted as the cognitive heat sink for most post-war Americans.

He claims we’re entering an era now where the cognitive surplus – brought on by increased industrialization and the advent of the knowledge worker (and these are assumptions here, because he really doesn’t outline from where this surplus is coming from) – is being recognized “as an asset rather than as a crisis.”

He sees some – and only some, more on that later – of the things occurring on the Internet as an outlet for that cognitive surplus, in that the Internet is providing an outlet for more people to produce and share intellectual assets, whether they be in blog posts, cartoons, videos to project like Wikipedia.

While discussing this concept with a television producer, he spoke about the hours and hours of volunteer effort many people put in to the Wikipedia entry on Pluto after it was declared a transneptunian object by the International Astronomical Union, and the producer tsked and asked, “Where do people find the time?” Shirky retorted that “anyone working in TV is not allowed to answer that question,” given that, by a back-of-the-envelope estimate he and an IBM engineer came up with, people in the United States spend 200 billion hours every year watching television.

“Doing something is better than doing nothing,” he said. He also added:

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf [speaking of World of Warcraft players] I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure out if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter. . .

Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Gin, he said, was the grease that helped the world through the initial throes of the Industrial Revolution, getting society to the point that they regarded the gathering of more and more people in urban areas as an asset rather than a crisis. The sitcom, he said, was the grease that helped the world through the initial throes of the cognitive surplus brought on at the end of World War II.

He doesn’t really carry the idea further, but I have to wonder if social networking is the next bit of grease that’s going to get society through this next crisis – one of a cognitive surplus combined with a re-evaluation of the true worth of knowledge workers – until something is organized that takes this situation from crisis to asset.

Part of me has to wonder, though. People have an innate desire to produce and share. I wonder if Shirky’s being a little short-sighted – for very good reasons – in not seeing the amount of produced and shared material that’s gone undocumented before the Internet (he hints at it, saying that as a kid he didn’t spend time blogging, or working on Wikipedia or other such activities rather than watching TV because in his time those other options didn’t exist). I’m sure a lot of stuff – from sagas to songs to drawings to stories to what have you – has been produced, long before the cognitive surpluses and the labor surpluses he talks about. We just don’t know how much, because it’s not documented. The Internet allows such individual producing and sharing to be documented at little to no cost, except in the cognitive effort necessary to produce something to share.

Additionally, he concedes that the Internet isn’t a nirvana of people sharing and producing stuff, using their cognitive surplus to the best of their abilities. He and the IBM engineer predict the Internet-connected population of the world watches 1 trillion hours of TV a year – or the equivalent of 10,000 Wikipedias each year. That’s a lot of time going into what he calls the “cognitive heat sink” of television.

So I have to feel somewhat good that I’ve used some of my cognitive surplus time – and taken advantage of the Internet – to write a novel and start on a second, and participate in Uncharted, where we’re trying to get people like us to produce and share and to be a media that invites participation, rather than expecting our readers to consume what we produce without participating themselves.

But I also have to say that people who are willing to produce and share were producing and sharing before the Internet came along. The Internet has made it vastly less expensive to produce and share, but it’s not the reason people do things, or create things, or write things, or want to share them.

I’m also convinced that because it’s become easier to produce and share, it’s going to become easier to produce and share things that lack depth – as evidenced amply by many things I produce on my blog. Spending our cognitive surplus producing and sharing is great, but can be even greater if we couple that with spending some of our cognitive surplus learning, reading the classics, working to become more culturally literate than we are, so the things we produce and share have a greater depth and meaning.