Code...is a medium in the full sense of the word.
—Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory 49
A medium is a medium is a medium.
—Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 229
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Sunday, December 2, 2012
"immense fan energy unleashed"
Hypable, which launched last year, is aimed at a Harry Potter-like audience of tweens, teens and young adults, mostly female. That means lots of coverage of the "Twilight" series and "The Hunger Games" and less emphasis on, say, "Star Wars," which Sims said attracts an older male audience.
[Professor Karen] North, at USC, said entertainment companies are similarly scrambling to harness the immense fan energy unleashed by sites such as Mugglenet.
Two things. First, the above-quoted article on fan labor in the Orange County Register is by Jim Hinch, who is also the author of the amazing pan of Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve in LA Review of Books that's been going around.
Second, and the reason I'm posting: it's not quite clear whose language this is—Hinch's or North's—but it seems telling that fan labor is imagined as a sort of natural resource, whose "energy" is "unleashed" by fan sites and can be "harnessed" (read: profited on) by the entertainment industry. Of course this is labor that is being appropriated. What's interesting about the language through which it is understood, here, is that it so explicitly routes that appropriation through an identification of (primarily young female) labor with natural resources, imagined as free for the taking. This usually doesn't end well.
(On fan labor, I highly recommend Abigail De Kosnik's essay in Digital Labor: The Internet as Factory and Playground.)
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Un coup de dès jamais n'abolira le hasard
About a week ago I wrote a post adding to my ongoing series on puerility, observing how the cultural phenomenon of the FiveThirtyEight blog and the conflicts surrounding it exemplified a discourse in which discrete, mutually exclusive outcomes are the only imaginable ones. Then, while I drove to Maryland for a workshop, stopping in Philadelphia on the way back, about eighty people commented on my post to let me know that they were persuaded (in error) that I was somehow defaming Nate Silver personally and statistics as a field, and that it was up to them to defend both.
This seems to me to suggest two things.
First, that the same logic that gives us "Obama or Romney?" as the paramount question one can ask about an election also gives us "for or against?" as the paramount question one could ask about the FiveThirtyEight blog. This is in no way an interesting question to me, but for many people it was the only question, and therefore my post could only be read as answering it. This reduction to discrete, mutually exclusive, and usually binary outcomes legible in the terms of a game is of course what I was identifying as a form of puerility in the first place. Obama or Romney? Statistics or "gut"? Nate Silver or Politico? Quants or scouts? These questions clearly generate a great deal of pleasure, as evidenced by the enthusiasm with which they are debated, but there are other questions, involving words like "why" and "how," that are worth discussing.
Second, that childhood is so overwhelmingly treated as a debased category that to invoke it is considered an insult.* In addition to its literal meaning of "boyish" (Latin puer), "puerile," in common usage, carries a pejorative connotation, of course, but that's its least descriptive and least useful aspect, which is why I set it aside. Puerility, in the sense of the performance of child masculinity, is one of the most powerful political forces in the present moment; that's why there is a "Nate Silver phenomenon" in the first place. It should go without saying that anyone can engage in this performance, but it is also worth noting (so I noted it) that Silver's public persona (white, male, youthful, virtuosic) makes him a particularly good candidate, out of the many people and organizations aggregating polls, to emerge as the celebrity of popular political statistics.
On election night it was interesting (though not surprising) to observe how, once the presidential race was called, Silver began to be celebrated on Twitter (elsewhere too, I'm sure, but Twitter is time-stamped) as if he were the magical wizard that, prior to the election, Silver himself so patiently tried to explain that he was not. A lot of the tweets were really funny (funniest), but many of them oddly called the Obama victory "a win for statistics" or even "a win for reality," as if to suggest that the validity of either were contingent on who won the election.** Some even explicitly trod into "Nate Silver IS a wizard!" territory:
Such celebrations seemed to concede (erroneously) that Scarborough et al. had a point in the first place— that a Romney win would have falsified Silver's model, and that Silver's model were based on occult wizardry rather than weighted averages of widely available polling data. As Siva Vaidhyanathan put it:
And surely many of the people declaring Silver the real winner of the election knew this, and had even, prior to the election, said it. This put no damper on the explosion of Silver jokes, however; the pleasure of play trumped the basic premises of the very thing being celebrated. The cultural meaning of statistics was precisely puerile at this moment, openly signifying "winning team" more than it signified the actual principles of statistics.
Another form of data analysis was also declared a winner after the election, it is worth noting—the data-mining that enabled the Obama camp's microtargeted get-out-the-vote effort. This was swept into the same category as Silver's poll averages and made a cause for celebration. But as Zeynep Tufekçi, who had earlier argued that work like Silver's had the potential to limit the puerile logic of the horse race, observed, data-mining is ethically neutral at best, and is as eagerly pursued by Target as by the Democratic Party:
Or as Alexis Madrigal put it, "Data Doesn't Belong to the Democrats". "The left's celebrating the analytical method right now as if it belonged to them," Madrigal writes. "But it doesn't. [...T]his election was not a triumph of data over no data, of rigor over hunch. The 2012 election was a triumph of Democratic data over Republican data." What Madrigal predicts next is a data analysis war, as Republicans struggle to catch up with and exceed the facility already achieved by Democrats.
This is indeed probably what will happen in 2016, and it is about winning. In such a discursive environment, we can easily have another election in which drone strikes are not up for debate at all. But who wins—the question that FiveThirtyEight and the political parties' data-mining efforts each, in their different ways, attempt to answer***—only ultimately matters in the context of policy questions. Are we able to ask them?
-----
*This is complicated, to say the least.
**This is in contrast with the predictions in individual states, which, taken together, are rather more meaningful for evaluating the model.
***I.e., Silver tries to answer by prediction based on polling data, while the data-miners try to answer by trying to secure a particular outcome.
This seems to me to suggest two things.
First, that the same logic that gives us "Obama or Romney?" as the paramount question one can ask about an election also gives us "for or against?" as the paramount question one could ask about the FiveThirtyEight blog. This is in no way an interesting question to me, but for many people it was the only question, and therefore my post could only be read as answering it. This reduction to discrete, mutually exclusive, and usually binary outcomes legible in the terms of a game is of course what I was identifying as a form of puerility in the first place. Obama or Romney? Statistics or "gut"? Nate Silver or Politico? Quants or scouts? These questions clearly generate a great deal of pleasure, as evidenced by the enthusiasm with which they are debated, but there are other questions, involving words like "why" and "how," that are worth discussing.
Second, that childhood is so overwhelmingly treated as a debased category that to invoke it is considered an insult.* In addition to its literal meaning of "boyish" (Latin puer), "puerile," in common usage, carries a pejorative connotation, of course, but that's its least descriptive and least useful aspect, which is why I set it aside. Puerility, in the sense of the performance of child masculinity, is one of the most powerful political forces in the present moment; that's why there is a "Nate Silver phenomenon" in the first place. It should go without saying that anyone can engage in this performance, but it is also worth noting (so I noted it) that Silver's public persona (white, male, youthful, virtuosic) makes him a particularly good candidate, out of the many people and organizations aggregating polls, to emerge as the celebrity of popular political statistics.
On election night it was interesting (though not surprising) to observe how, once the presidential race was called, Silver began to be celebrated on Twitter (elsewhere too, I'm sure, but Twitter is time-stamped) as if he were the magical wizard that, prior to the election, Silver himself so patiently tried to explain that he was not. A lot of the tweets were really funny (funniest), but many of them oddly called the Obama victory "a win for statistics" or even "a win for reality," as if to suggest that the validity of either were contingent on who won the election.** Some even explicitly trod into "Nate Silver IS a wizard!" territory:
Drunk Nate Silver held a seance for Nostradamus just so he could mock his abilities. #DrunkNateSilver (@fivethirtyeight)
— If It's A Choice... (@IfItsAChoice) November 8, 2012
Such celebrations seemed to concede (erroneously) that Scarborough et al. had a point in the first place— that a Romney win would have falsified Silver's model, and that Silver's model were based on occult wizardry rather than weighted averages of widely available polling data. As Siva Vaidhyanathan put it:
You realize, of course, that if Romney had won Nate Silver's prediction would still have been right.
— Siva Vaidhyanathan (@sivavaid) November 9, 2012
And surely many of the people declaring Silver the real winner of the election knew this, and had even, prior to the election, said it. This put no damper on the explosion of Silver jokes, however; the pleasure of play trumped the basic premises of the very thing being celebrated. The cultural meaning of statistics was precisely puerile at this moment, openly signifying "winning team" more than it signified the actual principles of statistics.
Another form of data analysis was also declared a winner after the election, it is worth noting—the data-mining that enabled the Obama camp's microtargeted get-out-the-vote effort. This was swept into the same category as Silver's poll averages and made a cause for celebration. But as Zeynep Tufekçi, who had earlier argued that work like Silver's had the potential to limit the puerile logic of the horse race, observed, data-mining is ethically neutral at best, and is as eagerly pursued by Target as by the Democratic Party:
Winning by big data driven ground game & micro-messaging is appealing (not saying all that it was) but it's policy neutral. Who next time?
— Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) November 7, 2012
Or as Alexis Madrigal put it, "Data Doesn't Belong to the Democrats". "The left's celebrating the analytical method right now as if it belonged to them," Madrigal writes. "But it doesn't. [...T]his election was not a triumph of data over no data, of rigor over hunch. The 2012 election was a triumph of Democratic data over Republican data." What Madrigal predicts next is a data analysis war, as Republicans struggle to catch up with and exceed the facility already achieved by Democrats.
This is indeed probably what will happen in 2016, and it is about winning. In such a discursive environment, we can easily have another election in which drone strikes are not up for debate at all. But who wins—the question that FiveThirtyEight and the political parties' data-mining efforts each, in their different ways, attempt to answer***—only ultimately matters in the context of policy questions. Are we able to ask them?
-----
*This is complicated, to say the least.
**This is in contrast with the predictions in individual states, which, taken together, are rather more meaningful for evaluating the model.
***I.e., Silver tries to answer by prediction based on polling data, while the data-miners try to answer by trying to secure a particular outcome.
Friday, November 2, 2012
The Passion of Nate Silver (Sort Of)
Needless to say, I am fascinated by the recent Silver Wars, which erupted, oddly, in the midst of a gigantic hurricane bearing down on the east coast. (No major damage up in my neck of the woods, although an uprooted tree on the green did reveal a skeleton. h/t Miriam.)
The "Nate Silver phenomenon" is a perfect example of Second Gilded Age puerility, a form of political commentary that is concerned not with meaning or ethics but rather with phenomenality, especially as translated into abstract forms, chief among them numbers. When I use "puerility" in this way, I don't mean it pejoratively but literally: this is a form of boyishness, as boyishness has been constructed in U.S. history. It's concerned first and foremost with abstract play—even a certain virtuosity with play—and it is entirely bound up its own game. And it is a game that may be a little ruthless, a game that implicitly must be played by a white, boyish figure, a Tom Sawyer who insists on playing even when a slave's freedom is at stake.* Silver's Wunderkind image creates kind of persona from whom we are prepared to receive statistical models; it is entirely appropriate that his statistical forecasting began not in politics but in sports.
Nate Silver's models can tell us how likely it is that Obama will "win" (the game). They can't, and absolutely do not aim to, explain, say, the role of race in the election. And they cannot give definitive predictions either, only probabilities: that's the point. Statistics always pulls back from the claims it makes; if it did not do so, it would not be statistics. Statistics is an inherently puerile discipline, not because it is dominated by men but because its principles concord so strongly with the way we have constructed boyhood—an unrelenting commitment to the play of abstract forms above all else: above wishes, above belief, above ethics, its only ethics being a commitment to the rules of the game. It presumes being unable to really know "the answer," except as defined and bounded by the game.
The Silver backlash has a huge problem with this. In the Politico piece that seems to crystallize the backlash, Dylan Byers quotes the NYT columnist David Brooks:
The backlash to the Silver backlash is even more interesting. Silver's most ardent defenders are wholly immersed in the logic of puerility: new-media, moderate-left, youthful, exclusively male***—most notably Silver's fellow statistical Wunderkind, Ezra Klein. Their chosen tactics, moreover, have at times taken forms that we might associate with the other sense of "puerile." An article in Deadspin, Gawker Media's sports site, for instance, delights in the flamboyant immaturity of name-calling: "Nate Silver’s Braying Idiot Detractors Show That Being Ignorant About Politics Is Like Being Ignorant About Sports."
The Defenders accuse the Backlashers of two things—ignorance of statistics and a reflexive personal hatred of Silver founded on defensiveness—and suggest that the two are, in essence, identical. The latter, it is interesting to note, is a highly psychologized accounting. In TechCrunch, Gregory Ferenstein writes,
Klein packs a slight dig at the Backlashers' masculinity in that phrase, "makes them feel innumerate." "Innumerate" is code for "inadequate," but a particular kind of inadequate; it's a castration complex built on an ignorance of statistics. Silver, as a methodologist and as a person, is "threatening" to traditional journalists (Ferenstein). The Defenders impute wrong feelings to the Backlashers, wrong feelings that are indistinguishable from wrong knowledge.
What is so interesting to me about the Defense—which is, if anything, more impassioned than the Backlash—is that it finds in the Backlashers a profound moral failing. Ferenstein's TechCrunch piece literally includes a picture of Galileo, calling up a larger-than-life myth of the forces of dogma unfairly pursuing a scientific crusader whose, as the Indigo Girls would have it, "crime was looking up the truth." Yup; Nate Silver, Galileo; I totally see it.
But the real failure of the Backlashers is a little more complex: not a moral failure, but rather a failure to be okay with the moral absence at the heart of statistical methods. The Silver backlash wants an answer, a position; it wants Silver to stop playing around. In other words, it reads statistics itself as waffling and double-tonguery. It's not wrong in that sense. It just fails to appreciate that that is more or less the entire point of statistics: to measure what is irreducibly uncertain.
There's certainly a basic failure to grok statistics that underwrites the comments by Joe Scarborough, David Brooks, et al. (the Backlash). And undoubtedly they are craven, miserable, petty people, as Ferenstein, Klein, and others suggest, although I have my doubts about proving the latter by way of the former.
But it's also important to break out of the puerility sandbox for a minute. We do not have to suppose, as Robert Schlesinger does in U.S. News, that the only alternative to "quants" is "gut feeling traditionalists" and "conventional wisdom"—that is, non-knowledge. There are good reasons to be wary of the statistical mode, if not reasons dreamed of by David Brooks, and they do not necessarily involve siding with the Ancients in a battle against the Moderns. Klein writes that
A Nieman Lab defense of Silver by Jonathan Stray celebrates that "FiveThirtyEight has set a new standard for horse race coverage" of elections. That this can be represented as an unqualified good speaks to the power of puerility in the present epistemological culture. But we oughtn't consider better horse race coverage the ultimate aim of knowledge; somehow we have inadvertently landed ourselves back in the world of sports. An election is not, in the end, a game. Coverage should not be reducible to who will win? Here are some other questions: How will the next administration govern? How will the election affect my reproductive health? When will women see equal representation in Congress? How will the U.S. extricate itself from permanent war, or will it even try? These are questions with real ethical resonance. FiveThirtyEight knows better than to try to answer with statistics.**** But we should still ask them, and try to answer them too.*****
Coda
The first woman I have seen to comment on the Silver Wars is Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times's public editor, and it was to reprimand Silver for playing around—literally. Silver offered to make a bet with Backlasher Joe Scarborough about the outcome of the election.Aunt Polly Sullivan writes that "[i]n a phone conversation, Mr. Silver described the wager offer as 'half playful and half serious.'" Which is, of course, the essence of the appeal of FiveThirtyEight.
-----
*I am of course alluding to the ending of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
**It's bad enough to have to link a Politico piece, but I'm not linking Brooks.
***I have not yet seen a Silver defense by a woman, although I suppose they must exist. I have seen many, prominently placed, by men, however.
****Silver's NYT colleagues, Dubner and Levitt, do not know better, unfortunately.
*****I am all too aware that a perfectly plausible gloss of this post would be: "don't hate the player; hate the game."
The "Nate Silver phenomenon" is a perfect example of Second Gilded Age puerility, a form of political commentary that is concerned not with meaning or ethics but rather with phenomenality, especially as translated into abstract forms, chief among them numbers. When I use "puerility" in this way, I don't mean it pejoratively but literally: this is a form of boyishness, as boyishness has been constructed in U.S. history. It's concerned first and foremost with abstract play—even a certain virtuosity with play—and it is entirely bound up its own game. And it is a game that may be a little ruthless, a game that implicitly must be played by a white, boyish figure, a Tom Sawyer who insists on playing even when a slave's freedom is at stake.* Silver's Wunderkind image creates kind of persona from whom we are prepared to receive statistical models; it is entirely appropriate that his statistical forecasting began not in politics but in sports.
Nate Silver's models can tell us how likely it is that Obama will "win" (the game). They can't, and absolutely do not aim to, explain, say, the role of race in the election. And they cannot give definitive predictions either, only probabilities: that's the point. Statistics always pulls back from the claims it makes; if it did not do so, it would not be statistics. Statistics is an inherently puerile discipline, not because it is dominated by men but because its principles concord so strongly with the way we have constructed boyhood—an unrelenting commitment to the play of abstract forms above all else: above wishes, above belief, above ethics, its only ethics being a commitment to the rules of the game. It presumes being unable to really know "the answer," except as defined and bounded by the game.
The Silver backlash has a huge problem with this. In the Politico piece that seems to crystallize the backlash, Dylan Byers quotes the NYT columnist David Brooks:
"I should treat polls as a fuzzy snapshot of a moment in time. I should not read them, and think I understand the future," he wrote. "If there’s one thing we know, it’s that even experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior."**The key here is the word "understand." Brooks thinks that Silver thinks he "understands" the future. But understanding has nothing to do with it; there are simulations, and they indicate the probability of potential outcomes. It's not understanding; it's pointing.
The backlash to the Silver backlash is even more interesting. Silver's most ardent defenders are wholly immersed in the logic of puerility: new-media, moderate-left, youthful, exclusively male***—most notably Silver's fellow statistical Wunderkind, Ezra Klein. Their chosen tactics, moreover, have at times taken forms that we might associate with the other sense of "puerile." An article in Deadspin, Gawker Media's sports site, for instance, delights in the flamboyant immaturity of name-calling: "Nate Silver’s Braying Idiot Detractors Show That Being Ignorant About Politics Is Like Being Ignorant About Sports."
The Defenders accuse the Backlashers of two things—ignorance of statistics and a reflexive personal hatred of Silver founded on defensiveness—and suggest that the two are, in essence, identical. The latter, it is interesting to note, is a highly psychologized accounting. In TechCrunch, Gregory Ferenstein writes,
Why does Silver, who is really just an apartisan puzzle-solver, inspire so much loathing? Because his results reveal a psychologically disturbing fact: we live in an uncontrollable, unpredictable world.As far as Ferenstein is concerned, the reason Silver is being criticized is that he reveals a truth that some people can't handle. That truth is, essentially, that statistics is a valid method of producing knowledge about reality; in other words, decrying Nate Silver reveals an ignorance that is the same as a psychological weakness. Klein's take is less cosmic but equally psychological:
Lots of pundits don't like Nate Silver because he makes them feel innumerate. Then they criticize him and prove it.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 29, 2012
Klein packs a slight dig at the Backlashers' masculinity in that phrase, "makes them feel innumerate." "Innumerate" is code for "inadequate," but a particular kind of inadequate; it's a castration complex built on an ignorance of statistics. Silver, as a methodologist and as a person, is "threatening" to traditional journalists (Ferenstein). The Defenders impute wrong feelings to the Backlashers, wrong feelings that are indistinguishable from wrong knowledge.
What is so interesting to me about the Defense—which is, if anything, more impassioned than the Backlash—is that it finds in the Backlashers a profound moral failing. Ferenstein's TechCrunch piece literally includes a picture of Galileo, calling up a larger-than-life myth of the forces of dogma unfairly pursuing a scientific crusader whose, as the Indigo Girls would have it, "crime was looking up the truth." Yup; Nate Silver, Galileo; I totally see it.
But the real failure of the Backlashers is a little more complex: not a moral failure, but rather a failure to be okay with the moral absence at the heart of statistical methods. The Silver backlash wants an answer, a position; it wants Silver to stop playing around. In other words, it reads statistics itself as waffling and double-tonguery. It's not wrong in that sense. It just fails to appreciate that that is more or less the entire point of statistics: to measure what is irreducibly uncertain.
There's certainly a basic failure to grok statistics that underwrites the comments by Joe Scarborough, David Brooks, et al. (the Backlash). And undoubtedly they are craven, miserable, petty people, as Ferenstein, Klein, and others suggest, although I have my doubts about proving the latter by way of the former.
But it's also important to break out of the puerility sandbox for a minute. We do not have to suppose, as Robert Schlesinger does in U.S. News, that the only alternative to "quants" is "gut feeling traditionalists" and "conventional wisdom"—that is, non-knowledge. There are good reasons to be wary of the statistical mode, if not reasons dreamed of by David Brooks, and they do not necessarily involve siding with the Ancients in a battle against the Moderns. Klein writes that
If you had to distill the work of a political pundit down to a single question, you’d have to pick the perennial “who will win the election?” [...] Now Silver—and Silver’s imitators and political scientists—are taking that question away from us. It would be shocking if the profession didn’t try and defend itself.Perhaps so. But what if that weren't, after all, the question?
A Nieman Lab defense of Silver by Jonathan Stray celebrates that "FiveThirtyEight has set a new standard for horse race coverage" of elections. That this can be represented as an unqualified good speaks to the power of puerility in the present epistemological culture. But we oughtn't consider better horse race coverage the ultimate aim of knowledge; somehow we have inadvertently landed ourselves back in the world of sports. An election is not, in the end, a game. Coverage should not be reducible to who will win? Here are some other questions: How will the next administration govern? How will the election affect my reproductive health? When will women see equal representation in Congress? How will the U.S. extricate itself from permanent war, or will it even try? These are questions with real ethical resonance. FiveThirtyEight knows better than to try to answer with statistics.**** But we should still ask them, and try to answer them too.*****
Nate Silver's Log, 2016. I've been on the run for four years now, spreading polling averages to them that needs 'em most...
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2012
Coda
The first woman I have seen to comment on the Silver Wars is Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times's public editor, and it was to reprimand Silver for playing around—literally. Silver offered to make a bet with Backlasher Joe Scarborough about the outcome of the election.
-----
*I am of course alluding to the ending of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
**It's bad enough to have to link a Politico piece, but I'm not linking Brooks.
***I have not yet seen a Silver defense by a woman, although I suppose they must exist. I have seen many, prominently placed, by men, however.
****Silver's NYT colleagues, Dubner and Levitt, do not know better, unfortunately.
*****I am all too aware that a perfectly plausible gloss of this post would be: "don't hate the player; hate the game."
Monday, October 22, 2012
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
I don't like the family Stein,
There is Gert, there is Ed, there is Ein;
Gert's poems are bunk,
Ed's statues are punk,
And nobody understands Ein.
—"Stein's Way." Unsigned review of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein. Time (11 September 1933): 57-9. Print.
And that's not even the best part of the review.
One more gem:
[AABT] has been approved by the bluestocking Atlantic Monthly (where part of it was serialized).
Bluestocking.
Thank you, Sterling Memorial Library; I love you.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Manners and the live-tweet
It's strange to see a conversation happen in your Twitter feed, mainly among people you know, and then watch that conversation get written up at Inside Higher Ed. Such was the recent "Twittergate," ironically so dubbed by Roopika Risam. The question was whether and under what circumstances it is ethical to live-tweet a conference.
I have a hard time taking the question seriously. I tend to sympathize with Eleanor Courtemanche's quip:
If we do any sort of public writing, whether on blogs, in print, or elsewhere, then we have had to make our peace with the partible personhood function of writing. You will be misread, misquoted, taken out of context, and distorted. And that's if you're lucky and are read. How dreary to be somebody!
Conferences are a sort of academic Facebook; they give the illusion of privacy and safety, while you're under a diffuse but constant surveillance. A certain segment of Facebook fans has a horror of Twitter and its public ways, because on Twitter that illusion of privacy is gone. But you know: it was only ever an illusion. Live-tweeting a conference only reveals and makes searchable (and renders amenable to response) the Telephone-relays already pervading our academic life.
I think the earliest blog post on the subject, Tressie McMillan Cottom's, is also the most interesting and nuanced. She addresses the most substantive critiques of live-tweeting: that it participates in the tendency of "openness" to devolve into commodification, and that it violates the speaker's expectations.
Still, the Inside Higher Ed article seems to unintentionally make the case that we have less to fear from Twitter than from journalism. As Alexis Lothian and Mark Sample observe, Twitter was responsible and careful where Inside Higher Ed was not.
I want to add only one thing, which irks me every time a conversation on the etiquette-ethics spectrum comes up. (That etiquette is so often discussed as an ethical imperative is itself, in my opinion, a problem, but a different one.) Inevitably there are calls for "BASIC MANNERS" and "COMMON CIVILITY" and "just don't be RUDE didn't your mama teach you better" and the like. I have no sympathy with the position that live-tweeting is just obviously rude.
There is no such thing as "basic manners." "Polite" (or socially affirming) in one context is rude in another, and vice versa. Or your mama may not have taught you "better." Maybe you had a bad mother; is that supposed to be the point? Why bring people's mothers into it? I like a fast conversation in which the conversants are so excited that they interrupt one another; I interrupt people, they interrupt me. Is this rude? Sometimes. Other times, as a friend once said to me when our interruptive conversation turned meta, "whatever; I'm from New York."
In Gender and Discourse, Deborah Tannen argues that the social meanings of linguistic acts are cultural, contextual, and mutually produced by conversants. Interruption can produce sensations of affirmation; the linguistic gestures of solidarity can be confining as well as affirming. "For example," she writes, "one can talk while another is talking in order to wrest the floor; this can be seen as a move motivated by power. Yet one can also talk along with another in order to show support and agreement; this must be seen as a move motivated by solidarity" (19). Moreover, "the two...are not mutually exclusive" (19).
So what is "basic manners"? If we take seriously the diversity of experience, then it's certainly not a universal baseline about which we get to wag our fingers. We need an academic bestseller on "the dorky art of faux-pas," because I feel that this fact is underappreciated. Academia remains deeply riven with racial and especially class codes that are absolutely inscrutable to, for instance, first-generation academics. ("Didn't your mother...?" "No, my mother has no notion of how to comport oneself at an academic conference, nor is she especially clear on what an academic conference is.") As Lisa Delpit has so powerfully shown, a white teacher's politeness can, to her black child student, be no more than a maddening obfuscation.
I taught Melville recently, so I'm going to leave the last word to Melville:
-----
Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: The New Press, 1995. Print.
Tannen, Deborah. Gender and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.
I have a hard time taking the question seriously. I tend to sympathize with Eleanor Courtemanche's quip:
For me, #twittergate is ALWAYS that tweets from conferences are TOO BORING (exc. mine, & OK all those from #navsa12)
— Eleanor Courtemanche (@ecourtem) October 1, 2012
If we do any sort of public writing, whether on blogs, in print, or elsewhere, then we have had to make our peace with the partible personhood function of writing. You will be misread, misquoted, taken out of context, and distorted. And that's if you're lucky and are read. How dreary to be somebody!
Conferences are a sort of academic Facebook; they give the illusion of privacy and safety, while you're under a diffuse but constant surveillance. A certain segment of Facebook fans has a horror of Twitter and its public ways, because on Twitter that illusion of privacy is gone. But you know: it was only ever an illusion. Live-tweeting a conference only reveals and makes searchable (and renders amenable to response) the Telephone-relays already pervading our academic life.
I think the earliest blog post on the subject, Tressie McMillan Cottom's, is also the most interesting and nuanced. She addresses the most substantive critiques of live-tweeting: that it participates in the tendency of "openness" to devolve into commodification, and that it violates the speaker's expectations.
Still, the Inside Higher Ed article seems to unintentionally make the case that we have less to fear from Twitter than from journalism. As Alexis Lothian and Mark Sample observe, Twitter was responsible and careful where Inside Higher Ed was not.
I want to add only one thing, which irks me every time a conversation on the etiquette-ethics spectrum comes up. (That etiquette is so often discussed as an ethical imperative is itself, in my opinion, a problem, but a different one.) Inevitably there are calls for "BASIC MANNERS" and "COMMON CIVILITY" and "just don't be RUDE didn't your mama teach you better" and the like. I have no sympathy with the position that live-tweeting is just obviously rude.
There is no such thing as "basic manners." "Polite" (or socially affirming) in one context is rude in another, and vice versa. Or your mama may not have taught you "better." Maybe you had a bad mother; is that supposed to be the point? Why bring people's mothers into it? I like a fast conversation in which the conversants are so excited that they interrupt one another; I interrupt people, they interrupt me. Is this rude? Sometimes. Other times, as a friend once said to me when our interruptive conversation turned meta, "whatever; I'm from New York."
In Gender and Discourse, Deborah Tannen argues that the social meanings of linguistic acts are cultural, contextual, and mutually produced by conversants. Interruption can produce sensations of affirmation; the linguistic gestures of solidarity can be confining as well as affirming. "For example," she writes, "one can talk while another is talking in order to wrest the floor; this can be seen as a move motivated by power. Yet one can also talk along with another in order to show support and agreement; this must be seen as a move motivated by solidarity" (19). Moreover, "the two...are not mutually exclusive" (19).
So what is "basic manners"? If we take seriously the diversity of experience, then it's certainly not a universal baseline about which we get to wag our fingers. We need an academic bestseller on "the dorky art of faux-pas," because I feel that this fact is underappreciated. Academia remains deeply riven with racial and especially class codes that are absolutely inscrutable to, for instance, first-generation academics. ("Didn't your mother...?" "No, my mother has no notion of how to comport oneself at an academic conference, nor is she especially clear on what an academic conference is.") As Lisa Delpit has so powerfully shown, a white teacher's politeness can, to her black child student, be no more than a maddening obfuscation.
I taught Melville recently, so I'm going to leave the last word to Melville:
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing—though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. "Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn't the people laugh?"
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander—from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg's father. Grace being said,—for those people have their grace as well as we- though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King's own house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch bowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. "Now," said Queequeg, "what you tink now?—Didn't our people laugh?"
—Moby-Dick, Ch. 13
-----
Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: The New Press, 1995. Print.
Tannen, Deborah. Gender and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Arrived today in the mail: volume 1 of LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism. Get your own.
(Also arrived in today's mail: a Comcast bill. You win some, you lose some.)
(Also arrived in today's mail: a Comcast bill. You win some, you lose some.)
Monday, September 10, 2012
"Dare to write clearly and engagingly whatever the audience, Helen Sword urges junior and senior scholars alike in a myth-busting guide to good academic prose."
Yes, dare. Don't be a moral coward like everybody else.
Yes, dare. Don't be a moral coward like everybody else.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Apply to THATCamp Theory!
Applications are here. It takes two minutes! Go!
THATCamp Theory is October 13-14, 2012
Plangere Writing Center, Murray Hall
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
THATCamp Theory is October 13-14, 2012
Plangere Writing Center, Murray Hall
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)