November 01, 2006 (1): PowerPoint Rhetoric

It must have been about ten years ago that I was sitting in a meeting at which John Seely Brown talked about the "new genre of rhetoric" that PowerPoint was imposing on our discourse (not to be confused with Chaim Perelman's "new rhetoric"). In spite of my agreement with John, I was still not prepared to read an article in today's New York Times that was basically about a PowerPoint slide (reproduced above). Quite honestly, I am still not sure what to make of it. I suppose my most negative reaction is that this may be the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of "dashboard thinking," that notorious fad of so much enterprise software, which, by reducing the complexities of a situation to a display of a few quantitative parameters, tends to be little more than a crutch for avoiding more serious thinking. However, there is also a positive side, which is that, if words fail to convince, the best alternative is a "killer picture;" and this picture is about as "killer" as you can get. At the end of the day, I think I prefer the positive side. After all, it was the "killer pictures" of Thomas Nast that eventually brought down Boss Tweed (who actually called them "damned pictures") and his corrupt establishment at Tammany Hall. If this is what it takes to convince our Administration and the general public of the extent of the failure of our "adventure" in Iraq, then I suppose I have to subscribe to the pragmatic philosophy that you go with what works.

October 30, 2006 (2): The Socially Illiterate Society

I realize that my recent attack on Henry Jenkins' Macarthur Report is not so much about "media literacy" as it is about "social literacy." It is bad enough that questions about the nature of social literacy and how it may be achieved are ignored by the media literacy camp, that seems to lose touch with what it is that media are mediating. It is more serious that they should be ignored by champions in the social software camp, such as JP Rangaswami; but what is “social literacy” if not an intuitive awareness of and sensitivity to concepts like “connectedness,” “belonging,” “sharing,” and “bonding,” which seem to figure so fundamentally in JP's rhetoric? Unfortunately, there seems to be no place for social literacy in today’s classrooms (at least in the public school system in the United States), since that is just not part of the accountability equation that the government has forced on those classrooms. Thus, the question of whether or not those classrooms have computers is ultimately a distraction from the real issue, which concerns how the next generation of pupils will be conducive to having relationships at all, whether or not those relationships are mediated by computer technology.

October 30, 2006 (1): The Final Steingart Installment

Today's SPIEGEL ONLINE provided the final installment in the translations of excerpts from Gabor Steingart's Weltkrieg um Wohlstand ("war for wealth") book. Once again the title is as provocative as it is relevant: "Twisting the Knife: Consumers Are Killing the Welfare State." This one actually makes an excellent companion piece to the Book TV broadcast of a lecture that Joseph Stiglitz recently gave to the World Bank to discuss his new book, Making Globalization Work. Stiglitz is the perfect antidote to anyone who has had too much over Tom Friedman's cheerleading, and he even took Friedman on by using the guy's own language. I cannot duplicate the words exactly; but what Stiglitz said went something like "Not only is the world not flat, but it is getting less flatter every day." This then gave him an opportunity to discuss the unpleasant consequences that may ensue from a Digital Divide which is growing larger, rather than smaller.

Unlike Friedman, Steingart is not concerned with the mission of making us feel good. He writes about German consumers; but he could just as well be writing about consumers in any industrialized and Internet-rich country:

The normal shopper at a German department store like Karstadt, wholesale retailer Metro or grocery discounter Lidl is a downright globalization fanatic. He compares prices and services but not nationalities or their social security systems. He wants his rebates and does not want additional charges. He is interested in the good deal, not in the dirty business already going on elsewhere in the world.

Even if he considers himself a romantic, he is actually a materialist by the book. It is only outside of business hours that he occasionally entertains idealistic doubts. And only then does he start to ask himself how it can be that he can obtain such large carpets so cheaply or why the prices on computers and mobile phones these days are so low.

This eventually leads him to a punch line that is not unfamiliar but still bears repeating at every opportunity:

What is important at this juncture is simply the realization that the global labor market, as we have invented it up to now, has created a unified sovereign territory for goods producers. The demand for labor now moves from one land to another, and naturally prefers those states with the lowest possible supplementary social costs.

Many who considered the social market economy to be the final stage of history are now being forced to admit they made a colossal error. Capitalism has, thanks to a global labor and finance market, increased its range, while the social safety net has lost ground. The market has gained power, speed and apparently also inevitability. But the social triumph of yesteryear has faded. Indeed, capitalism is going back to its roots.

I suppose I have enjoyed reading these essays because Steingart follows a path that I have tried to advocate for some time, the path of reasoning about consequences. In all fairness to the average consumer, it is not easy to reason about consequences when your finances demand that you get the best price for every purchase you make. So perhaps Steingart has been a bit extreme in picking on those consumers, but whom should he target? It is all very well and good to say that governments ought to deal with long-term questions of economic viability; but what are any of us to do when a government shirks that responsibility? Passionate talk of revolution is no solution, since the odds are not good that the resulting system will be any more conducive to long-term thinking. Unpleasant as it may sound, we may all have to face up to being responsible for our own assets and apply those assets towards building a safety net that can withstand future abuses from the movers and shakers of the global economy.

October 27, 2006 (2): Jenkins' List

As a result of my regular reading of Confused of Calcutta, I found myself looking at the Executive Summary of the Macarthur Report, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," written by Henry Jenkins and his colleagues at the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. The basic thrust seems to be a shift of "the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement." In other words it is all about "social skills developed through collaboration and networking;" but what are those skills? Here is the list that the Jenkins group compiled:

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

What fascinates me about this list, however, is how asocial, if not antisocial, it is. I do not see anything in the list that explicitly addresses the ability to engage in intersubjective communicative actions. Put another way, everything on the list (including Negotiation) is basically content-based. (Yes, that also includes the reduction of Play to problem-solving.) After all, if we are going to be talking about "media literacy," we have to remember that the "media" are just that: the channels through which communication, in all of its intersubjective glory, may be allowed to take place. Somehow or another, we need something on the list that honors Isaiah Berlin: Differing opinions should lead to dialog, but dialog does not have to lead to convergence of opinion. The intersubjectivity is a matter of each side reaching enough understanding to acknowledge, if not honor, the other’s point of view. This is the ultimate social skill for which we must all strive in an age of too many trigger-happy people with the power to end it all with a bang (not a whimper)!

October 27, 2006 (1): "Death" of a "President"

Speaking of fiction, The Raw Story ran the German Press Agency item about the limited-release opening of Death of a President in the United States. The byline was Los Angeles, but the film has also opened here in San Francisco. The Chronicle ran their review under an interesting headline: "Bush is murdered in tasteless, creepy 'Death.'" Well, as a long-standing John Waters fan, who was one of the first kids on my block to see a midnight screening of Pink Flamingos, I figure that I have earned myself the right to make my own call on tastelessness! On the other hand the Germans seem to agree with the creepy part, describing the assassination itself as "a chilling approximation." Meanwhile, as of this writing, The Raw Story has harvested 31 comments; and, without wading through all of them, there seems to be a strong faction that want to see this film in order to indulge in their favorite fantasy. I would probably find that even more creepy, were it not for the fact that I was living in Marina del Rey when Platoon came out; and there were movie theaters you wanted to avoid, because the veterans had chosen them to be the places where they would gather to relive their personal horrors while engaging in "dialog" with the images of the actors on the screen. So I guess the only lesson from all this is that, whenever we think we have a working definition of "creepy," something creepier comes along to raise the bar.

So, do I want to see this film? Notwithstanding any definitions of taste, I am always interested in anything that is called provocative, just to see to what extent I am provoked. Will I go to a theater to see the film? Well, this is opera season, not to mention the Symphony, and new new play just opened at Berkeley Rep. Usually I wait for these things to show up on cable. Perhaps I should worry that Comcast will block it, but I would be inclined to believe that they will just wait for a reasonable period of time to lapse after the election.

Meanwhile, just to remind us that irony never died, the front page of the Chronicle Datebook section allocates most of its space to a review of The Bridge. This documentary is real, not "faux," to use the word from the German Press Agency. For those of you unaware of this film, it is a documentary that shows (real) people taking a suicidal plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge and even interviews a survivor of one of these attempts. The Chronicle reviewer was full of praise for this one, but I am going to think a lot harder about whether I really want to see it than I shall over Death of a President. That kind of reality may just be too much with me.

October 26, 2006 (2): The Best Government Money can Buy?

Reuters just announced that Mohammed (Mo) Ibrahim will use his self-made millions to back an annual $5 million prize to be awarded to former African leaders "who had demonstrated excellence in government." Given the problem that Ibrahim is trying to solve, he should definitely be lauded for coming up with a new strategy. However, it revives an old joke that was very popular when I was a kid: Do we have to pay governments to be good, or should governments be good for nothing?

October 26, 2006 (1): White Trash Comes to Europe

SPIEGEL ONLINE is continuing to run English-language excerpts from Gabor Steingart's Weltkrieg um Wohlstand ("war for wealth") book. The title of today's essay is "White Trash, Fast Food: How Globalization Is Creating a New European Underclass." This is a must-read for all zealots who see globalization as the instrument of spreading the American value system around the world. If ever there were a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story, this is it!

As others have pointed out, there is not questioning the ways in which things have gotten better. Where the questions arise concerns the consequences of those improvements and whether or not things are getting worse at the same time they are getting better (and we simply choose not to look in the places where they are getting worse). Here is an excerpt from the argument of this particular essay:

We know, for example, that today's proletariat is richer than the worker of generations past. Indeed, with a little skill, he can tap into the coffers of the state's social safety net, which provides him with access to an income comparable to those of police officers, warehouse workers and taxi drivers. Thus, it is not material poverty that separates him from others.

Rather, what stand out are the symptoms of intellectual neglect. The poor of today watch television for half the day. These days, television producers even refer to what they call "Underclass TV." The new proletariat eats a lot of fatty foods and he enjoys smoking and drinking -- a lot. About 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country. While he may be a family man, his families are often broken. And on Election Day, he casts a protest vote for the extreme left or right wing party, sometimes switching quickly from one to the other.

But the main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today's proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

He likewise makes little effort to open the door to the future for his own children. Their language skills are as bad as their ability to concentrate. The rising rate of illiteracy is matched by the shrinking opportunities to integrate the underclass. The Americans, not ones to mince words, call them "white trash."

So, once again, the story comes down to education, this time in the setting of that condition of anomie that so occupied Émile Durkheim. Now the debate has to move beyond the question of whether or not we are teaching things of lasting value. Now we have to address whether we are succeeding in teaching anything at all. Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair!