Lions, tigers, and backchannels, oh my.

I am perfectly okay with students using laptops and mobiles in my classroom.  Of course, I do teach in the School of Mass Communication.  And, of course, I expect students, regardless of what I am teaching, to use their laptops and mobiles in the classroom to supplement what’s going on in the classroom.  But, with that single caveat, no problem whatsoever.

Here are my reasons:

1. Usefulness.

Laptops and (increasingly) mobiles are useful to record information (e. g., taking notes, or even taping the entire lecture).  And they are useful to communicate information.  Let me dwell on that second one.

Sometimes lectures are one-way streets.  That can be fine, depending on the circumstances, but, equally fine can be a two-street, with lots of class discussion and interplay among students and lecturer.

Unfortunately, when I was student (as I still am), I remember very often being very annoyed at the amount of class time discussions took from the lecture (which I really wanted to hear) and gave to the comments of other classmates (which I sometimes I felt were less useful than the lecture).

But, suppose technology could provide both the one-way superhighway and, simultaneously, the two-way country road.  Suppose, as a student, you had the capability to listen to the lecture and simultaneously, without interrupting the lecture, engage in running commentary that could aid further thought about, participation during, and understanding of the lecture?

You have that capability.

Simultaneous and participatory commentary during a lecture is live and well; it’s called a backchannel.   And backchannels are an accepted – and desired — feature of every scholarly academic conference I’ve attended for some time now.  (E.g., read this.)

Of course, you can only have a backchannel if you have the technological capability to provide that backchannel AND if you have a willingness on the part of lecturer and students to allow and use that backchannel.

Are backchannels — and similar forms of new media communications — disruptive to a traditional lecture?  In this sense of “disruptive,” probably so.

Are they beneficial to the lecture?  In my mind, most definitely.

Are they inevitable components of the lecture of the future?

Oh yeah.

Currently, we have the technological capability at Loyola to push our lectures — at least some of our lectures — into the future.

Do we have the willingness?

2.  Hypocrisy.

Again: Laptops and mobiles are accepted — and desired – communication tools at every scholarly conference I’ve attended.  They’re used for backchannel participation (without which you would miss much of the conference’s value), and for many other purpose as well – all supplemental to conference content.

And, if I’m doing something and benefiting from doing it – REALLY benefiting from doing it — why shouldn’t I be teaching my students to do it too?

Isn’t that the idea?

Rupert Murdoch vs. the Sandman.

1.  At the core of digital communications is something called packet-switching.

In brief, packet-switching takes messages that were once indivisible and divides those messages into tiny little “packets.”  Once messages are in these packets, it’s lots easier to send those messages over telecommunications networks, like, for instance, the internet.

The Sandman is a personification of packet-switching.  (That’s the Sandman in Marvel Comics, by the way, not the Sandman in the Roy Orbison song).  The Sandman can dissolve into little particles of sand — packets — and these little particles of sand can then go wherever they want to go.

2.  Suppose I just want a banana.

I go to a grocery store to buy a banana.  But this particular grocery store doesn’t sell just bananas.   To buy a banana, I have to buy a mango and a pear, and I have to rent a grocery cart (getting a free coupon for future grocery cart rentals in the process), and I have to listen to the grocery cart rental guy try to sell me a time-share condominium in Marigny.

The grocery cart rental guy calls this the Banana-Mango-Pear “Package.”

I ask the grocery cart rental guy if I can buy just the banana part of the package.

“No,” says the grocery cart rental guy.  “The Banana-Mango-Pear Package is indivisible.”

3.  In the olden days when I bought a newspaper…

…I got news and sports and editorials and this and that and (once upon a time) lots and lots of advertising.  Somewhere in there was probably what I wanted to read — but it was locked inside the newspaper package.

Currently, when I get on the packet-switched internet and Google the news, I get lots of little newspaper “packets.”  Maybe one of those packets is the New York Times.

When I go to the NYT website, I find more little packets — headlines, they call them.  So I click on a headline, and I read what I want to read.

And I say yay for the NYT, because I didn’t have to buy a mango and a pear to eat a banana.

4.  Some people think the NYT is packet-switched too much.

These people think the NYT is nuts.

These people would like for the NYT to sell you a newspaper package — because that’s what newspapers have sold you for a a long time, and that’s what  some people are still trying to sell you.

5.  Some other people think the NYT is not packet-switched enough.

If the NYT can packetize their news, these other people ask, why can’t the NYT packetize the price of their news?

If I only read Malcolm Gladwell’s articles in the New Yorker, for instance, why shouldn’t I pay just for those articles?

“Packetized” payments for individual articles — or even individual words — are called micro-payments.

That’s pretty much what grocery stores do when they sell you a single banana:  they charge you a micro-payment.  And some people think that’s a really good idea for newspapers like the NYT and magazines like the New Yorker.

Others don’t.

6.  But, before the Sandman becomes the Micropayment Man…

…he gets to bust up Rupert Murdoch and the newspaper packaging cartel.

Shouldn’t take long.

Changing of the changing.

1. Hurricane Katrina was, according to most accounts, a 400-year storm.  You can agree or disagree with that assessment (I tend to disagree), but you should at least agree with this:  A 400-year storm should come around about once every 400 years.

In other words, a 400-year storm is rare.  You won’t see many, if any, during your lifetime.

2. Currently, what is happening to the newspaper industry seems rare.

The newspaper has been around for some time, with the modern version tracing its lineage back to the Penny Press era of the early 1800s.  From then until now, given some ups and downs, the newspaper industry has done okay. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, for instance, was around for 150 years – before it went out of business in February 2009.  The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, published a print edition for over a century — until, in April 2009, its print edition went away.

There is a tendency, I think, to see the circumstances now threatening the newspaper industry as a sort of rare, once-in-a-lifetime, perfect storm.  If newspapers can weather this storm, if they can adapt and adopt new and more efficient business models — like the Associated Press is trying to do, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is trying to do — then all will be well.

Is this just a transition stage?  Will those newspapers that manage to survive emerge into a new and profitable period of stability?

Maybe not.

Maybe digital media is not really the new normal.  Maybe transition is the new normal.

Maybe whatever business model succeeds in the short term will fail in the long term — and maybe that long term is increasingly short.

Maybe the perfect storm now comes faster than the perfect levee can be built.

3. Once there was MySpace; now there is Facebook.

Once there was Yahoo; now there is Google.

Once there was the AP; now there is the clueless AP.

Once there some politicians; now there are some other politicians.

This, too, shall pass.

The form of the echo.

As the echo format becomes more focused, the original sound becomes more superfluous.

Our first example:  The Lessig Wave.

1.  The New Republic article.

2.  The reverberation of society.

3.  The recursivenness of community.

Carl Malamud, a constant advocate for access to US government data, writes in response to Lessig, arguing that Lessig’s article isn’t an attack on the transparency movement, but a need to locate transparency in a larger framework of good governance efforts. Malamud, like Lessig, quotes Brandeis: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

…from Zuckerman’s post, linked in #3 above.

Q:  If there is no understanding regarding what will happen in the future — because the past provides us with none — should we then reconsider the value of the zeal that drives the echo?

***

Our second example is left for the reader to pursue:  The Shirky Wave.

Those that criticize and offend…

…are the only ones worth paying attention to, since a) you can usually get all the praise and inoffensive information you want elsewhere, b) you are unlikely to improve your position without the motive (and information) necessary to do so, c) you may well wish to defend yourself from serious and potentially fatal attack, and/or d) you may just be flat out WRONG and need to shut up.

The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, by Cristina Bicchieri

“In The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cristina Bicchieri presents a new interpretation of social norms that will offend psychologists, economists, and sociologists alike, and therein lies its value.” PsycCritiques Joachim I. Krueger (here)

Google Book Search version (still, at this moment, hamstrung by the DoJ, among others).

The truth doesn’t scale.

to scale: to increase or reduce proportionately in size

***

There’s this article and this one, prompted by the new social media policy of the Washington Post.  In brief, the new WaPo policy requires journalists to separate their professional from their public activities.  C.W. Anderson, in the first article linked above, thinks that policy needs questioning:

“What is it about journalistic professionalism that demands the monk-like embrace of personal rectitude?”

Here’s an answer:  The truth doesn’t scale.

Or:  As the public becomes more social, more involved, and more massive, that public is increasingly more likely to get things wrong.  And, when confronted with the wrongness of this misguided, missle-like mass, the journalist is better off isolated and aloof than immersed and connected.

This, I know, is a radical view.

Among current proponents of social media, the public is the bee’s knees.  To “engage in public dialog” (again from Anderson above) is both to engage in truth-seeking and to reveal the truth.  But where is the evidence for these emergent-truth properties of the socially opinionated?

Not in tulip mania.  Nor in the more recent exotic derivatives mania.

Although two heads may well be better than one, public dialog within our current participatory culture  –  twitter chatter, bloggish banter, and website forum folderol – all consistently fail to produce what journalists, scientists, and others have been and do seem able to produce:  the truth.  And, in fact, this public dialog of the social seems more often actively opposed than passively sympathetic to truth and truth-seeking – ask, for instance, Copernicus or Gordiano Bruno or Galileo or, for that matter, Alan Turing about such things.

Crowd-sourcing seems well suited for shaking large pockets for small change, but the big bills still must be paid by some other means.  Scouring the webcam universe for porn simply does not scale into an in-depth understanding of human neuro-aesthetics.

Focused inquiry and exploration of the facts, protected and preserved in many instances from public evaluation, has proven more often effective and, yes, more often truthful than popular vote.  Eventually, of course, public evaluation must be endured in order to integrate and adjudicate the inevitable conflicts that arise from truly diverse thoughts and practices.  But, to shove populist morals down all our throats is not to reconstruct “objective” and “elitist” activities for the social good, it is to destroy those activities – and their products — entirely.  To conflate the private and the public is not an act of compromise; it is a tactic of control.

My review of The Lost Symbol.

My wife bought Dan Brown’s new book (made a special trip to the bookstore to do so), and she was reading something else, so I read it.

Aside from the part about moving things with your mind, it’s the same as Dan Brown’s previous book(s) — sort of like a sudoku puzzle with some different numbers in the middle.

Instead of an evil, whacked-out priest guy, there’s an evil, whacked-out non-priest guy.

And there’s a fairly interesting diagram of the Capitol building.  And a fairly whacked-out reference to The Abyss.

And that’s about it.

I did have to read it all the way through to make sure that it wasn’t different or anything.

So I did.

And it wasn’t.

When did things start getting bad?

Okay, I am going to go out on a limb and pinpoint the exact moment.

Things started getting bad when the Aarseth-Jenkins debate over the importance — or lack thereof — of game narrative turned out to be a limp-wristed, paper-thin, mutual-admiration-society, I’m-okay-you’re-okay-I-am-the-Walrus nothingness.  That moment was January 18, 2005 — and, for those of you who have forgotten (rightfully and appropriately) that such a pseudo-debate ever took place, here is a reminder.

In brief, because Espen decided to be Mr. Nice Guy, and because Henry decided to be Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Nice Guy won and everybody else — including, importantly, the TRUTH — lost miserably.  This decisive moment in the great game theory and research time-line has now led inexorably to our current moment in which transmedia storytelling, social agency, and all those many other consumer-research-based, community-manager-approved buzz words dominate ALL THOUGHT and ALL THINKING.

Welcome to the Age of Flat Ontologies.  Welcome to the Era of Serious Games.  Welcome to the Kingdom of Page-Ranked Fanbois.  Welcome to the Dawn of the Socially Relevant, the Culturally Obligatory, and, most of all, the Happy-Happy Joy-Joy.

Erasing boundaries.

Suppose virtual worlds erase boundaries — boundaries between the real and the virtual.  Boundaries between races, between genders, between old and young.

Sounds like a good thing.  It’s certainly something people are talking about.  And maybe wishing to happen.

But suppose this boundary-erasing function of the virtual is indiscriminate.  Are there not some — any — boundaries worth preserving?

What about the boundary between the intelligent and the moronic?

What about the boundary between the skilled and the incompetent?

What about the boundary between one thing and another thing entirely?

We might well be wary of the power to merge all things into one.  That power conceivably could be used to eliminate and destroy rather than to create and enlighten.

Transmedia storytelling again.

First part here.

Second part now:

I was earlier skeptical of Jenkin’s initial reponse regarding the essentials of transmedia storytelling; now, having read the next two installments of that response, I continue to think Bordwell has the upper hand in these matters.

I must admit, however, that I am not entirely sure of my reaction, since Jenkins seems to divide his argument into portions discussing transmedia storytelling as practiced by transmedia “artists” and as practiced by those more anonymous, less artistic folk who most seem to contribute to his broader notion of “participatory culture.’  Being more of the latter than the former (I fear), I will try to concentrate on the folk portion of the argument.

Bordwell earlier promoted, in general, the sanctity of certain media story forms (most obviously regarding the film medium, of course), but he also advanced the notion that stories and storytelling are not quite so plastic and open to cultural manipulation and control as Jenkins seems to require.

Jenkins’ response to Bordwell, essentially, seems to offer a list of how vast and varied stories and storytelling might, in fact, be.  This variation might, for instance, include the sort of limitations that Bordwell describes, but this variation might also, upon occasion, soar beyond those limitations.  Or, in other words, Jenkins admits to limits to stories and storytelling only under the conditions that those limits are limited.

Well, when all is potential, all is possible, I suppose.  But, simultaneously, where all is potential, nothing really is.

So Jenkins’ notion of the limitless potential of stories and storytelling is a concern if you happen to believe some things really are (and, conversely, that some things really aren’t).

I think stories and storytelling really are.

While Jenkins sees the story as a sort of “mother ship,” I see the story more as template for building mother ships.  Lots of little strange and alien things may flow from the mother ship, but only mother ships flow from the template.  (Jenkins may want to relegate such a story function to the “plot,” btw — his position on this remains unclear to me.)

That story template – that thing in our heads that distinguishes stories from not-stories – really is, despite and regardless of any participatory culture thrashing it about.

Where do we find the reality of that story template?  Not in story potentials, I don’t think, but rather in story limitations – where reality is much more likely to intervene.

For instance:  The story template includes the goodguy-badguy scenarios that allowed, famously, 60 Minutes and now, commonly, other fact-based news shows and productions to convert many and disparate facts, issues, and perspectives into a more produce-able, predictable, and palatable form.  This story template is, as others have noted, a “folk theory of causes” (cf.  narrative psychology, linguists such as William Labov).

Jenkins may have us believe that these folk causes are interminable – with which I would agree.  Yet they are causes nevertheless.  How these causes are used to subsequently promote and persuade is an interesting topic of study – e. g., the study of politics – but the inevitability of the formal template from which these arise and wiggle is quite terminable.

For better or worse, we have the capacity to draw inferences, conclusions, stories, and causes regardless of the data and observations from whence these are drawn.  Some have, at one time or another, called this capacity our “imagination.”  I wonder if this is what Jenkins is referring to when he notes the capacity of audiences to fill gaps (sometimes), explore “freedoms of interpretation” (sometimes), and engage in the many other varied activities of “participatory culture” (at all other times?).  Could we perhaps simply collapse all these activities into “using our imagination”?

In this collapse, what would “transmedia storytelling” lose, I wonder?  And what would stories and storytelling therein regain?