Dec
12
The last two or three days I’ve been writing drafts for blog posts on the topic of academic cheating. I wanted to address how it seems to me our very culture encourages people to cheat, how valuing a piece of paper more than actual knowledge has become the default way we value anything. Of course I didn’t publish any of the drafts; they got too shrill and preachy and didn’t contain enough insight to warrant an audience. I did reread Nick Mamatas’ excellent “The Term Paper Artist” and wondered about people like the following:
In broad strokes, there are three types of term paper clients. DUMB CLIENTS predominate. They should not be in college. They must buy model papers simply because they do not understand what a term paper is, much less anything going on in their assignments. I don’t believe that most of them even handed the papers in as their own, as it would have been obvious that they didn’t write them. Frequently I was asked to underline the thesis statement because locating it otherwise would have been too difficult. But that sort of thing was just average for the bottom of the barrel student-client. To really understand how low the standards are these days, we must lift up the barrel and see what squirms beneath. One time, I got an e-mail from the broker with some last-minute instructions for a term paper — “I told her that it is up to the writer whether or not he includes this because it was sent to me at the last minute. So if you can take a look at this, that is fine, if not I understand.” The last-minute addition was to produce a section called “BODY OF PAPER” (capitals sic). I was also asked to underline this section so that the client could identify it. Of course, I underlined everything but the first and last paragraphs of the three-page paper.
Of course, identifying those who outright do not belong in college or any educational establishment only begins to reveal the manifold problems we face today. There are lots of people who are intelligent enough but do not have the discipline or willingness for higher learning; there are people who are very smart but very unappreciative, and can encourage contempt for learning by making everything seem arbitrary. And even when one gets beyond issues of intelligence and discipline, there is still the fact that attitude, trends and perceived necessities play a gigantic role in closing more minds than they open.
Which brings me to MTV’s Jersey Shore, which I read about recently (Troy Patterson’s Slate review quoted below; h/t Josh for the link) and had the experience of viewing. If you’re asking whether there are people like this in Jersey -
Some of the douchebags with the hot chicks could further be defined as guidos, which brings us to MTV’s Jersey Shore. Here, eight Italian-Americans descend upon Seaside Heights, N.J., from Rhode, Long, and Staten Islands and other such locales for a sunny season’s worth of binge drinking, casual sex, and open hostility. (As the Washington Post put it in an extremely delightful 2003 story, “Guidos belong to summer, and summer belongs to guidos.”) What does it mean to self-identify as a guido (or, his female equivalent, a guidette)? One of the Jersey Shore stars, Pauly D, has a ready answer: “It’s just a lifestyle, it’s bein’ Italian, it’s representin’, family, friends, tannin’, gel, everything….”
Pauly D’s housemates include Jenni, who encourages the nickname J. Wow, transliterated JWOWW; Mike, whose sobriquet derives from his abdominals (“My abs are so ripped up, we call it The Situation”); and an unfortunate little person calling herself Snooki. Early in the first episode, Snooki wasted little time in gearshifting “from stupid to, like, incoherent,” as Vinny said. Sloshed, shrieking, and despondent that the male housemates repelled her groping advances, Snooki wobbled off to the roof deck alone. “You don’t understand how I feel!” she bawled, either to herself or the hammock. “It’s so not fair at all!” Shortly thereafter, she snooked into the hot tub with the guys while wearing her underwear, attire deemed incorrect by Angelina: “A thong bikini would have been a little bit more classier, if you’re gonna wear anything at all, you know what I mean?”
- I mean, it is true these individuals are from the New York area, but short answer: you could have fooled me. The people I knew in undergrad were probably smarter than these: they were getting grades and degrees and working hard to pay tuition and for their lifestyle. Did they act in identical ways? Absolutely; take away an hour or two of studying from their daily lives and many were animals who could stay just clean and organized enough for the reality tv cameras to film.
I’m not saying everyone has to be perfect: heck, I found “Jersey Shore” entertaining up to the point they went to the local bars for the obligatory club/bar drama that every reality TV show has to illustrate the poverty of America’s conception of having a good time. I suspect many of you would turn off this garbage if it appeared on your monitor or TV screen lest one gets a disease from watching it electronically. I do know the biggest difference between the educated and uneducated is that a truly educated person can ask serious questions about what they consider good; they don’t just think that partying and generally behaving in a manner they thought awesome at 15 or 16 holds good for the entirety of their lives. I wonder if reality TV or our everyday lives came first: it seems our everyday experience has always been a lifestyle that expects the camera to follow us around. After all, if you already think you know what is most important, you are saying that your life is worthy of emulation, that it should be broadcast into everyone’s home.
Dec
7
The article in question is by one David Carr at the nytimes; we’ve noted the President’s overexposure before – see “The Olympics, Obama and the Permanent Campaign” – but it might be more prudent to look away from the President’s explicit political ends and focus only on the means:
When Barack Obama became president, he promised a “new era of openness.” After almost a year of a media diet that seemed to be all-Obama, all-the-time that concluded in a reality-program couple crashing a state dinner at the White House, I’d be O.K. with the kimono closing a bit.
When Michaele and Tareq Salahi waltzed uninvited into the White House for a state dinner almost two weeks ago, their camera crew from Bravo’s forthcoming “The Real Housewives of D.C.” was left waiting outside, but it’s not as if their presence would have been much of a breach of current protocol.
After all, like much of daily life there, their visit was recorded and uploaded on the White House Flickr feed, the always-on streaming window into “the people’s house,” a nickname that has never been more apt than under the current residents.
Considering the White House’s hulking, media-rich Web site, its Facebook page, photo galleries and podcasts on iTunes, the presidency seems less threatened by the incursion of a reality show than running an administration that is in danger of becoming one.
Carr’s immediate conclusions, of course, are shared by all except the most hardened partisans:
One of the downsides of having a president who is also Celebrity in Chief is that it creates the impression that the leader of the free world is part of a milieu that is more TMZ than C-SPAN. In an effort to remain connected to the social media world that was so much a part of his electoral victory, the Obama administration may be guilty of a very contemporary common offense: Oversharing….
The president can’t be blamed for a few knuckleheads trying to game their way into his presence, but his shared love of the camera leaves him vulnerable to suggestions that he is too busy appearing as the president and not busy enough being one. And we all know that television shows — reality or otherwise — can jump the shark.
But again, I want to focus on the means. Americans may say they want the Presidency to be at an honorable remove, to be about competence in office appropriate to the office. But if that’s the case, not only should everyone have voted for McCain, everyone should have voted for Nixon in 1960. The sad truth is that if one becomes a tabloid sensation, one has a better chance of winning not just attention and dollars but even getting one’s message across. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Paris Hilton is admired by some. It’s almost impossible to tell how low tastes will go; part of the problem is that more media has actually meant fewer celebrities. Our attention isn’t divided: it’s non-existent unless buttons are pushed. Buttons correspond not to narratives that are of importance or genuinely grab our interest, but narratives that are consistent with how we view things already. People come to us already branded, but our passivity means there can be enormous wiggle-room for carving out a new brand. Don’t be surprised if Jon Gosselin or Michael Lohan ends up lecturing about parenting and people start listening in earnest.
So, in the current President’s “defense:” this is the media environment he has to work with. And he has to work with it. One problem with the Bush years was that the President then was drowned out by the enormous amount of media mocking him. When he made serious decisions about things like Iraq, they couldn’t be taken seriously in the least. To not engage the media environment is to concede the stupidest assumptions people make about politics. I’m not saying that President Bush didn’t engage the media. He tried and failed, and yes, that’s a scary thought. You can be the President of the United States and there are forces so beyond your control that you’re a sitting duck.
This President, on the other hand, has a huge advantage over the media. People like him for whatever reason. That would seem to indicate that updating his myspace and facebook page are the way to go. Unfortunately, the more one pursues that strategy, the less Presidential one is, and all of us know how shallow the sort of attention one gets from social media is. It’s important attention if you’re starting something new, not if you’re the President already.
My own thought is that the White House – despite how nice their new site looks – could learn from Sarah Palin. She’s very effective with her Facebook page: for better or worse, it seems to suit her. Pick one aspect of new media you “click” with, and use that alone if you want. Trying all forms of media at once is what those of us who are getting no attention have to do, and lends support to the idea that one is competing with people like Lindsay Lohan for the nation’s attention. The latter may be the truth, but it is not a President’s job to change how public opinion shapes itself. His authority is tied to actual power for a reason.
Oct
22
Arts and Letters Daily has some worse links than usual today…
Filed Under media, philosophy | Leave a Comment
1. Carlin Romano has written a screed against Heidegger that I skimmed the first two paragraphs of, felt sick, and immediately stopped reading. I’m not linking to it here – his essential point is that Heidegger was a Nazi and shouldn’t be taken seriously, and recent scholarship seems to show how much hate he was filled with.
I don’t want to be in the position of defending Heidegger, because he was a Nazi and that’s not some small thing – he absolutely should be considered infamous and his work taken with a grain of salt. Some of you have probably noted that hate is something I take very seriously: we are witnessing the ugliness that is fascism rise again in certain circles, and it needs to be combated, and I know I don’t have enough allies in this fight right now. Also, I’m not entirely sold on the Continental philosophy post-Heidegger that traces much of its critique back to him.
But I am going to say this: it’s hard for me to tell you how much I’ve learned from Heidegger, because it is an enormous amount. Introduction to Metaphysics starts off slowly: one might be able to skip the whole first part or two, really, and just cut to the part entitled “The Restriction of Being.” It’s there that he brings a Greek philosophical vocabulary back to life – logos, phusis, telos, ta onta and many others aren’t just fancy words one throws around to sound smart. They actually help build a metaphor that pre-Socratic philosophy, Plato, Aristotle and a host of others took seriously, and if you spend any time with the Greeks and find yourself scratching your head, you realize just how brilliant this discussion is. Truth be told, I had been reading Plato and Aristotle for a number of years and only after Heidegger did a number of issues fall into place: textual commentary tends to presuppose knowledge of how those words work. I bought a copy of “Four Seminars” recently because the discussion and translation of Heraclitus and Parmenides was not only enjoyable, but done with the utmost seriousness: Heidegger is a very original reader with whom translators would have issues; he’s an original reader because he turns the text over and over again in his thinking, he doesn’t just contend something and disfigure issues in order to fit them into his worldview (yes, Strauss would argue with me here. But Strauss’ critique of Heidegger, which implores us to take seriously that Heidegger was a Nazi, is far more subtle than Romano’s: see “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy for what is essential).
If you’re interested in political philosophy, a list of what I’ve read so far by Heidegger that’s pretty important:
- “The Concept of Time” – a very short lecture by Heidegger that actually opened up some metaphysical issues in Augustine for me.
- Introduction to Metaphysics – there are parts of it that drone on and on, but after struggling with Plato for some years it was a relief
- “The Question Concerning Technology” – it’s important, even if one finds the logic a bit strained.
- “Building Dwelling Thinking”
- “Language”
The last two I’ve cited are really about how one can see the world differently merely by reflecting on words, and that is a point of no small significance for Heidegger: it creates much of the thought I disagree with, it leads him into what Strauss calls “historicism,” where one’s vocabulary and its thematic import are bequeathed to one by one’s time. But my disagreement is a discussion for later. Right now, I want to stop people from going “oh you read Heidegger? That means you love Hitler,” and the related “Heidegger says ‘Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man,’ what he really means in that sentence is that he loves Hitler,” which is what Romano is clearly trying to provoke.
2. Also: there is a link to this WSJ piece on Norman Rockwell that says his “Freedom of Speech” is his greatest painting of the “Four Freedoms.” I saw the “Freedom of Worship” one in person: I can tell you that people cried in front of it. When crap libertarian rhetoric used to defend the tea parties and town halls is brought out at the expense of everything else – the “Freedom of Speech” painting is quite excellent, don’t get me wrong, and may be Rockwell’s best – we have a serious problem. One should not have to be a political scientist to have an open mind, and not use everything in the world around one to score cheap political points.
Jun
12
The Problem of Twitter: A Rant
Filed Under media, politics | Leave a Comment
Presented at the Inaugural Cool Twitter Conference in Washington DC on 6/11/2009. By “presented” I mean I stuck my head in my notes and never looked up and talked too fast – you’ll see that on the video, if I get a link (you might have to pay to see it, I’m money like that). Below are my notes.
I. I blog. I Twitter. And because of Twitter my subscribers have nearly doubled.
Well, so what? We all know many benefiting from Twitter’s users – the followers I’ve made are happy to use Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Stumbleupon and a host of other social media. Anything given to them tends to end up elsewhere on the web without my asking, but again, this success is true for many.
I’m a bit hesitant to talk about what I blog: I wish I could articulate a general problem all of you have directly experienced. The blog entry I’m proudest of is on a passage from Wittgenstein’s Blue Book, where he says that progress in philosophy is like organizing a bookshelf in a library. Progress is made when a few of the books are arranged correctly and need not be resorted. That notion of careful progress, where the goal is to avoid questions in philosophy that are pointless traps, stands in contrast to someone like Heidegger, where the question “Why are there beings at all rather than nothing?” is perfectly legitimate for philosophers to pursue.
The other blog entry I’m proud of is on the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln says that “all men are created equal” is a proposition; Jefferson calls it, in the Declaration of Independence, a self-evident truth. The difference in how equality is grounded reflects a vision of what values must be pursued more fervently by Americans post-Civil War. All of American history is the tension between liberty and equality; a democracy needs both, yet tends too much to one or the other any given time. When you understand such a tension – that there are no perfect, perhaps not even satisfactory conclusions in politics – you see more clearly how rich American politics can be, how possibility and value are linked. But that is a story for later.
What matters now is that you see how different I think what I’m trying to do is. There are better writers and academics out there, creating posts that are similar to what I write. Given how much I write on poetry, someone might not implausibly claim that I run a poor man’s Sparknotes/Clifff Notes. I am not in a position to define or defend my work; I can only demonstrate to a limited degree its value.
II. In a sense, Twitter is most useful to me because it is truly social media. On Facebook or Myspace, there are status updates, but the ability to find and engage new people seems to be dependent on a static page. People have to go find you, for the most part. My first few minutes on Twitter were the questions “Whom do I follow” and “Whom do I want to follow?” It it true you can set up a fairly private network on Twitter, but it seems to me that no matter what you do on Twitter, you’re broadcasting for the most part. Some have wondered aloud why some journalists love Twitter. Part of it I suspect is instantly being mass media, even while working a niche, networking, talking to friends and thus demonstrating the foundations of a thesis about how our society could entirely be mass media.
For me, Twitter is a bit different. I need truly social media to meet like-minded friends who would be interested in my work and open to the notion that I might have something interesting to say. My current crop of real friends is mixed on this score: a very good friend of mine listens to Alex Jones and is convinced the US government attacked its own people and covered it up. He naturally has no patience for my blog’s discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner in “The Case of Wagner:” Nietzsche blasts Wagner for Wagner’s promotion of the Reich, anti-Semitism, and shallow critique of Christianity. Along the way, Nietzsche makes a number of points important to understanding where conspiracy theory comes from. They can be summed up thus: people get it in their heads that they can write their own myths, nothing less, and they use a lot of ironic departures from traditional modes to construct what is less-than-rigorous in terms of truth.
III. The problem of Twitter is perhaps the problem of all new media. I suspect media centralization/decentralization goes in cycles: it seems around the time of the American Revolution everyone and their mother had a printing press and was creating pamphlets. This part of the cycle we’re in is strange, as you can tell by the issues I’ve alluded to; it isn’t clear that we can get clear on what questions are worth asking, which values truly are debatable, and whether we know enough to make the most of media. A small example will suffice: I’ve followed enough political tweeters to see thoughtful articles – i.e. in Mother Jones, not exactly a rightist publication, analysis and slight criticism of Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial writings, or reason.com’s dispatches about states prosecutors thinking medical examiners employed by the state shouldn’t give an impartial opinion but always serve the prosecution only – I’ve seen those articles tweeted and buried under a host of comments about politics that are, at best, people venting.
But don’t people have the right to vent? And isn’t that self-expression crucial to media and politics in a democratic society? Right now, political science works from the assumptions that human behavior is predictable in the aggregate, and that politics exists to enable satisfactory outcomes for all actors involved. Those assumptions make it very difficult for me to differentiate politics – where we send our fellow citizens to fight and die routinely – from marketing any given product. They lead to the reasoning articulated by a very intelligent, thoughtful blogger and political scientist, where a party doesn’t exist to change minds but only mobilize its base and conduct politics within the context of established institutions. Inasmuch as Hamilton in Federalist 1 declares that the whole point of the United States of America is to establish that people can govern themselves through “reflection and choice,” this state of affairs in political reasoning is unacceptable to me. Inasmuch as Twitter is representative of how we want to communicate with each other, how we want to establish influence and receive information, I am dependent – not merely a user – of Twitter.
May
30
Rant: If you have anything worthwhile to say, then reaching out to other bloggers is a waste of time
Filed Under media | 6 Comments
When I first started blogging, my main practice was to write posts that were responses to other bloggers’ posts. This wasn’t to attack them, although a few did deserve that. I spent a lot of time trying to show how to best appreciate their best points. I was doing this to show that someone was actually reading what was published and taking the time to respond. Over time, I hoped that I would be responded to or linked to or something.
Since that time, I’ve become progressively less generous, because the truth is that much of the blogosphere is extraordinarily ungrateful and petty. There’s lots of people who talk about giving and sharing, but few actually doing it consistently, and you’d be surprised at those few. Quite a number have mastered the game of seeming way more generous than they actually are. Twitter demonstrates this problem aptly: nearly everyone there calls themselves a “social media guru” because they add you back if you add them or some other stupid thing. Twitter is the web in micro; the “social media guru” types have been running blogs most of this time and trying this stunt, but they’re spread out on the Internet enough that one need not ever encounter them. On Twitter, though, one will encounter them by the thousands, all at once.
The ungratefulness and pettiness are stemming from a larger problem: if there are blogs I don’t read, there isn’t much I miss. Granted, there are some brilliant insights and really remarkable articles out there; some people really know how to make every second they’re online count for that much more. But the ungratefulness/pettiness is coming from the fact that bloggers in general don’t have that much to say, but want a soapbox anyway. How long can right-wing bloggers tell me about the politics of the late 70’s? How long can progressive bloggers keep yelling about Civil Rights and Vietnam? How many times can economics bloggers offer far more clarity on obscure issues than on the state of the current economy? And regarding that last issue, how long are we going to treat that as more important than terrorism, the state of our schools, the state of our morals?
Btw, don’t get me started on long rambling personal entries that sound like someone really wants to write comments beside the portraits of everyone in the high school yearbook. I’ve seen blogs with 2,500 word entries dedicated to such nonsense.
If you really want the Web to be something unique, you have to know a lot beforehand, search hard, and have a low tolerance for repetition. I typically repeat myself or offer a link which says the same thing over again when it makes a case more exactly, in greater detail. Thoroughness is important: only with a grip on detail can I myself go create something unique. But there are many other criteria for good blogging that belong to a craft called “writing” which we seem to want to do away with for “interactivity,” which I assume is a synonym for seeing and being in a world that agrees exactly with oneself on everything.