Possibilities

In a recent posting on the blog At One with the World, the writer expresses her feelings regarding the end of the Castro reign in Cuba, along with the end of other scourges of the 20th Century. “There are so many things that I have seen in my lifetime that I swore were beyond my wildest imagination,” she writes.  “In the 70’s, I never thought to see the end of Apartheid in South Africa, or Nelson Mandela a free man; I never thought to see the Berlin Wall come down and the unification of Germany; I never thought to see the break up of the Soviet Union; and I never thought I would live to see Castro step down from ruling Cuba on his own accord.”

I couldn’t agree more with her sentiments. As a child, I was raised to fear the Russians. My early school memories are filled with visions of air raid practices.  When the fire alarm sounded with a certain pattern, I would be directed to either line up in the coat closet or crouch beneath my desk, at all times covering my head to protect it from falling debris. I recall one day in second grade coming home from school explaining how the teacher said that if the boats coming to Cuba didn’t turn around that day, the world was going to end.  Our homework was to pray that evening that it didn’t. Five years later, on the first day of the Middle East War of 1967, I remember boarding the school bus for the ride home.  A fellow student  said matter of factly, “Did you hear?  World War III just started today.”  Such were the carefree “Happy Days” of the 60s.

Decades later, watching on TV as the statue of Lenin fell to the ground, it was hard to believe the fears of my childhood could be ended so quickly and in some ways uneventfully.  I felt the same hearing the news of Castro. 

Today’s generation has a new fear. They live with the fear that at any moment a terrorist attack could kill them or their loved ones. I only hope that one day, they too, can see the end to the scourge of their age. As noted on At One with the World, “All things are possible.”

   

Nowhere to Hide

The other day, I couldn’t remember the web address for the home page of a graduate course I am currently taking on electronic communities and writing.  Rather than look it up, I decided to take the easy way out—I did a Google search. I typed in the instructor’s name and the course abbreviation, then hit enter.  What popped up was slightly unnerving. Much to my surprise, what appeared beneath the address for my course’s home page was a link to my own Blog.   Apparently, because I had referenced my instructor’s name in a previous posting, my Google search had turned up more than my instructor; it had turned up me.

Why I found this so unsettling may have something to do with my reserved upbringing. In our Irish family, things are not bared for all the world to see. As the saying goes, we don’t “air our dirty linen.”  Though a legitimate reference to my instructor (I had made reference to an article he had written) is certainly not dirty linen, the ease in which something I had thought was between a select small group of classmates could become known to millions left me feeling vulnerable. 

I am not alone in my insecurity. In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Siva Vaidhyanathan comments that even young people who have no qualms about posting pictures of their latest exploits on social networking sites are concerned about who gets to decide what information is shared. “When we complain about infringements of privacy,” notes Vaidhyanathan, “What we really demand is some measure of control over our reputation in the world. Who should have the power to collect, cross-reference, publicize, or share information about us, regardless of what that information might be?”

The lack of control over what kinds of information about ourselves are made available to others has serious repercussions for us as individuals and as a society. Last year, I was sickened to watch what happened to a family friend whose private mistake became a public scandal on the televison show American Idol. Notes Vaidhyanathan, “As long as we are held highly accountable for youthful indiscretions that are easily Googled by potential employers or U.S. customs agents, we limit social, intellectual, and actual mobility. And we deny everyone second chances.”

What is worse than the kind of reputation trashing my friends endured, however, is what Vaidhyanathan refers to as the Nonopticon. The Nonopticon is  the “state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it.”  It describes the current environment in which we are tracked, watched, and profiled through what we buy at the grocery store, order on-line, or peruse on the Web. Notes Vaidhyanathan, “for the sake of a decent society, we must expose, understand, and confront the Nonopticon.”

Why?

When Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed in the knee by Tonya Harding, the image of an anguished Nancy looking up at the TV camera wailing “WHHHHHYY?” was quite vivid.  Of late, I have found myself asking the same question on my two-hour journey home from Rowan Thursday evenings.  “WHHHHHHY?” I wail aloud to the trucker passing me in the fast lane.  Why blog, why Zoho, why Netvibes, why Loranger, why Wenger, why me.  For those of you who have found yourself asking the same question, the answer can be found on William Wolff’s Blog called Composing Spaces in his “Preparing Writers for the Future of Information Systems.”

Living in the Global Village

“Tribal people, one of their main kinds of sport is butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies…The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There’s no evidence of that in any situation that we’ve ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each other…the global village is a place of a very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situtions.”

 Marshall McLuhan

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte

Several summers ago I had the opportunity to visit the art museum in Chicago where I was able to view the Seurat’s masterpiece of Pointillism, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte. The painting was much more immense than I had expected, consuming a wall about the size of an average bedroom. Seurat was a Pointillist, using a brush technique in which small individual dots are used to give an illusion of  the subject. In a Pointillist painting, the eye and brain work together to piece the image together.   

Pictures of this painting can never do justice to the experience of being consumed by it. Viewing it was an activity, not a passive observation. I noted that whenever I would move to a different place, the painting appeared to change, depending upon my perspective.   Up close, the dots of color appeared whole and seemed to jump out and attack me. Farther away, they appeared to blend into a seamless whole.

I cannot help but connect this visit to my reading last week of a series of lectures and interviews with the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan called Understanding Me. McLuhan makes frequent reference to Seurat, noting the similarities between his Pointillist technique and electronic media.  As an Impressionist, Seurat was more concerned with the light reflecting off the objects in the painting rather than the objects themselves.  Television does the same, McLuhan noted. It showers dots on its viewers through light.

The similarity is about more than dots, however. Wendy Beckett, in her book Sister Wendy’s American Masterpieces, notes that “the park was quite a noisy place: a man blows his bugle, children run around, there are dogs. Yet the impression we receive is of silence, of control, of nothing disordered. I think it is this that makes La Grande Jatte so moving to us who live in such a disordered world: Seurat’s control. There is an intellectual clarity here that sets him free to paint this small park with an astonishing poetry. Even if the people in the park are pairs or groups, they still seem alone in their concision of form–alone but not lonely. No figure encroaches on another’s space: all coexist in peace.”

Could this be the “mass man” that McLuhan speaks of?  As Beckett points out, Seurat was not concerned with the individuals at the park. He cared only of the whole.  Perhaps, through the establishment of one mass consciousness, man will finally live in piece as he does in the painting.

What Would McCluhan Think of YouTube?

Ineresting.

The Parkway as a Community of Practice

I am writing this as my Dodge Grand Caravan gallops its way down the left hand lane of the Parkway, just past Exit 137. I am returning from a Parent’s Weekend trip to Providence College in Rhode Island. I am topping off this trip with a 200-mile engagement with Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Three hundred miles of broken white lines tends to free up the mind for associative thinking. It occurs to me that the Parkway itself is a community of practice.  If reification is “the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness,’ ” (pg. 58), then the signs are everywhere.

“Bridge speed 45 MPH,” “Cash must keep right,” “Lane ends merge left.” Such concrete manifestations of abstractness are what Wenger is talking about when she points out that “writing down a law, creating a procedure, or producing a tool is a similar process. A certain understanding is given form” (54-59).

As a community of practice, I note that the drivers’ participation in this practice has much to do with this reification. The duality of participation and reification is everywhere around me.  I glance at the speedometer on the dashboard and it reads 72 mph. The sign outside posts the speed limit at 65mph. It seems that while the concept of a safe speed limit has been written as law and posted, the members participating in the community have altered its reality, revealing “the inherent limitations of reification” (64).

Electronic Shopping Buddies

The business section of this morning’s Asbury Park Press had an article about a web site where shoppers get together on-line to chat about shopping, share information about products, and steer each other to good buys.  The website, called Kaboodle, looks and acts like a social networking site and combines two of the things Americans love to do most: shop and talk on-line. According to the article, which came from the Associated Press, “Many users find it utterly addicting, logging on at least daily to see products that other people are looking for or have discovered. These members say the shopping lists their fellow users post are often funky, personal elements of self-expression, as much as that may sound like an overly exalted way of describing what is, after all, consumption.”

Such activities are a perfect example of the social learning theory put forth by Etienne Wenger in her book titled Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.  Wenger points out that learning results from the interplay of human beings as they engaged in a common pursuit, collectively creating meaning and identity.  She uses the term ”community of practice” to describe such networks as families, offices, and social networking sites. Practice, as defined by Wenger, is “a process by which we can experience the world and our engagement with it as meaningful” (51). What makes the shopping/chatting site so indicative of the kind of practice Wenger describes is that it not only engages its members, it serves to redefine the act of shopping itself and give a new kind of identity to the shopper.  Shoppers in this community of practice are no longer passive victims of retail, sitting politely waiting for the weekend shopping circular. In this community of practice, shoppers call the advertising shots, spreading word (and links) about bargains, which brands and merchants to seek out, and which  dot com sites to shop at.  As Pat Conroy, vice chairman and lead consumer products consultant for Deloitte & Touche, notes in the Press article, “We have never seen, in the past few decades, the shift in power to consumers that we’re seeing now.” 

Why I like Amazon.com

Nielsen and Loranger’s Prioritizing Web Usability has many concrete applications in my daily life. Had I read this book a year ago, I would have known not to side with colleagues who felt their creative freedom was under attack because the college web pages were being standardized. I’ve learned about various things I have being doing incorrectly on the Internet as well. It seems one of the subjects under observation may well have been me, at least on page 68 (see description of inept multiple window manipulator). Now I will know how to view the hotel pool at the Marriott without freezing my computer. Most informative of all, I can now explain some obsessive behaviors of late. Apparently,
the reason I so quickly forked over $40 for a pair of Victorian lace-up boots (note: these were not for me; my daughter needed for them for a school play) is because of the interior link the search engine brought me to (see page 29). And the preponderance of brown cartons arriving at my doorstep this week from Amazon (many of them books for this class) can be blamed on my skill in loading the shopping cart.

Questions about the Learning Record

1.  Are we to download this?  If so, how and to where?

2.  Will we be keeping records throughout the semester?  What should we keep and how?

3.  Will this be an entirely on-line portfolio?

4.  Will some of our records be links (to blogs, for example?)

5.  Can you illustrate this step-by-step? There is so much information it is hard to know what to focus on.