The Freedoniad: A Tale of Epic Adventure in which Two BFFs Travel the Universe and End up in Dunkirk, New York

Giving it another boost, because: Why not! And it was so much FUN! 

Bumping this to the top (from 2014) because why not? Some of us need a break from weary weather.

This is the story of Sparkychan and Gojochan and how they started in Jersey City, New Jersey, traveled the universe, and ended up in Dunkirk in upstate New York. Sparkychan’s the pink one and Gojochan’s the grey one. “Chan”, as I’m sure you know, is a Japanese diminutive and is appended to the names of children, where it has affectionate connotations. “Sparky” is obvious enough, and as for “Gojo,” that’s short for “Gojira,” which became “Godzilla” when rendered into English.

I bought the two toys so I could pose them among some of Jersey City’s grimier spots, as you see them above. I named them when I started using them in stories I told to two young girls I’d recently met.

Except that I didn’t really meet them.

I met their father.

Except that I didn’t really meet him either.

Not in the “real” world.

I met him online, at Bérubé’s joint, where he posted as The Constructivist. Bérubé – that’s Michael Bérubé, formerly president of the Modern Language Association – ran a real sociable place, where The Constructivist and I joined a bunch of others in a major interwebs project/party. And that is how I more or less – the details don’t matter – ended up at Mostly Harmless, one of The Constructivist’s blogs.

These days he mostly posts about women’s golf. But back in those days he would also post about his two young daughters, which he identified as onechan (the older one) and imoto (the younger one). I believe onechan was between three and four at the time.

So on July 9, 2007, I posted following photo addressed to onechan and with this title: “Waiting for her in America, but with fond memories of Japan.”

The Constructivist is on the faculty at the State University of New York at Freedonia and lives in Dunkirk with his family. His wife is Japanese and they were in Japan for a year. He was on a Fulbright and she was visiting with her family in Chiba Fukuoka. Hence the photo’s title.

The tree’s not exactly a Bodhi tree, but you get the idea. You’ll also notice that I jacked up the saturation at bit, which I sometimes do. Anyhow, the sisters had a nice conversation about Sparkychan and Gojochan (though I hadn’t yet named them), which is reported in the comments HERE.

Is Academia Eating Its Young?

Bumped to the top of the queue from a decade ago on general principle. Nothing's changed on this except that other social media have displaced blogging. The pandemic has killed off some of the weaker schools and hastened the transition to forms of distant learning. Permatemping is still a scandal.

The fate of bloggers has been a matter of some interest in the academic blogosphere. Not bloggers in general, but graduate students and junior faculty. The concern is not just that no professional credit accrues for blogging, but that blogging may actually hurt one’s career. It is a fact that many (older) faculty are, at best, ignorant of and indifferent to, online activity of all sorts, including blogging. Some – many? – are actively hostile to it.

This issue came to my attention most recently though a discussion at Arcade, a humanities site sponsored by Stanford. Arcade includes a group blog where a wide range of humanists have blogging rights. This particular issue was not the central focus of the discussion – which was about the anxieties attendant upon thinking in public and, by the way, why aren’t people posting as much anymore? – but it did come up.

In thinking about the issue I was struck by one thought: it’s pointless to try legitimating blogging in the current academic world. Of course I think blogging is a valid intellectual pursuit,; that’s not an issue. The current academic world is too far gone to be able to accommodate blogging in a robust way. Just why I think that would require some explaining, which I don’t want to at the moment. Let’s just say that I’ve been deeply skeptical about academic institutions for some time, and this is just another reason to despair of them.

And that leads me to this question: Is the academic world eating it’s young? And if so, how can it survive?

I believe the answer to the first question is “Yes.” And the answer to the second question must therefore be, “No, it cannot survive. Not in its present form.”

On the first point, it’s long been common wisdom that graduate students and junior faculty must curb their creativity and get with the program so they can obtain, first, a tenure-track appointment, and then tenure itself. But, if you’ve been holding back during what may be the most creative period in your intellectual life, will you be able to open it up once you’ve gotten tenure, or will you have forgotten how? And, it’s not as though having tenure brings you home free. There are still many lines to toe, many hoops to jump. I take the case of Mark Changizi as an index of the current state of affairs. He’s one of the most brilliant and creative psychologists of his generation, but has chosen to abandon the academic ship because it didn’t give him room to think deep thoughts.

Then there is the scandal of permatemping, using graduate students and poorly paid adjuncts to teach the bulk of undergraduate courses. Not only does this make research impossible – and research has never been of primary interest to more than a small number of academics – but it makes good teaching difficult to impossible. How can you do a good job if you’re teaching five courses at a time, spread over two campuses? You can’t. All you can do is hang on and hope your spouse has good health coverage.

No, the current system cannot survive, not when the structure of the institution forces older faculty to grind the younger faculty into hamburger. At the same time there’s the pressure from the on-line for-profit world. Those institutions have their own problems, but they’re here to stay. They’ll continue to siphon students away from more traditional institutions, and those traditional institutions will offer more and more online instruction, taught by graduate students and adjuncts.

Many schools will survive, in some form. But the system as it currently exists is dying. It cannot be saved. The best that can be hoped for is that some gifted people at some institutions will be able take hold of change and do something interesting. I see precious little of that on the horizon.

The Genius Chronicles: Going Boldly Where None Have Gone Before?

I've bumped this to the top of the queue because it's that time of year and on general principle. I first published the report in 2013 and have updated it through 2018. After that, what's the point? It's the same old same old.

I've now assembled my posts on the MacArthur Fellows Program into a single document under the above title. You can download it here at Academia.edu, but also here, at my Scribd page. Abstract, introduction, and embedded document below.

Abstract: This is an informal evaluation of the MacArthur Fellowship Program, the so-called "genius grants." I argue that the program functions basically as a PR vehicle for the MacArthur Foundation and for the foundation world in general. I also suggest that it could achieve better results by not awarding grants to people who already have jobs at elite institutions. There are discussions of how talent is evaluated, the cultural factors in genius, accounts of three elite institutions (Johns Hopkins, RPI, and SUNY Buffalo), and discussions of Louis Armstrong, John von Neumann, and Richard Feynman.

Why Look for Geniuses?

As examples of the kinds of people I mean by the word “genius”, consider the following list: Voltaire, John von Neumann, Pāṇini, St. Augustine, Sappho, Cervantes, Florence Nightingale, Sequoia, Murasaki Shikibu, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Goethe and Mozart. Those are people of such an exalted nature that we wouldn’t expect more than one per class of MacArthur Fellows, if that. If that’s the standard, then perhaps the real question is whether or not the program has identified any geniuses at all. And it’s likely we’re not going to know for a while, as it takes awhile for individual contributions to work their way into and through the culture.

Of course, the foundation itself has never said it was on the prowl for geniuses:

Journalists and others sometimes use “genius grant” as a shorthand reference for the MacArthur Fellowship. We avoid using the term “genius” to describe MacArthur Fellows because it connotes a singular characteristic of intellectual prowess. The people we seek to support express many other important qualities: ability to transcend traditional boundaries, willingness to take risks, persistence in the face of personal and conceptual obstacles, capacity to synthesize disparate ideas and approaches.

But I wonder what would have happened if the "genius" label hadn't been stuck to the MacArthur Fellows Program. Would the it have taken old in the public imagination – to the extent that it has, which isn't up there with the Oscars, Emmys, and Grammies, but it’s pretty high – without that label?

That seems unlikely. The term “genius” has an immediate impact. The phrase “exceptionally capable individual” does not, and it just gets worse if you add further qualifications, such as the notion that these individuals are pursuing ideas and projects off the beaten track. No if the program was to get any traction in the public mind, then “genius” it had to be.

That the term got stuck on the Fellows Program by journalists rather than by the foundation is a public relations bonus. And as long as the term sticks, the program can distance itself from the term all it wants to without, in fact, threatening the publicity.

For that, as Waldemar Nielsen noted in 1997, is what the program is. It’s public relations not simply for the MacArthur Foundation, but for the world of elite foundations. The genius grants put a meritocratic sheen on a system that is permeated by cronyism. What is more disturbing – for cronyism, after all, is an old story – is that we live in a world undergoing massive and potentially cataclysmic change, but in social, cultural, and political systems, and in our relationship to the environment. In such a world we desperately need new ideas, not further assurances that the old institutions have things well in hand.

People need hope for the future. They need to believe that the world is somehow on their side. The possibility that a genius can be picked out of the cornfield or the alleyway and do great things, that is a comforting belief. It says that the world CAN change for the better.

But the MacArthur Foundation isn’t even looking for the most gifted people in America, they’re looking for the best ones in a certain very diffuse social network. And that social network is biased toward an institutional world rooted in the 19th Century. By awarding a very high percentage of their fellowships – a two-thirds majority in 2013 – to people who have jobs at elite institutions the foundation the MacArthur Fellows Program reinforces the network of institutions that are failing us. They could do better, but they won’t.

Vygotsky Tutorial (for Connected Courses)

Bumping to the top of the queue because it is relevant to my current interests (the impossibility of brain-to-brain thought transfer).

Howard Rheingold recently mentioned Vygotsky in a Connected Courses discussion:

And student-centric pedagogy in which learners attempt to make meaning of texts together isn't as new as social media. Dewey, Freire, Vygotsky and others pointed in that direction.

I’m not sure what he had in mind with that reference to Vygotsky, but Vygotsky is one of the seminal 20th century thinkers about language and mind and has had a strong influence on me.

Vygotsky argued, in effect, that thinking – considered as a quasi-verbal voice in the mind – is just internalized speech. The young child learns to speak to herself as others speak to her and thereby gains a mechanism affording some control over her mind. We can contrast Vygotsky’s view with the somewhat later view of Noam Chomsky, the linguist, who regarded language as primarily an instrument of thought and only incidentally an instrument of communication. On the contrary, Vygostkians argue, we can think (in the sense of talking to ourselves) because we can communicate.

I’ve already got a relatively brief post on this elsewhere on New Savanna: Thought as Inner Speech. In this post I excerpt a long article published in PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts: First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction. When reading this excerpt keep two things in mind. First, there is no deliberate instruction going on. For the most part we acquire language without being deliberately taught; we just “breath it in.” The child is not, in this process, imitating the adult (or other speakers). She’s internalizing.

Think of the process Vygotsky describes in terms of the scaffolding metaphor that's currently all over the place. The adult's speech scaffold's the child's behavior, both in action and perception. Then the child learns to use her own speech to scaffold. Finally there's no need for external scaffolding, that is, no speech either from an adult or from the child herself.

Vygotsky on the Emergence of Thought as Inner Speech

Given this conception of self and language I now want to turn to Vygotsky's conception of thought as inner speech. The general idea is that as others direct the child's actions and perceptions through language, so the child learns to use language in controlling herself (Vygotsky, 1962; Luria, 1959). In effect, the child peoples her brain with an other and uses that other as a mechanism to control her own mind.

Figure 1: Adult directing child's attention to a bunny.

When a young child is requested to do something, the linguistic channel in the child's brain analyzes the acoustic input and activates the appropriate cognitive and perceptual schemas. The command "come here" will activate a plan for locomotion while the command "look at the bunny" (see Figure 1 for an informal representation) will activate a plan for seeing. The child knows that she is to execute the command because of the intonation pattern (Jakobson's conative function, 1960), which, presumably, is grounded in the various neural systems subserving social interaction. Upon receipt of that intonation pattern, the child's motor system is prepared to execute a pattern. As the content of the utterance is decoded the motor schema, whether for moving her body or looking in a certain direction, is executed. This sounds as though the infant is helpless in the face of intelligible commands from others, that she has no choice but to execute them. Initially, I believe, this is the case. The motor control center has no way of distinguishing between a command originating in the brain of another and a command originating within the child's own brain. Once the ability to make the distinction is learned, the word "no" enters the child's vocabulary as a means of marking autonomy (Church, 1966, p. 101).

Not only can the child listen, she can also speak – though there is a lag between the child's capacity to understand language and the child's ability to produce it such that the child can understand more than she can talk about (Lenneberg, 1967). If the child's utterance contains a command directed toward herself – and there is evidence on this (Vygotsky, 1962; Luria, 1959) – then she is using language to direct her activity in the way which others use language to direct her activity (see Figure 2). The route from acoustic analysis to the execution of the action is the same in both cases, only the utterance's point of origin is different. In one case the utterance originates with another, in the other case with the child herself.

Figure 2: Child talking to herself about a bunny.

The next developmental step, so Vygotsky's account goes, is that the child's self-directed speech becomes silent and internal (see Figure 3). In a word, it becomes what is ordinarily known as thinking (Benzon, 1976a, cf. Lamb, 1998, pp. 181-182). Given that this process starts with language which others direct to the growing child and involves mental structures for coordinating language and social interaction, this would make thought, so understood, to be an inner dialog between virtual persons. It is thus not surprising that, in his investigation of the metaphor system governing folk conceptions of the self, George Lakoff (1996) found that we conceive the self to be a multiplicity of agents. And when we leave the world of folk psychology and enter the world of psychoanalytic thinking we find that the superego, the inner agent of social norms, develops as an internalization of parent figures (for example, see Freud, 1960, pp. 18-29; Erikson, 1963, pp. 256-57).

Figure 3: Child thinking about a bunny.

Let us then assume the existence of the mental machinery responsible for the process Vygotsky has outlined. This machinery operates on the self-structure as described in the account of personal pronouns. In the context of this more sophisticated machinery the ego and alter nodes are variables. Let us assume that this machinery creates what Gilles Fauconnier (1994) calls mental spaces; a mental space is an occasion for thinking, speaking, or writing [Note 9]. It is a temporary event; neurologically it would correspond to a particular pattern of brain activation.

[Note: the talk of ego and alter variables in the following paragraph refers back to an earlier section of the original article. Just read through it.]

A mental space can be real or hypothetical (Lakoff, 1996, pp. 95 ff.). A real space is one representing real events, whether immediately present or recalled from the past. When activated in a real space the ego variable is set to equal the self-image while alter is set to equal the person with whom one is talking. This means that all the knowledge one has of that other is brought into play, whatever that means, through the operations of the alter variable. And, of course, all the knowledge one has of oneself is brought to bear through the ego variable. One constructs a hypothetical space to consider hypothetical situations about real people or, possibly, imaginary events about completely imaginary folks. When activated in a hypothetical space ego can be set to equal any person, as can alter. In particular, it is possible to set both ego and alter to the same value. When one is just thinking, ego and alter may both be set to the self-image, thus making such thinking into a conversation with oneself. When one is watching a performance of Antony and Cleopatra, ego may be set to Antony while alter is set to Cleopatra, or Caesar, or Enobarbus, whomever Antony is interacting with at the time – a matter we'll take up in the next section.

Walter Murch on Collective Creativity [TALENT SEARCH]

When I decided that this week would be Talent Search Week I was hoping to have a new article for today. But I've gotten broadsided by other matters and have spent most of the day  putting out fires.  So I've decided to bump this up to the top of the queue. Walter Murch has won three Oscars, one for sound on Apocalypse Now and two for The English Patient, sound and editing.

Two summers ago I was working on a series of posts about Apocalypse Now. One day I got an email from one Walter Murch, a man I did not know. But I knew the name.

Could it be him?

The Walter Murch I was thinking of had gone to Johns Hopkins a couple of years before I had and, like me, had associated himself with Professor Richard Macksey. When this Walter Murch left Hopkins he went West and ended up in the film business, where he’d worked on a number of important films, including Apocalypse Now, for which he won an Academy Award (aka an Oscar) for sound.

Was this that Walter Murch? Yes, it was, and he liked what I was saying about Apocalypse Now. Since then we’ve carried on a casual and sporadic email correspondence.

Most recently we’ve been talking about the collective nature of movie making. By convention overall creative responsibility for a film is credited to the director, and for sufficient reason. The problem is, however, that our basic cultural model of creativity is one of individual creativity, and that does not do justice to any number of activities, from scientific laboratories, through basketball teams and ballet companies, the founding team of a high-tech start-up and, yes, a motion-picture production ensemble.

Walter sent me a passage from a 1994 journal entry:

Reading Penrose - the fact that billiards, which is the game usually given as an example of mechanical physics in deterministic practice, is not immune to vanishingly small initial conditions for the outcome of complex sequences • A line of 20 balls may be arranged in a zigzag such that each will hit the next in sequence when tapped by the cue ball. But exactly where the last ball will wind up after it is hit is subject to something as small as an intake of breath in the neighboring town. If there are 26 balls, a molecular disturbance in some neighboring galaxy will influence the outcome • Reminds me of my 'magic light' hypothesis of film: that film is the sensitive receptacle of everything that happens during the filming - what the assistant electrician had for breakfast, etc. - caught somehow, invisibly, in the amber of celluloid. In the future, people will be able to see this complex of interactions directly by shining a special ‘light’ through the film. It will look like some 5-dimensional moiré pattern, endlessly shifting, endlessly fascinating.

By Penrose I assume he meant Roger Penrose, a mathematician who had published a number of general interest books in the 1990s. You can find images of moiré patterns all over the place on the internet, or you can look below for some simple examples I ran up on my “classic” Mac back in 1985 or 86:

Walter then went on to comment on his old journal entry:

What I meant by "Magic Light" is the discovery of some new force (Force 5) of nature, which has been with us all along but of which we are presently as ignorant as Newton was of electromagnetism. Using this new “force” as a beam, these hypothetical people of the future will transect our films and see - not the images which we see - but some fascinating interaction of all the people who worked on the film, in all its unexpected contingency, and this will be much more satisfying (to them) than the film itself. And it will be a wonder, to those future people, that we could accomplish this filmmaking without any knowledge of “Force 5”, which will be as crucial to them in their society as electromagnetism is to us today. As wondrous as is the construction of Gothic cathedrals to us today: we can hardly believe that our ancestors achieved these miracles with only human and (literal) horse power, and with no engineering textbooks.

And you could add: Duke Ellington and Shakespeare and the Egyptian Pyramids and many other things to this list.

Combining these two passages we get a sense of a film as a very compact “distillation“ of the diverse events surrounding and accompanying it. One might hazard the word “essence” but I fear it has too much of the wrong baggage associated with it. I’m a bit reminded of the JPEG compression for still images and the MPEG compression for video images. You “squeeze out” the redundancy and get a much more compact encapsulation of the information. Then, at playback, the redundancy is added back in and you see the full photograph or video image.

Walter goes on:

I think part of the mystery is that occasionally there is a balance of forces - what Koestler called the autonomy of the part and the wisdom of the whole - where the “part” (whatever it is) makes autonomous decisions that would be impossible for the theoretically guiding force (whatever that may be) to make. And that these decisions miraculously further the higher goal of the “organism” (Duke Ellington's sound, for instance: Duke did not have to tell each of his musicians exactly what to do at every moment) Similarly, if everything that is done on a film had to be expressed in “machine code” (e.g. “turn thirty degrees to the left and cock your right eyebrow”) the film would never get off the ground. People talk about this happening in sports, in battle, in every communal undertaking in fact. It is the human equivalent of the miraculous (to us) ability of fishes and birds to swim/fly in formation and all turn, repeatedly, at exactly the same moment, as if the school/flock were a single organism.

And when we've understood –mathematically, neurally–the nature of that coupling that makes of many ONE, then we will be on the threshold of a deeper understanding of  not only OUR nature, but perhaps of life itself.

Some time ago I read an interview with Jack Welch, then CEO of General Electric, who talked about how he and his colleagues in the executive suite could communicate in “code.” Through years of working together they could speak volumes in very terse ways because their shared experience gave them, well, a code that was meaningful among them but not necessarily to anyone else.

Yes, there are lone creative “geniuses” but I suspect there are fewer of those than we imagine. Creativity needs community and communities breed creativity, or can do so under the right circumstances. We have only just begun to understand such matters.

Five Extraordinarily Creative Communities, But Maybe Six [TALENT SEARCH]

I'm bumping this to the top for Talent Search Week. Here I look at some creative communities, for, often as not (more often?), genius thrives among genius. And genius can only spread among friends and allies. This is about to be added to, The Genius Chronicles: Going Boldly Where None Have Gone Before? to give us Version 7, which you may download here: 

https://www.academia.edu/7974651/The_Genius_Chronicles_Going_Boldly_Where_None_Have_Gone_Before.

* * * * *

Shakespeare, Ellington, Disney, Apocalypse Now, English at SUNY Buffalo, Mana Contemporary (?)

I was thinking about Apocalypse Now, an extraordinary film, as I often do. But not about the film itself, rather about how it was made, the production spread halfway across the Western Hemisphere (Hollywood to the Philippines), several years, a typhoon, a heart attack, and miles and miles of footage – well, not miles and miles, but you get the idea. Basically, Coppola was riding herd on a small town of talented people devoted to making this one film.

From there my mind drifted to the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo in its glory years, then to Duke Ellington, Shakespeare, and Disney – the glory years of the five early features, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi. Extraordinarily creative communities all, organized at different times and places and to different ends. Now there’s Mana Contemporary, right here in my own backyard, a unique for-profit non-profit art complex on the West Side of Jersey City. In this context it’s a question mark: Will it spawn an extraordinarily creative community??

Let’s start with Ellington and work our way through the list and back to Mana.

Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington was an American composer and bandleader whose career spanned the middle half of the 20th Century. During the latter part of that period he maintained his band at a financial loss. It was his instrument and he needed it as such; by that time his royalty income was sufficient to cover his costs.

First, Ellington did not write music in the abstract. He wrote specifically for the personnel in his band at the time. When the personnel changed, he changed the arrangements if needed. The band’s roster was unusually stable. Harry Carney, his baritone sax player, stayed with him for his entire career. Other key musicians had long tenures – Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart on trumpet; Juan Tizol and Sam Nanton on trombone; Sam Woodyard on drums; Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, and Barney Bigard on woodwinds, and many others. And then there’s his alter ego, Billy Strayhorn, who contributed much of the band’s repertoire – including its theme song, “Take the A Train” – once he joined up in 1939.

Ellington was open to ideas from his men. Many of the lines and riffs, not to mention a tune or three, in his music came from them. So many, in fact, that when Lincoln Collier published his Ellington biography in 1987 he decided to cast doubt on Duke’s genius because of that. He was right to emphasize Ellington’s permeability to ideas from those very talented musicians he gathered specifically for that reason, but as for genius, who knows what THAT is, anyhow? Keeping those folks together and pointed in the same direction was no small task. Surely we must give Ellington credit for having the good taste needed to dream it up, and for having the wile and guile needed to pull it off.

The fact is we have been so besotted with the Romantic idea of the genius as a solitary creative figure pissing in the wind of stale bourgeois conformity that we have no effective way of talking about how people work together in groups. And that’s what Ellington’s band was, a very creative group, with Ellington as cat-herder in chief and front man.

William Shakespeare

And I’ll bet Shakespeare was much the same. Of course we don’t know much about the man, so little in fact that nominating others for the honor of having written those plays has been a minor academic sport for over a century. But, like Ellington, he didn’t write in a vacuum, he didn’t write for some distant audience. He wrote for a specific company, his company. He knew who would speak those lines, what resources of gait, gesture and posture, of facial expression and vocal nuance – a raise of the brow, the twitch of a lip, a stutter coughed up on the fly – they commanded. Did they suggest lines to him? I wouldn’t be surprised. Did he accept their suggestions? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Did they get pissed-off at him for hogging the credit? I suppose, but they’re the ones who took the bows, no?

Just as we know little about the man, we know little about the process by which his plays came to be published in the form we have them – two different sets of texts, most plays in two different versions, some with significant differences between the two versions. Were they based strictly on Shakespeare’s original scripts or did they reflect improvisations and inspirations that happened in performance? We don’t know. But I rather suspect that Shakespeare’s working methods were more like Ellington’s than our prejudices in these matters can accommodate.

So, Ellington and Shakespeare, individual men who surrounded themselves with bands of brothers, channeling and shaping their creativity so they spoke with one voice.

Toward a Fan-Based Research Collaboratory

Cross posted at The Valve

Despite some reservations about fan scholarship -- e.g. I've seen pointless edit wars at Wikipedia & pros are adept at pointless quarrels as well -- I'm seriously thinking about an initiative to see if fans are interested in doing at least some of the descriptive work I call for in the piece on cultural evolution I recently did for the National Humanities Center (cf. this "quasi-festo" for naturalist criticism, and this piece on "Kubla Khan"). I see little prospect that academy-based scholars will under take such work in the near term. The sort of descriptive work I have in mind is not obviously subordinate to an inquiry into the "meaning" of a text. That pretty much means that the work is not unpublisheable on its own; there's no obvious way to earn professional credit for doing it.

But fans may well be interested in doing such work, though on the texts that interest them. And those texts are only rarely going to be canonical high culture texts. And that's just fine with me. I've done such work on manga and cartoons and would have no problem with doing it on episodes of, e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Trek (any generation).

I've recently been doing quite a bit of work on Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film by Nina Paley, which I discuss in the Humanities Center post. As some of you may know, the film is done in four different visual styles. So I've made a table with a column for each style and then gone through the film from beginning to end and briefly annotated each segment in the proper column. You can find that table online in a Google docs file here. One of those segments, the Agni Pariksha, is done in a fifth style. I've gone through that segment an annotated each "shot" or sequence within it. You can find that here. In principle each of the some 60+ segments in the film could be described at the level of detail I've used in the Agni Pariksha segment.

In fact, one could easily describe a film frame-by-frame. Would that be worthwhile? In some cases, yes, and in some cases no. It depends. There's really no way of knowing until the work's been done in at least some cases and we can take a look at it.

It's clear to me that such descriptive work is a necessary precondition to a deeper knowledge of texts, whether written, filmed, or videotaped. All the cognitive psych and evolutionary psych and neuro-psych in the world is not going to accomplish what can only be accomplished through description. If the pros aren't going to do the work, then it's up to the fans. If the fans get into it, then in a decade or two the pros will have no choice but to follow or simply to drop off the edge of the earth.

Seel also, this post on Tvtropes.org.

To Academia.edu or Not Academia.edu, that is the question

There's a debate going on about whether or not scholars should participate in Academia.edu. The case against it is: because, capitalism! That is, it is a profit making venture and so doesn't have 'our' best interests at heart. But then, do existing colleges and universities?

Gary Hall is one source of this discussion. His Should This Be the Last Thing You Read on Academia.edu? has, at this point, been seen almost 12,000 times. A paragraph:

Of course, the majority of academics who are part of Academia.edu’s social network are the product of the state-regulated, public higher education system, as is their research (a system, it should be said, from which public funding is steadily being withdrawn). But just as Airbnb and Uber are parasitic on the public ‘infrastructure and the investment’ that was ‘made by cities a generation ago’ (roads, buildings, street lighting, etc.), so Academia.edu has a parasitical relationship to the public education system, in that these academics are labouring for it for free to help build its privately-owned for-profit platform by providing the aggregated input, data and attention value. We can thus see that posting on Academia.edu is not ethically and politically equivalent to making research available using an institutional open access repository at all.

I am currently participating in two discussions of the matter at Academia.edu. One of them is hosted by Eileen Joy, publisher of Punctum Books: Open Letter to Rosemary Feal, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and the Modern Language Association. The other is hosted by Tim Markey: On Staying With academia.edu.

I've expressed by own general views on the issue in the first two sections of my working paper, Personal Observations on Entering an Age of Computing Machines.

Wuthering Heights, Vampires, Handbooks, and Citizen Science

Heathcliff as vampire wannabe? Why didn't I think of that? Fortunately others have.

Over at The Literature Network, kev67 asked (in Nov 2012):

I was just wondering whether Wuthering Heights was some sort of proto-vampire book when in the last chapter Nelly herself wonders whether Heathcliff is a ghoul or a vampire. I was surprised as I did not think vampires had been discovered till later. I have not watched any of the Twilight films (and I don't intend to neither) but it struck me there were some similarities between Wuthering Heights, Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other vampire films and television series. Heathcliff can stand bright sunlight; bibles, wooden crosses, garlic and holy water might annoy him but would not be sufficient to ward him off; and although driving a wooden stake through his heart would kill him, so would other methods of execution. However, there are some similarities: Heathcliff is evil (like most vampires). Heathcliff and Catherine continue to walk the Earth after death and do not find rest. Heathcliff has no hope of salvation, neither does he want it. Heathcliff's idea of heaven is close to torment. Heathcliff's love for Catherine is eternal (rather like some vampire love stories). Heathcliff's love for Catherine is rather chaste. Heathcliff is tall, strong, rather dark with long, black hair. Heathcliff forms one point of a love triangle with Catherine as the apex (a bit like Twilight I believe).

The good folks at Shmoop – "We speak student" – are on the case. Here's the lead to their Wuthering Heights material:

Edward and Bella, meet Heathcliff and Catherine.

That's right: before The Walking Dead, Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Vampire Diaries, there was Wuthering Heights.

At first glance, Heathcliff may not resemble the vampires that you've grown to know and love (or hate), but he's got a lot more going for him than most of 'em. Just saying.

Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, revolves around the passionate and destructive love between its two central characters, Emily Brontë's headstrong and beautiful Catherine Earnshaw and her tall, dark, handsome, and brooding hero/devil, Heathcliff.

Forget the romantic candlelit dinners, the wine, and the roses. Catherine and Heathcliff's love exists on an entirely different plane: one that involves ghosts, corpses, the communion (or possession) of souls, and revenge. And, speaking of revenge, Heathcliff—who harbors more than one grudge against his adoptive family, the love of his life, and his neighbors—manages to make every revenge drama look like kid's play.

And to seal the deal, "Reading Wuthering Heights gives you bragging rights over all your friends who think that the whole vampire thing started with Buffy. Suckas."

* * * * *

I'm thinking a couple of things.

First, the connection is valid. I assume that proper scholarly work has been done on this connection, tracing themes and connections, that sort of thing. If not, get on it, someone!

Second, I'm guessing that these two sites, Shmoop, and The Literature Network, are aimed at high school students and lower level undergraduates and community college students (and their teachers). And we've got Cliff's Notes and Spark Notes and others serving the same market. They all have basic stuff about literary texts, mostly canonical ones.

How much of the material at these sites could be consolidated into consensus handbooks of materials about these texts? These sites are commercial enterprizes and so, I assume, would be reluctant to give up their stuff to an open-access resource. But, they're already giving their stuff away on the net. Why don't they all draw on the same body of standard material, material that furthermore has been vetted by scholars – assuming you can find first-rate scholars willing to do this. These sites would also be useful for the casebook industry.

I've been calling for handbooks for awhile. My point is that we've got the seeds of that already on the net.

Third, this leads us to citizen science. There's lots of 'fan'-created stuff on the web. Some of high quality. This Wuthering Heights site, by Paul Thompson, is excellent. I found it when looking for a timeline of events in the story. Thompson's done quite a bit of sleuthing on this. There's handbook quality material lurking here.

But how do we put it all together? And just who is "we"? Does literary academia want to commit proud suicide or does it want to enter the 21st century and engage the large population of people who are interested in literature (though they might not give a crap about high theory)?

Online "Session" on the Nature of Stories and the Discipline of Literary Criticism

As some of you may know, Academica.edu is a social networking site for thinkers. It’s central function is to serve as a repository for papers, whatever you want to upload. You can classify each paper however you wish, and receive notice of uploads in whatever categories interest you. And so forth.

They’ve recently added a "session" function. You upload a paper you want to discuss with others and Academica.edu notifies your mutual followers, that is people whose work you follow and who also follow your work. You can also tweet word of the seminar, Facebook it, and otherwise get the word out, which is what I’m doing here. You then have 20 days to discuss the paper.

The paper displays on the left of the screen and comments display on the right. Some comments, annotations, are tied to specific points in the text:

That’s a shot from a session I’ve convened around an open letter I posted to Steven Pinker some years ago. It’s about the nature of stories, using the Winnebago Trickster cycle as an example, and also includes a capsule history of academic literary criticism from just after WWII to more or less the present. Pinker made a short reply.

You can join the session here:

https://www.academia.edu/s/1a44a72101

Humanane Letters and Good Talk: Building Community in a Research Lab

Over at 3 Quarks Daily Jalees Rehman has an interesting post about research life in the life sciences: Literature and Philosophy in the Laboratory Meeting. He identifies a problem:

Over the years, I have noticed that the increasing complexity of the molecular and cellular signaling pathways and the technologies we employ makes it easy to forget the "big picture" of why we are even conducting the experiments. [...] When asked to explain the purpose or goals of our research, we have become so used to directing a laser pointer onto a slide of a cellular model that it becomes challenging to explain the nature of our work without visual aids.

Visual aids = PowerPoint. So:

This fall, I introduced a new component into our weekly lab meetings. After our usual round-up of new experimental data and progress, I suggested that each week one lab member should give a brief 15 minute overview about a book they had recently finished or were still reading. The overview was meant to be a "teaser" without spoilers, explaining why they had started reading the book, what they liked about it, and whether they would recommend it to others. One major condition was to speak about the book without any Powerpoint slides! But there weren't any major restrictions when it came to the book; it could be fiction or non-fiction and published in any language of the world (but ideally also available in an English translation). If lab members were interested and wanted to talk more about the book, then we would continue to discuss it, otherwise we would disband and return to our usual work. If nobody in my lab wanted to talk about a book then I would give an impromptu mini-talk (without Powerpoint) about a topic relating to the philosophy or culture of science.

He then briefly indicates some of the books and philosophical topics they've discussed.

I commented by saying a bit about my experience getting my Ph. D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Investing in Educational Technology Start-Ups is on the Rise

From the NYTimes:

Venture and equity financing for ed tech companies soared to nearly $1.87 billion last year, up 55 percent from the year before, according to a new report from CB Insights, a venture capital database. The figures are the highest since CB Insights began covering the industry in 2009.

However:

While rising sharply, the values of ed tech financing deals are chump change compared with the money flowing into consumer software. Uber, the ride-hailing app, for instance, raised $2.7 billion last year.

The smaller sums going into ed tech illustrate the challenges facing start-ups as they try to persuade public school systems to adopt their novel products. Companies often must navigate local school districts with limited budgets and slow procurement processes. To bypass the bureaucracy, many start-ups are marketing free learning apps and websites directly to teachers in the hopes that their schools might eventually buy enhanced services.

Citizen Science: Help untangle the connections among the brain's neurons

I'm knee-deep in reading a NYTImes Mag article about Sebastian Seung, a Princeton neuroscientist who hopes to map the connections among neurons in the human brain. The human connectome, as it's called, has recently been elevated to Holy Grail status within neuroscientist. While I doubt that it deserves that status, sure, why not map all the connections and see what you get?

In the process Seung has developed a game that allows citizens – that's you and me – to help:

In 2012, Seung started EyeWire, an online game that challenges the public to trace neuronal wiring — now using computers, not pens — in the retina of a mouse’s eye. Seung’s artificial-­intelligence algorithms process the raw images, then players earn points as they mark, paint-by-numbers style, the branches of a neuron through a three-dimensional cube. The game has attracted 165,000 players in 164 countries. In effect, Seung is employing artificial intelligence as a force multiplier for a global, all-volunteer army that has included Lorinda, a Missouri grandmother who also paints watercolors, and Iliyan (a.k.a. @crazyman4865), a high-school student in Bulgaria who once played for nearly 24 hours straight. Computers do what they can and then leave the rest to what remains the most potent pattern-recognition technology ever discovered: the human brain.

Ultimately, Seung still hopes that artificial intelligence will be able to handle the entire job. But in the meantime, he is working to recruit more help. In August, South Korea’s largest telecom company announced a partnership with EyeWire, running nationwide ads to bring in more players. In the next few years, Seung hopes to go bigger by enticing a company to turn EyeWire into a game with characters and a story line that people play purely for fun. “Think of what we could do,” Seung said, “if we could capture even a small fraction of the mental effort that goes into Angry Birds.”

No doubt we will learn something from the connectome of a single brain, but what? What generalizations can we make from the connectome of a single brain? 10 brains, 100 brains, a thousand, ten-thousand? And these are necessarily brains of dead people. It would be nice to follow the connectome of a single brain over time, year by year, month by month, day by day...hour by hour? Imagine, for a moment, that we could do that. Much of the value in that effort would be in tracking the connectivity of individual neurons from one moment to the next. To do that, though, we need to be able to assign a unique identifier to each neuron and then track that identifier from one measurement period to the next. How would we do that?

And then there is this:

Eve Marder, a prominent neuroscientist at Brandeis University, cautions against expecting too much from the connectome. She studies neurons that control the stomachs of crabs and lobsters. In these relatively simple systems of 30 or so neurons, she has shown that neuromodulators — signaling chemicals that wash across regions of the brain, omitted from Seung’s static map — can fundamentally change how a circuit functions. If this is true for the stomach of a crustacean, the mind reels to consider what may be happening in the brain of a mouse, not to mention a human.

I'm thinking that if all goes well, in a decade or so the connectomitrists will examine their work, rethink, and do something else, something that we and they could not otherwise have imagined.

* * * * *

Here's an old post of mine–well, the post isn't so old, but it consists of notes that are at least a decade old–that talks a bit about neural connectivity and identity in the context of direct brain-to-brain communication.

How I’m Going to Spend Christmas Day

I’m going out for dinner with friends, and new friends at that, so that will be good. But between now – 8:30AM – and then, how would I know?

I’ve got a number of writing projects I’m working on, some that are near completion: the compilation of my 3 Quarks Daily essays, my series on the nature and direction of cultural evolution, and my essay on bell rhythms and spirits, based on this working paper (this one’s going into a special issue of an academic journal). And I really should get cracking on my (contemplated) series about space travel, perhaps with an essay on whether or not outer space is real. Oh, I know it’s real, I’ve seen the pictures. But I mean really real, reality that you can smell and touch. Can we make it THAT real? How? And I’m itching to do another piece on graffiti, one arguing from historical precedent, that it’s the cultural tipping point to the next phase in human cultural evolution. I’ve started blogging my way through danah boyd’s It’s complicated; will I finish that? I really want to do more on cultural ranks and on cultural identity as well. What about the working paper on Porky in Wackyland or the one on The Greatest Man in Siam? And then there’s Goethe’s Faust, which I’ve just barely begun to read.

Yikes!

There’s no end of things I could do between now at a lovely evening. But at the moment I’m thinking about not doing any of them. I think I just want to mull things over. By all means, look those projects over, maybe make some edits here and there. But no push to finish any of them.

Maybe I’ll take a walk along the river. That’s always nice. Perhaps I’ll even take some photos. Though that’s getting dangerously close to doing something. I mean, if I take the photos, them I’m going to want to develop them. That’s not quite like writing a project to the end. But, no, better not do that.

We’ll see.

Happy Holiday!

Christmas Flowers at Longwood Gardens 2012

Pedagogical Affordance and Entrepreneurial Action: A Framework for Thinking about Connected Learning

This working paper consists of a series of posts written for an online workshop in connected learning: Connected Courses. It was conducted in the Fall of 2014 and was sponsored by the DML Hub, as part of the MacArthur Foundation, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Course URL:

http://connectedcourses.net

You can download the PDF at this link: https://www.academia.edu/9727654/Pedagogical_Affordance_and_Entrepreneurial_Action_A_Framework_for_Thinking_about_Connected_Learning

Contents

• Introduction: Pedagogical Affordance, Entrepreneurial Action?
• Vygotsky Tutorial
• Pedagogical Styles 1: Coaching and Midwifery
• Pedagogical Styles 2: Lectures, and beyond…
• Learning to Learn and Co-learning, NOW
• Co-learning Models: Meta-Cognition, Democratic Schools, and Entrepreneurs
• Pedagogical Styles 3: Courses I have taught (or taken)
• “VICTORY IS MINE!” – Active engagement with computing in connected learning
• Connected from Birth: You, Your Double, and Cyberspace
• Education, not just for the young
• Pedagogical Styles 4: Cognitive Demands and Interpersonal Dynamics
• Appendix: Interdisciplinarity is the Utopian Dream of an academic culture whose time is rapidly running out

Introduction: Pedagogical Affordance, Entrepreneurial Action?

With roots extending into the final decades of the previous millennium, online learning has begun blossoming at the beginning of this one. These efforts are fueled by the romance of invention and discovery, the idealism of making knowledge widely available at low or even no cost to students, and the practical desire to achieve dramatic reduction in the per unit cost of instruction. Online learning is here to stay.

This working paper began as a series of posts to an online workshop: Connected Courses: Active Co-Learning in Higher Ed. The workshop is interested in a particular kind of online learning, co-learning, where much of the learning takes place in interactions among the students rather than in the interaction between the instructor and students, one by one. It quickly became obvious, however, that co-learning has been most extensively explored in certain kinds of courses, courses involving media and writing where the emphasis is on students building presentations of one sort or another rather than on describing, analyzing, and describing things.

The question arises, then, of how far can co-learning techniques be extended to other kinds of courses. Could classical mechanics be taught in this way? What about the economics of the ante-bellum South? Ultimately, the only way we’ll know is to try and see what happens.

But such exploration is best undertaken in the context of a framework for thinking about how instruction and learning are organized. That’s what these posts are about.

The Four-Fold Way through an Undergraduate Education

From my notes about a decade ago:

Though I haven’t really thought it through, it seems to me that a proper undergraduate education ought to give equal emphasis to four components:

1. Expression – Where we have the arts, music and dance, poetry, etc., and physical education.

2. General Education – Where students get a general view of how the world works, from physics through natural and human history.

3. Something Practical – Specialized education in something that would allow the student to earn a living.

4. Some Intellectual Specialization – Where the student can dig-in to something that particularly interests them.

On 1 and 4, some students would naturally gravitate toward an expressive discipline, e.g. fine arts painting. But they really ought to developed some specialized knowledge in an intellectual discipline, whether it’s one relevant to painting (like perceptual psychology) or not (such as microeconomics). And a student who naturally gravitates to a specialization in Medieval European history needs to develop expressive abilities as well.

And so one through all four.

I have the vague sense that this is descended a conversation I had with David Hays some years before that.

Pedagogical Styles 4: Cognitive Demands and Interpersonal Dynamics

I figure this will be my last post before wrapping the series, writing an introduction, and putting them all together in a PDF.

The important point is that I’ve changed my sense of what pedagogical parameters are. I started out thinking that they would be affordances or demands of subject matter that constrain how that subject matter can be packaged into courses. That’s what I had my attention on in the three posts on pedagogical styles:

• Pedagogical Styles 1: Coaching and Midwifery; URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/11/pedagogical-styles-1-coaching-and.html
• Pedagogical Styles 2: Lectures, and beyond…; URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/11/pedagogical-styles-2-lectures-and-beyond.html
• Pedagogical Styles 3: Courses I have taught (or taken); URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/11/parameters-of-pedagogy-3-courses-i-have.html

Thus, whether or not co-teaching is a practical pedagogical regime depends on the nature of the subject matter. And to some extent that’s certainly true. But in thinking these things through I’ve realized that we have to treat the interpersonal dynamics to students and teacher as an independent source of variation.

So the situation is more complex than I had imagined it to be. Surprise, surprise!

Dependent and Independent Variables

Let’s put this in terms of social science research design. Courses are being taught and you have some theory about how that goes. To test that theory you need to identify independent variables and dependent variables. Your theory then tells you that, given a certain configuration of one or more independent variables you’ll find a certain configuration of one or more dependent variables.

What that means is that, if the subject matter has certain affordances X1 and Y3 that it will be taught, say, as a lecture course. Correspondingly, if the subject matter has affordances X2 and Y1 then it will be taught, say, as a one-on-one tutorial. You then examine an appropriate selection of actual courses and see if that’s how things fall out.

What I’ve realized, though, is that cognitive affordances and interpersonal dynamics are, to some extent, independent of one another. This means that whatever the cognitive demands of a particular subject matter may be, one can independently have different conceptions of the proper relationship between teacher and student and student and student.

This independence was there in that initial post on coaching and midwifery. Learning how to play a musical instrument is very different from learning philosophy. Both can be taught one-on-one through coaching. But both can be taught one-to-many through lecture.

It should be obvious that philosophy can be taught one-to-many through lecture, because, after all, that’s how many philosophy courses are in fact taught. Very few philosophy students have their own personal Socrates, though advanced graduate training at its best may be a bit like that. Similarly, instrumental learning can be taught one-to-many through lecture, though this may not be so obvious. I’ve never actually attended a lecture of that sort. But I’ve watched master classes, where a hand full of students and one teacher when through their paces on stage. And the mass of music lessons online at, for example, YouTube operates like this.

So, it can be done. Still, the one-on-one philosophy tutorial is very different from a one-to-many philosophy lecture, and the same with learning a musical instrument. I note further that lecture courses in philosophy are generally accompanied by smaller discussion sections and also have the option of individual tutoring during office hours. Thus the actual instruction given is mixed-mode.

What this means is that I’m not going to be able to write a nice neat “wrap-up” post. Nor, for that matter, had I intended to do so. But I had intended to argue something like, “well, we’ve got this three or four distinct affordances and florg and wrap seem amenable to co-learning while krink and slam resist it.

I’m not going to be able to do that. But, having stated the issue, I will play around just a bit more.

It’s Complicated 2: Graffiti and Public Space

You are looking at two of the handful of arches known in Jersey City collectively as the Bergen Arches. In my experience, while many people have heard of “the Arches”, few people have a clear idea of what and where they are and even fewer have been there, though many pass beside them as they drive on Rt. 139. The arch to the left is over the remaining roadbed of a trolley line, which is where we’re standing. The one on the right goes over the Erie Cut, a man-made geological formation geographical feature that used to accommodate four railroad tracks. Three of them have been ripped out; the  fourth is broken and busted. The Erie Cut is almost a mile long and goes under four or five more arches, though three of them are better characterized as short tunnels.

Unless otherwise indicated, all the photographs in this post are of the Bergen Arches and were taken on December 7, 2014.

I’ve written about the Arches before, extensively. I’m going through the exercise again because, 1) they fascinate me, and 2) I want to discuss them in the terms that danah boyd has established for teen cyberspace hangouts in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014).

There are major differences, of course. The Bergen Arches is a real location in physical space whereas the spaces boyd has investigated are virtual. Functionally, network spaces exist online; physically, though, the servers that support them have real locations around the globe. However, copies of my photographs of the Arches exist on my Flickr page and so can be accessed by anyone who has Internet access to Flickr. And I am by no means the only one who photographs the graffiti down there. Just how many of us do that, I don’t know. I’d say 10s to 100s.

We’re standing right in front of the upper arch, looking down at the lower arch. Notice the somewhat scuffed and faded graffiti at the base of the arch. I’ve got photos of that wall going back to 2007 and those show four or five paint layers below the one currently visible. The strange big-eyed character at the left, however, is unchanged, perhaps because the location is not particularly desirable; it’s small and peripheral. I’ve got photos of that character in at least two other locations. The dark black lettering in the middle, however, is relatively new. You can make out the letters “MESS.” MESS or MES writes with the PFE crew. He gets up all over the place, though I’ve only got photos from three other locations that I can think of off hand. Finally, notice the black netting in the lower arch. That was installed a year or two ago to catch the crumbling masonry.

One of the themes boyd develops is that of privacy in public. The Internet functions as a public utility and most of the places teens hang out are public spaces; anyone can go there. Some have privacy settings, like Facebook, but using them is somewhere between tricky and a pain in the ass, so most teens simply ignore them. The fact that they don’t mess with those privacy settings doesn’t mean that they’re addressing their remarks to the public large. They’re not; they’re only addressing their friends. And, for the most part, the public at large could care less about what they say – the various snooping agencies and advertisers are not the public at large, nor is it obvious that they have any very clear idea of what they’re doing; they just do a lot of it.

However, steps are taken (p. 65):

Children love to experiment with encoding messages. From pig latin to invisible ink pens, children explore hidden messages when they’re imagining themselves as spies and messengers. As children grow up, they look for more sophisticated means of passing messages that elude the watchful eyes of adults. In watching teens navigate networked publics, I became enamored of how they were regularly encoding hidden meaning in publicly available messages. They were engaged in a practice that Alice Marwick and I called “social steganography,” or hiding messages in plain sight by leveraging shared knowledge and cues embedded in particular social contexts.

That photo dates from July 6 of 2007 and is the oldest photo I have of that wall, which is the wall whose lower edge we saw in the previous photo. There’s a lot of stuff on that wall, and things seem to have been piled atop one another chaotically. There is, however, an informal ethics to that. Unless the existing imagery has been badly degraded by the weather, or by “toys” (novice writers who have more chutzpah than skill), you have to do something better than what you’re going over.

It’s Complicated 1: Escaping on a Raft in Cyberspace

Farewell to freedom on the Adriatic and to days of wild abandon. – Hayao Miazaki

Are we heading toward a world in which our activities in the physical world are totally institutionalized so that our only “free” time is the time we spend online? That’s what I’ve been thinking as I read danah boyd’s new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014). But before I get to that – I’m only three chapters in, anyhow – let me tell you about my childhood. It’s not that my childhood was particularly interesting or significant, but simply that in one crucial way it was quite different from the lives of the 150+ teens boyd interviewed for the book: within broad limits, I could go where I wanted, when I wanted; these teens cannot.

From there I follow boyd to a discussion of the social management of anxiety and then shift gears and end up patrolling the backwoods in the antebellum South, looking for escaping slaves and other miscreants. That’s when we meet up with Huck and Jim riding the bit stream to freedom, thereby returning me to dana boyd. You’ll see, it’ll all work out in the end.

Sorta.

Confined to Quarters

I grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Richland Township, a suburb of Johnstown in Pennsylvania about 70 miles east of Pittsburgh. My neighborhood bordered on small farms and forest. As a teenager I had to be home for dinner, be home before dark, get my homework done, and practice my trumpet. I had various activities as well, scouts, school clubs (band and others) that took time, but they didn’t fill my schedule. I could, and did, roam freely about the neighborhood. I had to tell my mother generally where I was going, but that was it.

As I’ve indicated, that’s not the case with the teens that boyd interviewed. This is important, for it is the main reason many of them spend so much time online. Cyberspace is the only place they can hangout with their friends without adult intrusion into their lives (pp. 20-21):

The social media tools that teens use are direct descendants of the hangouts and other public places in which teens have been congregating for decades. What the drive-in was to teens in the 1950s and the mall in the 1980s, Facebook, texting, Twitter, instant messaging, and other social media are to teens now. Teens flock to them knowing they can socialize with friends and become better acquainted with classmates and peers they don’t know as well. They embrace social media for roughly the same reasons earlier generations of teens attended sock hops, congregated in parking lots, colonized people’s front stoops, or tied up the phone lines for hours on end. Teens want to gossip, flirt, complain, compare notes, share passions, emote, and joke around. They want to be able to talk among themselves—even if that means going online.

While boyd has a great deal to say about just what they do, I want to leave that aside for now. Much of what she says is generally about life online, written for people who don’t spend much time online. I do, so the world she describes is familiar to me even though I’m old enough to be a grandfather to the people she’s interviewed.

Here’s a bit about one of boyd’s subjects (p. 89):

My interview with Myra, a middle-class white fifteen-year-old from Iowa, turned funny and sad when “lack of time” became a verbal tick in response to every question I asked her about connecting with friends. From learning Czech to track, from orchestra to work in a nursery, she told me that her mother organized “98%” of her daily routine. Myra did not like all of these activities, but her mother thought they were important. She was resigned to them. Lack of freedom and control over her schedule was a sore topic for Myra. At one point, she noted with an exasperated tone that weekends were no freer than weekdays: “Usually my mom will have things scheduled for me to do. So I really don’t have much choice in what I’m doing Friday nights. . . . I haven’t had a free weekend in so long. I cannot even remember the last time I got to choose what I wanted to do over the weekend.” Myra noted that her mother meant well, but she was exhausted and felt socially disconnected because she did not have time to connect with friends outside of classes.