A Utilitarian World (2)

Imagine a world in which the daily experience of attending school does not exist. Take that a bit further and imagine learning as an experience that is both lifelong and not constrained by institutions, not necessarily located within institutions, but fundamental to everyday life.

In a utilitarian world, learning is sequestered to one place or one time.

Learning, in my opinion is by definition never finished. Of course there is a narrative to the learning experience — a beginning and an end, but the entire process of learning is always temporary and crucially, contingent.

In a utilitarian world, learning is first of all ‘located’ to some place and then given a particular time, fit into a schedule.

Even online education which should be open and less linear has in many instances been structured into a sequential process. If the digital age has so far taught us anything, it is that sequence should be based on multiple pathways and diverse strategies to learning. Learners want to map their direction based on a vast number of factors from state of mind, to the demands of everyday life.

This need to take control — manifested most fully in the rise of social media — has its own problems. For example, given the wealth of information that now suffuses everything that we do, how can we distinguish between good and bad information? This is a major issue for parents whose children are exposed to any number of questionable web sites and problematic claims from many different sources. But, the need to take control is also essential to the learning experience. After all, learning if it is to be valuable must also be seen to have value. Value is gained when learners feel some degree of empowerment from the process.

In this context, teachers have become curators as well as mentors and guardians of history. The word curator is derived from the Latin, “curator” which means overseer, manager and of importance to this discussion, guardian. Curator also comes from the word, to cure. The challenge is that curators have to be able to teach critical thinking.

In a utilitarian space, there is less and less time for historical and critical engagement with ideas. The rush is on to achieve a great deal as quickly as possible and the notion that for example, it might be important to spend some time on areas of study that seem peripheral to a set of pragmatic goals becomes less and less attractive.

In my next post in this series, I will explore contemplation which marks out a territory that is far more speculative than an overly utilitarian approach could ever permit.

Part 1 can be found here.

A Utilitarian World (1)

The Dilemmas of Learning              

Over the years (17 to be exact), this web site has turned into a vast enterprise. There are now no less than 1200 pages of material on the site and most of the articles and essays are original. I often comment on learning and research in education and industry. Today, I am beginning an occasional series that is part of my new book. So, I would appreciate any feedback and advice on this entry and others as they appear. I would like the book I am writing to reflect and incorporate the concerns and views of the large community of readers who visit Critical Approaches on a regular basis.

The work of research and learning, particularly in applied areas like design can be as pragmatic as required depending on the project or the demands of clients or the general challenge taken to various problems and issues. However, any learning process and research that is entirely governed and judged by pragmatic standards is rarely that useful. In saying this, I am trying to soften current trends and discussions among educational policymakers and the community that suggest that learning without a pragmatic outcome is not valuable and in the end will not add value to society or to the individual learner. The emphasis on outcomes in education has become so dominant that it seems almost heretical to raise some questions about it.

For example, a course in philosophy or ethnography may seem irrelevant to designers or engineers or medical practitioners. In fact, if you take a close look at the professional schools, there is a nod to the humanities in some of them, but for the most part, the curricula have narrowed to reflect the immediate challenges of the professions. Engineering schools often have courses in Technology and Society and do permit their students to take electives. But, the core training focuses on the perceived needs of specialized individuals to the exclusion of what are seen to be courses that are less important to the future employment of professionals. Martha Nussbaum has commented on this situation in her new book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010 Princeton University Press).

Part of the challenge here is that learning should not be narrow but also learning is by definition a process that is always unfinished. The idea that students can earn their qualifications in a linear and direct way actually contributes to failure unless the disciplines are very simple and the skills needed never evolve or change.

Three concepts to keep in mind here:

1. Learning is non-linear, therefore broad based skills provide students with multiple pathways to achieve the goals they set for themselves;
2. Pragmatism is not in and of itself a negative, but pragmatism in the service of limited outcomes decreases flexibility and inhibits creativity;
3. Professional disciplines need to integrate and not just pay lip service to other disciplines. 

Part Two will appear soon…… 

The Anti-Gladwell: Small Change Indeed

I have always wondered why Malcolm Gladwell was such a successful writer. He has a knack for taking simple, obvious phenomena and turning them into stories. “Outliers” is an interesting book about the many elements that have to come together for someone to be successful or for someone to fail. It is well written, but left me as all of Gladwell’s books do, with the sense that he skims the surface of events and has the rather uncomplicated aim of informing not probing. He is the quintessential postmodern writer. Factoids are personalized into stories, claims are made and dropped, personal narratives are unveiled and in all of this, significance is drawn from the trivial in the blink of an eye. He is very good at pastiche and as a bricoleur he knows how to bring different experiences and events together that often don’t seem like they should be linked. His books are soothing, neither brilliant nor banal. 

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It should therefore not be surprising that he would write an article in the New Yorker about a genuinely new cultural phenomenon like social media. After all, social media pose a challenge to writers like Gladwell. Social media as a term probably describes too much because all forms of communications are social. Twitter and Facebook are hardly the essence of social media and that is all that Gladwell focuses on. But, I am getting ahead of myself.

Gladwell is a good polemicist. So, in the New Yorker article he sets up a simple opposition, the civil rights movement of the 1960’s as an agent of massive change and Twitter and Facebook as weak networks, amorphous by design and therefore unlikely to be agents of genuine social transformation — not that either Twitter or Facebook were ever built to be change agents, but a polemicist does not care too much about these distinctions.

The civil rights movement was the product of many events and many people working and dying for change. The history of that movement is very complicated so for a moment, let me concentrate on Galdwell’s use of the Greensboro sit-in in 1960 which is often described as one of the key events in the growth and development of the civil rights movement. No less an authority than Taylor Branch whose history of that period (Parting the Waters and At Canaan’s Edge) runs to two volumes and over two thousand pages comments on the rather weak way in which the protest began. “No one has time to wonder why the Greensboro sit-in was so different. In the previous three years, similar demonstrations had occurred in at least sixteen other cities. Few had made the news, all faded quickly from public notice…” (Page 272 of Parting the Waters)

Branch goes on to talk about the fact that the small group of protestors had no tactical plan or goals and they were not prepared. The spontaneity of their protest and the fact that they decided to sit in the wrong place (reserved for whites) in a café in Woolworth’s was the result of deeply felt emotions about the racist way in which black people were being treated and about the built-in racism of the US.

Their protest was open-ended and the networks of activists working in the South became aware of what they were doing through the radio and telephone and as Branch describes it, ‘parallel lines of communication’. In other words, the message traveled without needing to be framed and shaped into a particular form. There was no centralized control or authority. People found out by whatever means they could.

Gladwell doesn’t mention this because it would show how similar the networks of the sixties were to social media today. I assume that had he done the research, Gladwell would have discovered that newspapers both traditional and informal were also key arbiters in the development of the movement and that the growth of television as a mass medium closely parallels the increasing breadth and depth of people’s commitment to getting involved. Notice that I refer to this period, as does Gladwell as a movement. Unpack that word for a moment and you will discover that “movement” is at the core of what Martin Luther King pursued. He wanted people to spontaneously rise up against injustice. He knew that if he over-organized both the protest events and the speeches, people would not move as quickly or spontaneously to join together. Movements are fluid. They are not political parties.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Social media are very fluid because that is how large communities of shared interest form and grow. For Gladwell, organized groups drive change with carefully built hierarchies. That is precisely what we have with traditional political parties but Gladwell doesn’t seem to care about the obviousness of the connection between the political stasis we are in at the moment and the hierarchies he celebrates in his essay. Worse, in a period when a new generation is discovering how powerful they can be if they cluster together on certain issues (he makes no reference to the environmental movement), he says, “we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”

Clearly, Gladwell doesn’t understand nor has he examined the heterogeneous nature of social media, their diversity and also the multitude of different ways in which social media are being used not only to promote change, but also to act on and respond to social issues. One can only imagine how wonderful it would have been for social activists working with King and others, if they had been able to utilize media they controlled as opposed to having to fight for a place on traditional news broadcasts.

Gladwell doesn’t discuss the grassroots nature of social media instead he conflates Facebook and Twitter with something far larger than what these two companies represent. Polemicists like Gladwell are fond of using simple binaries to explain complex phenomena. He says the strong ties of the people in the Civil Rights Movement held them together. He compares this to the weak ties of social media. But, the binary is wrong to begin with. Social media are neither strong nor weak. The ties that bring people together are thankfully more often than not, unpredictable. Sure, there is superficiality in all of this and of course Twitter restricts what can be said to a few sentences. But, this is no different from the restrictions of any mass medium with the crucial difference being that Twitter is produced by its users and not Rupert Murdoch.

Taylor Branch tells the interesting story of the historic day (July 10, 1962) when television images ‘leaped’ across the Atlantic ocean for the first time using the Telstar satellite. As it happens, Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy were in jail in Albany, Georgia and one has to wonder what would have happened if a million people had twittered about the imprisonment.

Social media are not a panacea. In fact, social media are hard to define because an increasingly complex communications environment frames so much of what we now do. However, networks are not going to go away (Gladwell completely misunderstands the history of networks, but that will have to be the topic of another essay), rather we need to understand how they work by actively participating in their construction and use. The challenge is to work with social media networks to deepen the manner in which users connect to each other. We are at the very early stages of the formation of new types of communities driven by common interests, conflicts and often utopian desires. Polemicists like Gladwell have nothing to add to this debate.  

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Boston Med, Social Media and Reality Television

In 1999, the television show, Big Brother began airing in the Netherlands. Within a year it had spread to ten other countries and within five years to seventy countries. The title of the show comes from George Orwell’s novel, 1984. This article however is neither about Big Brother nor about Survivor, which began a year later although both are fascinating phenomena and worthy of discussion, but rather is about Boston Med a documentary television show with a difference.

Is it a coincidence that so-called reality television gained notoriety at the same time as the Internet and Social Media became more and more ubiquitous? And, to what degree have the combination of reality TV and traditional documentary practices become interdependent? The Internet has also expanded the ground and breadth of narrative television by creating an interface between “real” life and storytelling particularly through the use of social media. Let me explore these points a bit further.

Clearly, the nomenclature is contradictory here. From the start, reality television has been a sophisticated cover for a carefully planned process built on the foundations of the documentary, fictional cinema and TV. The editing is as intense as conventional narratives, and the shooting is never as spontaneous as it looks. The brilliance of reality television is that it has managed to create an aura of truth about what happens to its characters. From marriage to food to fashion design, using contests and conflict, reality TV has become the cheapest way to tell stories about people, their lives and their aspirations. It also exploits both the audiences and the characters that are central to its success. 

The word reality refers to what appears to be spontaneous activities and events that even in real life are never as spontaneous as the shows make them appear.  Reality TV is a combination of candid camera, news type editing and gossip. Think of Entourage as reality TV, and if you resist that, ask yourself why?

The confusion here between artifice and real life is the same as the artificial distinction between online and offline life. There is as much storytelling to everyday life as there is reality, tragedy and happiness. Fiction and truth are bedfellows. The relationships are fuzzy and sometimes infuriating, but always mixed. In other words, there is no such thing as truth without fiction. This is a broader argument; suffice to say that a show like Boston Med takes the medical drama of ER or Grey’s Anatomy to another and far more important level, blatantly using the devices, locales and narrative structure of those shows to far greater effect.

A crucial distinguishing feature of Boston Med is its use of music both during and after very serious medical events: this is combined with first person narratives sometimes by doctors and other times by nurses and patients and family. All the characters talk to the camera and thus to the audience. Their spontaneity has been carefully constructed both through editing and some terrific camera work. This is all done in a present tense sort of way to make it feel as if events are unfolding in real time, even if the histories we witness have been compressed into a few minutes.

The brilliance of the show is the seamless manner in which the stories link together over the length of the series and the interconnected sets of relations that we witness between all the characters irrespective of their status. The camera work, sometimes handheld and sometimes not, is carefully paced between close-ups and traveling shots but never to the point of distraction.

Every hour of this eight-hour series was punctuated by helicopter shots of patients arriving for treatment. These were combined with exterior shots of Boston both from the ground and from the air. Metaphors of urgency were built into the fabric of every sequence. Everything is normal in this world, but nothing can ever really be normal in medicine.

The template for each show is similar: bring doctors and patients into the foreground through interviews that appear to be spontaneous and frame their experiences of medical care from crisis to cure, or in some instances to failure; cover cases of great complexity where the doctors become natural heroes as they struggle with what seem to be overwhelming odds; intercut some carefully constructed operating room footage to give the experiences an air of reality, and add the drama of personal conflict, as well as the human elements necessary to identify with the characters.

If all of this seems mechanical, Boston Med for the most part pulls it off largely because so many of the characters are really interesting and also because it is impossible not to feel the pain and fear of various patients as they struggle with their bodies and their mortality. It is also fascinating to peer into the lives of physicians and nurses and to recognize their humanity and the sacrifices they make for their profession and their patients.

The fact that this carefully constructed show seems to be “real” is because most of Boston Med tells genuine stories through a highly sophisticated use of artifice. Fabrication is at the core of the documentary impulse, and this is not meant as a pejorative comment. This brings me back to the Internet.

The Internet is really a vast network of story pages told for the most part in the first person with Facebook as the primary interface among people seeking information about each other, as well as providing a context for the exchange of ideas and fantasies. Facebook and Twitter are built on narrative principles. On Facebook you have your main page, which is your home. This is a place where you can list what you like and show everything from your photo album to your furniture. Facebook pages unfold synchronously and asynchronously. And for many, Facebook allows the personal to be public. Your Facebook home is your environment and your diary, a visual, oral, chat and game space, the living room or basement of your house.

Twitter augments all of this by increasing the pace of connection and varying the density and purpose of the stories people tell each other. The overlay of first person and third person perspectives opens the news and personal events to constant comment. In other words, social media takes private lives and makes them public even if you limit your “friends” to a few hundred. Imagine trying to do what Facebook does over the phone.

This intermingling of the private and the public is at the core of the storytelling on Boston Med and, in fact, all of forms of television and film. Our identities are being shaped by these interactions, by the interfaces between the stories we tell each other and their transposition into the broadcast and social media context. The media in general are making it possible to be unashamedly voyeuristic under the cover of truth.

Watch Boston Med and you will understand why. 

Social Media (new series)

A recent blog post by one of my favourite writers, Alexandra Samuel and an article in the New York Times about some research which suggests that teenagers who use the Internet at home are less likely to have good grades at school has motivated me to start a new series on Social Media. Samuel quotes Matthew Gallion who bemoans the fact that social media are about seeking approval from friends rather than about communicating ideas and emotions. The latter is only possible within the real context of coffee houses and homes.

In the New York times article two studies are quoted both of which use relatively small samples to make enormous claims. The researchers brought computers into households with teenagers and discovered that the teenager's school grades went down because of the computer's presence in the household. The second small study found a similar trend in Virginia among poorer households. Aside from the obvious dangers of taking small studies which inevitably trend in the direction that researchers assume from the start, there is the further and much more serious issue of generalizing to teenagers as a whole.

The metaphor that underlies this approach is that the Internet and especially social media are by definition, distractions. But, distractions from what? A closer look at the studies mentioned in the Times reveals that little is said about the quality of the educational institutions that the teenagers were attending. The studies abstract the reality of schooling from the home and vice-versa. How about this argument? The schools the teenagers were attending in Romania and Virginia were so bad that they needed the distractions of social media to engage in the interpersonal learning experiences that the schools denied.

I am being facetious here, but this constant thematic of social media as destroyers of human capacity and learning, as an interruption to processes that are otherwise not only better, but more substantive belies the fact that social media are a disruptive force and intentionally so. Matthew Gallion has the same problem in his analysis of the authenticity of the coffee house as a place of communications and interchange. Come on.

There is no way of generalizing here. Most "real" conversations happen to be pretty inauthentic to begin with and there is not a special utopian place where conversations break down the conventional barriers that people put up to exchanging real emotions and feelings with each other. The problem with these articles and analyses is that the Internet and by extension social media come to represent the opposite of some idealized space that we can no longer access. This is bad social science and a terrible use of anecdotal evidence to make broad claims that have little to do with the realities of modern day communications.

Communications among people, both interpersonal and social are always fraught with errors, blockages and challenges. There would be little need to communicate if we weren't constantly trying to overcome differences in understanding and perspective. Social media add another potential layer to misunderstanding and understanding — another layer to what we do everyday, which is converse with our family, friends, colleagues and neighbours.

The issues surrounding learning are equally complex. Schools are not necessarily places of learning and are not the ideal environment versus some baser realities in the communities and households we inhabit. As with everything, some schools and some classes in those schools work and others don't. Some aspects of social media work to increase communications among people and others don't. Distractions are real and always have been. Some teenagers prefer to ride their bicycles instead of studying history. Perhaps it is time to seek new metaphors and models to explain what is happening today. Yes, the Internet disrupts. And yes, all new forms of communications historically have disrupted the social order of their time. Ironically, social media might well be the best opportunity we have had in decades to open up learning to many new modalities and to harness the energy of conversation for the public good.