Red Herrings Overboard

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Many of the criticisms directed at information technology in the classroom get hung up on a misattribution issue. Eric Rauchway makes this point very effectively: the problem with bad PowerPoint presentations is often not the software, but the presenter.

The professors who get up and drone their way through slides would get up and drone their way through written notes if you took away the technology. There’s some truth to the point raised by Kid Bitzer in the comments to the Rauchway thread, that PowerPoint exacerbates or aggravates some of the underlying issues that a mediocre or poor lecturer carries into the classroom. Still, dealing with the technology is just a case of treating a symptom, not the disease.

I’ll also leave aside the other contributing problems that make bad lectures even worse than they have to be, such as classrooms with two or three hundred people in them.

I think there a few really basic things that professors who make significant use of lectures in their teaching can do to improve them, whether or not they use any kind of presentation technology.

1. A lecture is not the right vehicle for problematizing a subject, exploring the finer points of scholarly debate on a particular issue, or indulging in the kinds of qualifiers and asides that are a part of scholarly writing in many fields. There might be a moment in a lecture where a student’s question or comment catalyzes a useful digression along these lines. You might build a lecture around describing two major competing schools of thought. But a lecture is a compressed format that requires clear, declarative statements. I know this was the first lesson I struggled to learn coming out of graduate school, because I felt like boiling issues down to some core principles was committing some kind of intellectual sin. Discussion is a good format for muddying the waters, lecture is not.

2) Don’t use a lecture to repeat or duplicate an assigned reading. This is a mistake in several respects. It wastes the time of those who did the reading, it incentivizes others to skip the reading, and it raises the question of why the classroom exists in the first place. A lecture that addresses a reading should be a dynamic response to that reading: putting it in perspective, going beyond its terms, comparing it to material that was not read. Lectures should be used more often to explain and explore material for which there is no useful single reading. Readings and lectures have to be complementary, not redundant.

3) A lecture needs to have a theme, a central idea, and you need to come back to it repeatedly. You can do that elegantly through what pedagogical specialists call “spiraling”, where each return to the theme is slightly different, or builds up. But a lecture that’s just a grab-bag of all the stuff you can think of about a topic makes for a lousy performance and makes for lousy pedagogy. A clear theme, repeated elegantly, is more engaging to listen to and it’s far easier to retain some useful knowledge from listening.

4) Performance counts. Maybe that comes down to vivid language, maybe it comes down to a great anecdote, maybe it involves humor, maybe it’s about great use of props or technology. Don’t be ashamed of a bit of schtick. At the very least, you’ve got to be excited and engaged by the material you’re covering. If you’re bored by it, or sound bored by it, it’s inevitable that the students will be as well. Performance is generally not spontaneous, either: it should be as much a part of preparing a lecture as anything else.

5) Personalization is important. This is one reason I find Horowitzian demands for a completely neutral, affectless classroom so completely clueless. I’m not saying that a good lecturer gets up and rants at students about his pet political beliefs, but if you’re not putting your own distinctive views of the material out there, you’re not giving a good lecture. If you’re just reading off a generic, lowest-common-denominator description of knowledge on a particular subject, you might as well just distribute your outline to the students and save them the trouble of coming to class to hear you read that aloud. If there isn’t some benefit to hearing you, a particular individual scholar, interpret the subject matter, then there isn’t much point to having a classroom in the first place.

6) A good lecturer has got to learn to pay attention to body language in the audience without being over-attentive to it. At first I can remember being incredibly anxious at the least sign of a student appearing bored. Over time what you learn is that there are some people who appear bored when they’re sitting and listening even if they’re actually highly engaged, and there are people who look perky and attentive who are actually busy daydreaming about going to the beach. After a couple of weeks with a given class, you should learn to watch the students who have responsive body language, who can tell you something about whether the lecture is going the right way or not. Use those students as your “standard candle” to decide whether or not to stop or change course in a lecture. If you’re not prepared to try some other approach to a topic or to take another tack altogether, once again, you’re undercutting the whole point of having a real physical classroom with you, a real physical person, in front of a real physical audience.

Posted in Academia | 7 Comments

A Tale of Two Game Movies

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I’m pretty surprised that Sam Raimi has agreed to make a film based on World of Warcraft. I still enjoy World of Warcraft as well as find it intellectually interesting but the idea that its mashed-up, derivative, internally contradictory, heavily baroque game fiction could serve as a platform for an interesting film strikes me as unlikely. On the other hand, I like a lot of Raimi’s films, and he’s got a good sense of how to compress baroque pop culture properties into punchy narratives. So maybe he sees something I don’t in the treatment he’s looking at: maybe some Xena-like fantasy cheese or maybe some metatextual thing that plays with the idea of Warcraft-as-game. I can’t imagine a straight-up mock-epic treatment like Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films would be anything but a Uwe Bollesque stinkfest.

On the other hand, a World of Warcraft-based film makes a ton more sense than a film based on the game Asteroids. The announcement of that signing deal, which apparently followed on a four-studio bidding war, raised a lot of eyebrows among pop culture observers.

As it should: this is one of those stories where the surface p.r. explanations just don’t cut it. Let’s say you’re a mid-level studio executive at Universal and you say to yourself, “I bet we could make a totally cool movie about a lone spaceship doing some asteroid mining”. Only the most feral, predatory intellectual property lawyer is going to tell you to pay off the people holding the rights to the video game Asteroids if you want to make that movie.

You could even say to yourself, “I bet we could make a totally cool movie about how kids playing videogames here on Earth are actually controlling spaceships that are doing asteroid mining and other jobs.” You might want to lawyer up about infringing on The Last Starfighter and Ender’s Game, I suppose, but not Asteroids.

So what’s going on here? I think again this is something less about business and profit and more about organizational sociology of contemporary cultural, economic and civic institutions. Most of them tend to have a big, amorphous layer of middle managers who make all the serious concrete decisions about resource allocation. All of those actors have strong incentives to claim sole credit for successful resource allocations and to obscure their involvement in unsuccessful ones. All of those actors need to provide a constantly renewed account of their own accelerating productivity: it’s never enough to be maintaining or supervising existing activities. And in a lot of these institutions, middling figures frequently arrange (implicitly or explicitly) to collaborate with a counterpart at another institution to mutually enhance their prospects along these lines, to manage their institutional capital and engage in quid-pro-quo dealings that make the dealers appear productive.

Hence in many cases an interest in paying out money for intellectual properties that are completely non-necessary to making a new cultural work. If you buy my mothballed intellectual property out of the attic of my megacorporation today, I’ll buy yours tomorrow, old chap. If you pay off the lawyer-troll under the bridge today in order to clip-clop across, then we’ll pay off yours too. Licensed properties are also a great alibi for failures (the source property is the problem! the adaptation is the problem!) and a great way for a studio executive to claim a successful adaptation (it’s not the film itself, it’s that I recognized the value of the property itself!)

In a lot of institutions, those middle-rank incentives drive some actions that people accountable for the total institution find frustrating or perverse, and end up constraining the generative actions of people who actually have to enact what the middle layer decides upon. Not to mention that the hidden incentives that drive institutional action sometimes produce results that outsiders find completely laughable or baffling, like a film based on the game Asteroids.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture | 7 Comments

Mine!

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I didn’t catch the complaint of some philosophers against a small NEH course-development program called “Enduring Questions” the first time around, but picked up on it via Savage Minds.

The NEH program offers a small amount of financial support for faculty developing “predisciplinary” courses that deal with questions like, “What is the good life?”, “What are good and evil?”, “Is there a human nature” and so on.

The term predisciplinary is evidently the first provocation to philosophers critical of the program, as they (I think accurately) read it to say that courses taught by philosophers in philosophy departments which are part of the standard curriculum of disciplinary philosophy are not really what the grant aims to support. There’s nothing excluding philosophers from participation, but the clear implication is that to qualify for the grant, they’d need to teach the normal substance of their discipline in some kind of extended or extradisciplinary framework. Understandably, this is a puzzling request from their perspective, since they’re quite right that they really do address these questions day-in and day-out in their existing courses.

I’m sympathetic to the initial reaction of irritation. If the NEH set up a course development grant called “Time and the Past” aimed at supporting interdisciplinary courses that examined change over time but framed the grant so that ordinary history courses didn’t qualify, my first impulse would be to object. Why exclude the discipline that makes that question its central concern?

But hold on a moment. What might a grant solicitation written that way incentivize? Maybe attention to how thinking about change over time is a real problem for some disciplines: some forms of economics, for example. Maybe a course (by philosophers, even!) on whether history matters or is knowable, which history departments don’t tend to offer. Maybe a course in a natural science that asks how and when old science matters to contemporary science. The more I think about it, the more I can think of really interesting courses that respond to the prompt and aren’t likely to be taught by most historians. I can think of courses which might respond to the prompt that could be taught by a historian, but they’d be good additions to a curriculum in other departments as well.

The more I think about it, the more I also recognize that historicism or study of the past play roles in other disciplines, sometimes roles that intermingle with the way historians work and sometimes not. What skin off my nose is it if a literary critic is also an intellectual or cultural historian? That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. I might have some friendly nudging about methdology to make to a non-historian doing historical work, but no more.

Broadly speaking, I think anyone can study history, and that the methodology and theory of historical study are not highly technical. Academic historians certainly benefit from having studied history, e.g., from knowledge of particular places and time periods, knowledge of historiography, and actual experience of historical research. It does not require a lengthy apprenticeship to begin to think usefully about the past, and scholarly works of history can and should be read and savored and made use of by broad audiences with no special training.

The philosophers who object to the NEH grant largely argue that philosophy is a highly technical discipline with a history of progressively greater and more precise knowledge about its subject which cannot be understood without dedicated training. They also argue that the “enduring questions” the NEH proposes are by nature philosophical in this sense. They perceive no need to incentivize courses in “enduring questions” because they believe such courses already exist and are called “a philosophy major”.

Part of this reaction is just the enduring struggle within and around disciplinary philosophy over Rorty-like complaints that the discipline is too insular and technical. My long-term arguments against fastidious forms of disciplinarity, at least at small colleges, apply just as surely to philosophy as they do to my own discipline and most others. All disciplines, even the natural sciences, need some capacity to translate and disseminate their particular forms of knowledge outside of their discipline, without insisting that an outsider undergo some prior training in that discipline. However, I do think there’s something especially wrong-headed with saying, “Well, we have a pretty precise, well-resolved technical answer to the question, ‘What is the good life?’, but if you’re not trained in philosophy, I can’t explain it to you.” The question “What is the good life?” is really not the same thing as a difficult question in mathematics.

I also wonder, however, if the philosophical critics believe that there is no intellectually useful or legitimate response to many of the “enduring questions” outside of academic philosophy. For example, surely literature or art poses those questions and sometimes struggles to answer them in a manner quite distinctive from philosophy. This is not to say that philosophy, like literary criticism, cannot try to encompass or understand the way in which art or literature ask those questions: philosophers has done wonderful work along those lines. But interpreting how art asks enduring questions is not the same as the first-order posing of those questions by artists within their art.

Similarly, the empirical study of how human beings actually have been in past societies or presently are within contemporary societies tends to intrinsically generate some of those enduring questions. A comparative historian with an interest in political systems may not set out to answer the question, “What’s a good government?” as a political philosopher might, but I’d be surprised if by the end such a historian wouldn’t have some pretty interesting and wholly intellectual answers to that question which come from an accumulation of empirical cases.

If the NEH grant ended up drawing out some of those different ways of coming at big, deeply human questions and forging them into provocative courses, that’s a great outcome. Humanistic inquiry has a pressing obligation to legibility with wider publics, a need to pose its distinctive questions in broadly relevant terms. I can’t see why the federal government (or anyone, really) ought to subsidize humanistic study which is in some enduring or permanent fashion conceived as incommensurable with general intellectual discourse and incommunicable to anyone lacking highly specific training.

Don’t get me wrong: any study of “enduring questions” needs to enshrine philosophy, to acknowledge its central importance, both in its broadest and most specifically disciplinary forms. Anyone aspiring to teach to those questions who recognizes that importance and yet is not a philosopher is well-advised to be seek the counsel of philosophers with some degree of humility. This is where I understand and endorse with reservations some of the irritation expressed by philosophers at this grant program, insofar as it can be taken to endorse the idea that “enduring questions” can be asked wholly innocent of the long history of philosophers asking them.

Humility ought to work both ways, though: contemporary scholarly philosophy doesn’t own a comprehensive patent on those questions.

Posted in Academia | 9 Comments

Passages to Meritocracy

Posted on July 21, 2009 by Timothy Burke

If nothing else, Sunday’s New York Times story on pricey consultancies helping well-heeled students get into the selective university or college of their choice was memorable for the juxtaposition of a quote from Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, who describes admissions consultancies as snake-oil salesman, followed several paragraphs later by the former dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania talking about his admissions consultancy.

The story makes most of the consultants look bad before there’s any need to consider the nature of their business, with their ridiculously high fees, shaky salesmanship and questionable credentials. Some of them, according to the Times story, at least imply that they can place clients through pulling strings and trading on personal connections. Given what we’ve heard about some public university systems in the last few months, that’s not a totally absurd thing to imply, but from what I know, selective private institutions don’t exactly work that way. The money and fame of an applicant’s family may influence the decision at some institutions and most places treat legacies as a privileged category as well, but for the most part that’s all done indirectly. A consultant who rang up an admissions staffer would probably come off as terribly vulgar and Not-Done in most cases.

Still, I think Amy Gutmann and her peers at other selective institutions might want to own up to their own responsibility for creating a market niche for snake oil.

A colleague of mine once suggested that we should just make admission to Swarthmore a pure lottery for any candidates who met high minimum threshold criteria for admissions. In his view, trying to build a class that is somehow perfectly engineered in terms of a mix of temperments, talents, life experiences, intellectual dispositions and the like is not just a Rube-Goldbergesque nightmare, but also involves a whole range of shifting, ad hoc and quite specific value judgments about merit and potential that get made in a very non-transparent way within the black box of the admissions process.

I didn’t like that idea when he suggested it, because I have some continuing investment in the machinery of selective admissions on the basis of various congruent and sometimes clashing ideas about merit. Giving up on the idea that we can evaluate the relative merit and particular suitability of an applicant pool for a given college or university feels to me like giving up on meritocratic advancement as a whole. Which I suspect is my colleague’s view as well, that meritocracy is a bogus veneer papering over the embedded power of social class.

Against that, I can only say that there are some jobs which are genuinely important beyond just paying a salary to the person doing them, and some people do those jobs far better than other people. Equally, there are students who flourish in higher education in ways that benefit their institutions as well as themselves. It may be that there is no best-practices process that can reliably predict who those people are, nothing that can beat a random selection. I’m not prepared to give up on the idea that we can do better just yet.

However, it’s important not to do worse, to so mystify the process of trying to identify merit that you spew collateral cultural and social damage out on the wider society. The admissions consultancies may be a symptomatic sign of that kind of damage stemming from the opacity of selective admissions.

A prospective applicant to a highly selective university or college can fairly readily “chance” themselves in terms of test scores, grade-point averages and preparation. Applicants who are well within the typical qualifications then often know what kinds of straightforward additional criteria might give their application greater weight: from underrepresented regions, from underrepresented identity groups, distinctive athletic experience, unusual degree of specific academic preparation.

Where it gets sticky, at which point some admissions consultants move in with their snake-oil, is that further distinctions of merit that may be used to admit one qualified candidate and reject another come to rest on an applicant’s life experiences, expressions and evidence of inner character, subtle evidence of suitability for a particular institution’s expressed culture, creativity of an essay and so on. Something that gives an admissions officer a “feel” for the individuality of a particular candidate.

All of that kind of evaluation is the devil’s playground. I really have met people who have a form of emotional intelligence that lets them size up another person pretty quickly and predict how much they’ll contribute to a project or team. I’ve met people who are really bad at doing that, and quite a few of the latter either don’t know that they’re bad at it or are never made accountable for being bad at it because it takes four or six or ten years to discover just how bad they are. Most of us, I think, are in between those poles: we guess right sometimes and wrong other times, and sometimes when we’re right, we’re right for the wrong reasons, and vice-versa.

It’s easier to talk about the visible effects that being judged on subtle signs of character and potential have on an incoming group of students. For one, it forces 18-year olds to pretend to be finished, accomplished adults, to narrate a life for themselves which is already full of accomplishment, already garnished with epiphanies. Which, if not an active lie, is usually at least an exaggeration.

For the applicants who know that this self they’re describing is an invention, the only damage is contributing to their cynicism about process. For the applicants who really come to believe in this presentation of self, the consequences can be more damaging. What do they have left to learn now that they’ve arrived at college? They’re already intellectually complete. What surprises does experience have in store for them that they’ve not already experienced? I see this sometimes especially with students who have a political or social project outside the classroom that they’d like to accomplish: they don’t approach that work as an open-ended exploration with uncertain ends because they’re still locked into a rhetoric that describes those commitments as already finished and known, already rooted in an orthodox style, where all consequences and processes are always already anticipated.

I think that kind of attitude is essentially taught by the selective admissions process, by trying to match up to the mysterious judgments about merit that circulate at its hidden core. I’d like to say that we should say instead that we’re looking for evidence of curiosity, humility, openness to exploration, maybe even a certain kind of ordinariness. But given the nature of the process, all that would produce is a wave of 18-year olds obediently producing an account of themselves as more curious, more humble, more open and more ordinary than other applicants, in a few cases with the help of expensive consultants skilled in advising applicants about the social semiotics of teenage humility.

So maybe my colleague is right: there’s no way to transparently or secretly match up our real institutional values and aspirations with applicants who are really going to flourish in terms of those values and aspirations.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 8 Comments

Other People’s Money

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Some interesting fallout from the light sentence given to Pennsylvania state senator Vincent Fumo for his conviction on corruption charges, a sentence that the judge in the case justified as recognition of Fumo’s many good deeds. (The 55-month sentence is less than the plea deal Fumo was originally offered.)

Said good deeds were documented by a long parade of prominent character witnesses who sent letters to the judge. The letter that sticks in my craw most is from the current Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.

Rendell does a bit of damning-with-faint-praise in his letter, which I mostly took to be an effort to build in a firewall between himself and whatever the sentence to Fumo ended up being. The thrust of his letter, however, is that Fumo worked hard on the behalf of less-fortunate Pennsylvanians, including people not in his own district, and that these good works should be considered as mitigating his illegal conduct.

What bugs me about this is that it frames the kind of corruption that Fumo engaged in as a kind of personal misconduct that has no political or social implications in its own right. I’d actually buy that argument if Fumo had been convicted of assault or of breaking into his neighbor’s house to steal something. There can be a big disconnect between good works in the world and individual crime or immorality.

Fumo, however, was systematically making the plight of less-fortunate Pennsylvanians more rather than less dire. Rendell gets it exactly wrong. Fumo was stealing “other people’s money” and redirecting it to his personal use. He was using the protected concept of a non-profit institution to carry out this activity. Fumo, like much of the Pennsylvania legislature, had no meaningful conception of the public interest beyond the reproduction of a self-aggrandizing network of people and resources.

I don’t think this is just Ed Rendell being Ed Rendell. I think this is a blindspot that crops up across the ideological spectrum in American (and arguably global) politics, but that is especially annoying when it comes from liberal Democrats. If someone’s delivered some votes here and there in support of progressive legislation, that means almost nothing if they’re constantly draining off resources that might be used to progressive ends in favor of keeping the wheels greased for a small elite of people centered on the politician himself or herself. Whatever goes out the door with those votes gets smuggled back in through phony non-profits, wink-wink nod-nod kickbacks, under-the-radar earmarks and the like. Lauding someone like Fumo for helping poor people is like praising water for being dry or sunlight for being dark. And yet, Rendell isn’t the only one to look the other way when stories like this break, to downplay the consequences.

If some punk off the streets breaks into a house and rips off some jewelry, maybe I’d be willing to find mitigation in the fact that he also volunteers at the local soup kitchen, is nice to children, has a little dog named Smookums and was abandoned by his father when he was six. Theft from the public by a public official, whatever his character, is of a graver category of offense than one person stealing from another person, and nothing should mitigate its gravity. We’ve been falling all over ourselves for three decades in the United States to get tough on crime, make mandatory sentences more and more extreme, and yet somehow official misconduct never seems to be crime in the same sense. Maybe it’s not: it’s worse.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off

Obama in Ghana

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I joined in a conversation in Second Life about Obama’s speech in Ghana over the weekend. Due to some technical snafus, I had trouble participating in the panel early on, so one of the basic reactions I had to the speech didn’t really come into play. Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses a good deal of what I was thinking at his blog, though.

It was a fine speech, delivered with Obama’s typically crisp and efficient demeanor. Aside from the historic dimension of the speech being delivered by an African-American President of the United States to an African audience, however, the content was pretty much a tour of contemporary middle-of-the-road orthodoxy concerning African politics and African economic development. I teach a class every three or four years where one of the major themes is African-American encounters with and visions of Africa. Obama’s speech struck me as being pretty far down the list of emotionally and politically momentous episodes in that history, almost a coda rather than a milestone.

Some of that has to do with the content of the speech, which aside from Obama’s discussion of his personal connections to Africa could largely have been delivered by George Bush. I don’t mean that as a critique, I just mean that it was very much a shared governmental perspective steeped in of-the-moment policy initiatives, the Washington Consensus 2.0. Obama didn’t even really take a strong side between some of the contending factions within development circles, instead making little grace gestures towards various pet projects or arguments.

Ta-Nehisi suggests that some of the commentary on the speech saw Obama as more able to scold Africans for their failures in the same way that some prominent African-American spokesmen are allowed to critically address black fatherhood or other issues. Maybe, but the basic message that in the 21st Century, the structural consequences of the colonial era or Cold War geopolitics are less consequential than the internal dynamics of African societies is something you’ll hear from Western politicians across a pretty wide political spectrum. It’s heard as having a different significance, or a different authority, when it’s seen as coming from a racial insider.

I also think, however, that Obama demonstrated that younger political leaders in the African diaspora have less and less of a sense of having travelled through the same historical trials that African leaders of the same generation have experienced. The older generation still has some of the cadences of a pan-African nationalism rolling around in their heads. That imagined sense of a shared project is what produced so many misrecognitions between Africans and African-Americans from the 1960s to the 1980s, but even confusion creates a connection. Even given his personal history, you can feel a distance between the historical evolution of Obama’s political moment in the U.S. and the diverse political moments that many Africans of his generation are experiencing in different nations. Even his father’s involvement in Kenyan nationalism recedes into a prologue to Obama’s journey into an American identity. Which is, again, fine: that’s an ur-narrative of American immigration, which often kicks over the traces and contexts of the political and social histories of the immigrant generation, turning them into heritage rather than ongoing experience.

The upshot, though, is that Obama’s speech struck me as a standard address by a Western leader to Africa that happened to have a big footnote. As far as truly unusual Presidential speeches in Africa go, Bill Clinton’s apology for slavery (to a somewhat bemused audience of Ugandans, a country with little historic connection to the Atlantic slave trade) was more notable.

Posted in Africa, Politics | Comments Off

The Weedy Garden of Familyhood

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Before the blog went haywire last week, I meant to comment on Michael Chabon’s essay “The Wilderness of Childhood” in the New York Review of Books.

The basic thrust of Chabon’s commentary is spot-on. It’s certainly one of the most complicated, mysterious transformations of the way childhood and family life feel that I’m aware of in my own life. My childhood was like his childhood in the sense of his essay. In fourth grade, living in southern California, friends and I would ride our bicycles around a fairly extensive area on our own. We had a racket where we collected golf balls in a ravine near a course and sell them back to golfers: the ravine was rocky and on a few occasions, we saw rattlesnakes coiled under rocks there. We moved when I was in fifth and sixth grade, near a creek that ran through a quiet suburban neighborhood that was surrounded by less-quiet areas. I routinely used to tell my mother that I was going to go hike up the creek, and then off I went for hours at a time. Once I went almost all the way to the beach, probably a four or five-mile round trip, and similarly far up the creek. There was a municipal park nearby, and I’d go there and meet friends on my own.

I knew the backyards and byways of my neighborhoods in a way that I think my daughter and her friends will never know. A bit of that is a difference between the roads around my current house and some of the places I grew up: there’s a couple of busy, badly designed roads that bisect some of the likely walks she might take. Mostly, it’s a comprehensive shift in how children, parents and space relate.

Chabon settles on the common default explanation for this change, namely, the extent to which fears about children being molested by predatory strangers has led American parents to hold their children closer to them. I think he’s right that this is a big part of the change, and he’s not the first to point out that the fear is wildly out of step with the reality. It’s also not a new danger. As an adult thinking back, I can think of at least two times when there was a probable pedophile somewhere near to my own childhood travels: an older brother of a neighborhood kid at one point, and the sketchy young adult “friend” of a kid I knew when I was in sixth grade. If you follow Chabon’s metaphor (and a memorable Matt Groening cartoon that he cites as well), every wilderness has, by necessity, its ogres and perils. In sixth grade, I knew where the house with the dangerous dogs was, I knew about the kid who was supposed to be a dealer, I knew (along with all my friends) about the old sycamore tree in the park where some unknown person had stashed some mildewed porn. I knew where the neighborhood with the tough kids was and how to skirt around it. I knew where there was a pool with tadpoles in the creek, that you could eat the watercress growing on the banks, and I knew where going any further down meant you’d have a hell of a climb back up a concrete and rock tumble.

Like Chabon, I think it’s too bad that we’ve swung away from that kind of childhood experience. On the other hand, I think he’s missing something new about contemporary middle-class childhood. Sometimes, yes, it’s about ferrying the kids between contained, safe experiences. But also, I think that a lot of middle-class family life is now about the simultaneous adventures of children and adults, that children and adults are sharing far more of their experiences.

I recently watched the Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life”, based on the Jerome Bixby short story. For those who haven’t seen it, the basic premise is that there’s a rural Ohio town that has been removed from the world by the god-like mental powers of a six-year old boy who then terrorizes the population of the town. One of the subtler aspects of the story, alongside the overtly horrific consequences of the boy’s powers, is the way that the adults are forced to anxiously guess at what a child prefers while suppressing their own adult cultural habits in his presence. The two worlds were alien to one another, and now they’re drawn together under the worst of cirucmstances.

The wilderness of childhood that Chabon describes in the 1960s and 1970s was maintained in large part by the strong separation of adult leisure and children’s leisure. Saturday Morning TV was partly defined by that sense of isolation, kids off watching cartoons by themselves, cartoons which the adults knew little about, like the rest of the things their kids did or said. Adults had their own places and activities within which children were only occasional, peripheral presences. All the stories we saw reflected this distance: adults were Charlie Brown voices, they didn’t come into Narnia, they were left behind in Kansas.

It seems to me now that in many families, children and adults have far more shared cultural moments and touchstones. A lot of children’s media is cross-over entertainment that adults also watch and enjoy, or in the case of video games, play alongside their children. I feel like I’m far more likely to see parents and kids hiking together or exploring around the landscape. Last weekend, I took my daughter to see an odd ruin in the woods near here, and there was a mother and her two sons coming out of the woods as we went down the overgrown path to it.

We haven’t really figured out yet how to tell stories that reflect this shared world, which is why a lot of children’s media still banish adults at the outset of the action, so that the kids in the story have to make their own decisions. But I could easily see that we could have a new wave of stories where adults and children deal with adventure together without the grown-ups making all the choices.

I think rather than lamenting the lost past, Chabon might be better off looking for where adventure and exploration take on new and distinctive forms in the present.

Posted in Domestic Life | 1 Comment

Blog Troubles

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I think we have everything fixed now here. Let me know if comments are still broken or links to entries here aren’t working.

Posted in Blogging, Swarthmore | Comments Off

The Implausibility of Liberal Revolution

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been struck in the past week at some of the similarities between Iran and Zimbabwe. Yes, there are vast differences in geopolitical status, economic health, histories of 20th Century statehood, religious and social ideology and much else besides.

But in both places in the last few years, you’ve had some similar kinds of reformist movements that looked to elections as a possible window of opportunity for changing or eroding the power of an authoritarian state elite. Similar in the kinds of claims and strategies they’ve employed, similar in being forced to rely on a figurehead opposition figure whose future commitment to liberal political values is at the least ambiguous. Similar in the social composition of the strongest underlying constituencies pushing for reform: urban populations, educated elites, aspirant cosmopolitans.

And the consequence of both reform campaigns has been broadly similar: to reveal that the state they critique is even less ideological than it appears and that the chief authoritarian or his closest associates is only partially in charge of a state apparatus that has largely been taken over by a silent coup d’etat of securocrats who have connections to paramilitary or irregular forces which draw from different social foundations than the reformers do. And that the securocrats are determined to stay in power regardless, and have the means, lack of scruples and competency to do so, perhaps indefinitely.

Some critics charge that liberals or the left are silent about Iran (or Zimbabwe) because they have a double standard, or even because they have a kind of bizarre sympathetic view of nationalist autocracy in developing nations. I’ve agreed that there’s something to this charge when it comes to Zimbabwe. I don’t feel competent to say the same about Iran. But the substance to this critique strikes me as complicated.

More importantly, there’s another layer of silence that comes from feeling an echo of the same futility and despair that’s clearly affecting reformist actors in Iran or has affected them in Zimbabwe. Beyond saying for the umpteenth time that the upper echelons of state power and securocrat authority in both states are morally contemptible, destructively short-sighted, grotesque, and so on, what’s left to hope for or advocate? Every avenue of international or local action seems played out. The people in control of both states don’t appear likely to allow themselves to be tricked into letting a process of change develop so far that they can’t stop it. They don’t seem to have any interest in the long-term sustainability of their economic or social policies. They seem to have a strong enough internal organization of the state’s capacity for violence that they can’t be challenged effectively by militant or violent action from within. We’ve already seen where most kinds of external intervention lead; even strong diplomatic suasion arguably has a rebound or self-defeating effect in some cases.

Many postcolonial regimes which have organically collapsed from within have done so in many cases because they commanded states with little internal coherence or capacity for directed force, not because they were challenged by strong local social movements, international pressure, or more competent rivals intent on reorganizing and reforming the government. I can think of some important exceptions, but even a few of those seem to me to have given way over time to a recurrence of the same kinds of regimes that they originally displaced.

This is where Iran is a really different kind of case: not contemporary Iran but the beginnings of the current regime. Depressingly similar as it might appear now in its resistance to some kind of liberalization or democratic reform, the current government was the consequence of a pretty genuine bottom-up revolution which gained important traction from international pressures against the Shah’s regime. What I’m struck by, though, is how impossible that kind of successful bottom-up social upheaval against an oppressive state feels to me now, if it is limited to an alliance between urban populations and educated elites. (Which, importantly, the Iranian Revolution was not, though it incorporated those constituencies.) All around the world, it seems to me that states dominated by military or police power have learned how to resist, frustrate, suppress and isolate that kind of transformational pressure from loosely “liberal” constituencies pretty much indefinitely. The only real threat to most regimes are illiberal social and political movements: national or ethnic resistance or religious fundamentalism primarily.

I think a lot of the starry-eyed fetishization of Twitter and other new media in the case of Iran is simply about a hope that a magic technology will come along and make liberal revolution or transformation plausible where social organization has not. As we’ve seen, the technology for organizing smart mobs works for as long as a securocrat state will tolerate it working, and no further. If shutting it off and violently crushing public dissent costs such a state some kind of economic opportunity in the global system, that’s clearly a cost that these states are prepared to pay.

So all of this thinking is also why there’s silence of a kind. Getting up with a bullhorn and declaring one’s outrage slides pretty quickly into self-parody, into a public confession of impotence. Knowing that, what is there to say? I suppose one could get busy with the five-point plans and communiques and various inventories of miniscule carrots and eeny-weeny sticks, but it seems all rather futile. Or, as a lot of blogspheric hot air producers seem to prefer, one could just recycle ire and outrage into wholly domestic attempts to gain miniscule political advantage over local opponents.

Posted in Africa, Politics | 2 Comments

Gaming Roundup

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Timothy Burke

So I’m catching up after a week of household projects and hiking with family. First, some miscellaneous thoughts about digital games and virtual worlds after State of Play.

1. The theme for State of Play was “Plateau” and unlike most such conference themes, it seemed pretty descriptive of where academics, policy-makers and developers are with virtual worlds at the moment.

On one hand, they’re undeniably established as subjects of study, areas of interest for policy and law, and as a media form which some companies will continue to produce, operate and profit from.

On the other hand, all the utopians who expected virtual worlds to have a transformative impact on culture and sociality, to be the transcendent media form of the 21st Century, or to be the perfected experimental instrument that would at last permit social scientists to generate knowledge comparable to the natural sciences have mostly moved on to the next technology of desire or have tempered their expectations. Academic work on them is unmistakeably segmenting into more disciplinary or focused kinds of questions, which I think is largely a good thing and a sign of intellectual maturation.

This sense of a flattening out of expectations did sometimes manifest as a kind of gloom or resignation. When the occasional panglossian voice piped up about how exciting their organization’s presence in Second Life was going to be, there was often a kind of bemused ripple in the audience, that someone hadn’t gotten the message that they were trying to peddle yesterday’s news. It’s hard to come down to earth and just deal with virtual worlds as merely a form of entertainment, only a form of communication, another interesting flash (but no more than a flash) of particular insight into human sociality and culture in the 21st Century. It’s maybe especially hard if you’re trying to pull down some money either to develop a virtual world project or to support major research into virtual worlds. I have no such ambitions so I can kind of afford to sit back with a bemused grin as others try to refine old turns of seductive phrasing, or to cop a superior pose at the frustrations expressed by people whose genuine artistic ambitions and life’s work are heavily invested in MMOs as a form.

This is a bit of what I was getting at with my remark that the developers’ panel seemed to be “chasing their own tails”. It seems to me that a few existing virtual worlds are meaningful commercial and cultural successes within their own terms, and that’s a good enough starting place. I’m the first to complain that the form is capable of so much more even within its areas of strength, but I don’t really expect a persistent-environment MMO with 3d avatars to have the dissemination of a popular Facebook or iPhone app or the commercial success of a Top-Ten television show. Especially not in a fragmented cultural marketplace which may never again have products which are truly dominating mass-market experiences shared by most or all of the North American audience.

I have a lot of the same wish list (or hate list) as the developers, but I think it might be time to stop and ask some questions about those ambitions without sidelong glances at World of Warcraft or recapitulations of the history from MUD to now as a kind of trauma. Why don’t we have dynamic or sandbox worlds? Is it all the bad money men who don’t get it? Are we talking about the same thing when we invoke those words and ideas? If there was an unlimited budget for development, what else would cap or frustrate those ambitions: absent or embryonic technologies, limitations of existing infrastructure, expectations of players, the organization and sociology of game design itself? Or maybe there’s some conceptual flaw that’s deeper still, I dunno.

The nice thing about getting to a plateau is that it might be a good time to rest, have a picnic lunch and enjoy the scenery and reconsider whether to try and climb the cliff looming above the current plateau or to climb back down and look for another mountain.

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On the other hand, I really enjoyed the recent issue of The Escapist that focused on frustration. This is not unique to virtual worlds, really. I keep being struck that no matter how much I like digital games of all kinds, they are just rife with pleasure-killing features and designs that really seem wholly unnecessary, that aren’t part of the challenge of a game or even just a case of “filler”. Contrary to the editor’s note for the issue, though, I wouldn’t say that these experiences are what make it all “worth it”. Instead, I think they’re a real limit condition for digital games: a limit to their audiences, a limit to their success in their own terms as a cultural form, a limit to their success as products. More than a few experiences of dropping $60.00 on a bad, aggravating cultural experience is a pretty serious disincentive to keep going. I know, books, films, and TV can also be frustrating. But digital games have turned the unnecessary assault on the audience’s patience and sanity into a nearly standard feature.

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By the way, last week was also a big week for industry mergers. What does it all mean? Hell if I know, but Electronic Arts is certainly an interesting company to study if you want to try and understand how the drive to consolidate, absorb and monopolize a given industry is ultimately even against the interest of the consolidating company. EA clearly has executives who understand that the company’s size and structure actively impedes it from consistently producing the best products it can or even from making consistent marketplace successes. But this is sort of old news for cultural industries in general.

It’s hard not to see changes in the management at Mythic as a sign that Warhammer Online is recognized within the company as coming up short against benchmarks for minimal acceptable success that Mark Jacobs himself announced prerelease. I wonder a bit if WAR is actually going to survive more than another year or so.

This makes me note also that elsewhere, SOE has become a curious niche with MMOs, a kind of elephant’s graveyard where wounded, underperforming or neglected games end up. Which, if they’re all making some kind of profit, makes some degree of business sense.

Going back to my first point in this post, though, you’d think this would all make it a bit easier to drive the point home with the money people in these firms that the last thing anyone needs is a clone of World of Warcraft. You can’t possibly out-WoW at release at this point, and so you’ll inevitably suffer by comparison, no matter how bored people are with WoW. When I read about something like the new Star Trek MMO and get the vague, possibly inaccurate, impression that there are going to be tank ships, healer ships, dps ships, or that the game-mechanical questions around cloaking are going to be imagined in roughly the same terms that rogue stealthing in WoW are imagined, it really depresses me. Most attractive IPs aren’t necessarily suited to be MMOs at all, and very very few are suited to just be a reskinned WoW. A Star Trek MMO might work, but only if the basic structure of the entire project is reconsidered from soup to nuts.

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Moderating a panel on methdology and the study of virtual worlds at State of Play, I was suddenly struck that even though I’m more inclined to the methodological practices of my anthropologist colleagues who were on that panel, the foundation of my own methodological approach to the form is really quite different, and ultimately very much unlike my work on African history. Basically, I think I’m a memoirist at heart when it comes to games and virtual worlds, more like Julian Dibbell or Jim Rossignol. I think this is also a legitimate methodological approach within academic contexts as well as outside of them, and an approach that has a kind of tense, uneasy and sometimes rivalrous relationship with ethnography. I think I might try to work up a more formal commentary on this for Terra Nova.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture | Comments Off