Digital Search I: Google Poisons the Well

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I am apparently not the only person who feels a bit bait-and-switched by the state of Google’s digitization projects after the settlement. So much so that Sergey Brin himself has sallied forth to defend the current terms in the New York Times.

Several years ago, my feeling was that the main forces opposed to Google’s digitization of libraries were some of same groups and interests opposed to digitization in principle, or to open-access forms of publication.

Sure, there were also those with specific suspicions about Google’s intentions, most particularly regarding how the company intended to profit from the project. In retrospect, those suspicions were warranted.

Back when the digitization of some big academic libraries began under Google’s supervision, the company tended to politely sidestep direct questions about their own financial interests in the project. I recall several conversations I was involved in where the speculation was that Google intended to operate a book store to compete with Amazon, focused on in-print books that turned up in searches.

Or that the company was interested in working on the next frontier of problems with search technology itself, which required going beyond the clever mirroring that Google presently employs (e.g., using people do on the web as a kind of map of how knowledge is connected and what kind of knowledge is important). Searching a huge space of scanned books and document for relevant content might take a completely different approach to work well, and that approach might add up to a technology as lucrative as Google’s initial approaches to search turned out to be. Or that the company would somehow link the project to its existing advertising business.

The fear was always that Google would try to grab hold of the “orphan works” in large research libraries once they were digitized and sell those back to research institutions on an exclusive basis, to become the king vendor atop the mountain of digital databases. Well, once the settlement took on concrete shape, that turned out to be exactly where the company was heading.

I was initially welcoming to Google’s initiative because I believe that digitization is crucial for the improved dissemination of knowledge. I think scholars in many fields have been for a great many years frustratingly indifferent to dissemination as a primal commandment. Digitization at this scale is expensive, so I was always open to the idea that Google would try to make back its money in some fashion. The problem is that they’ve chosen to try and make it back in the one manner that will permanently impede rather than enable new conditions of information circulation.

Brin disingenuously suggests that out-of-print work is available now only to those who can afford to hop on a plane and fly to a library which holds such work. There’s a very small class of materials about which this is true: rare books, archival holdings and the like. Which are not the materials being digitized at the moment. Otherwise, there are a fairly large number of institutions which participate in inter-library loan or in more regional equivalents. The books may have to fly on a plane, but not the researchers.

Making a Google-digitized collection available to libraries for an annual fee doesn’t permanently open up that collection to a wider circulation. The basic problem with the entire economy of digitized research materials at the moment is that the whole apparatus has become a gun held permanently to the temple of libraries: work that they formerly owned outright is now rented for variable fees from vendors who are mostly interested in the extension of their own monopolies over information rather than on lowering barriers to use. Google’s entry into that economy just turns that gun into a rocket launcher.

I don’t mind it if Google Book Search recaptures its costs through ad revenue or through sales of in-print books. I don’t really care that much about whether the revenue goes to a rights-holder, or about making efforts to find rights-holders. I think some of that concern is a red herring, and is mostly about making sure that existing publishers get whatever cut of the pie they think they can snatch out of the whole deal. Scholars mostly don’t research and disseminate for royalty payments. Worrying about a slightly bigger share of chump-change is for chumps.

I do mind if the orphan-works content of Google Book Search is something that Google owns and sells access to on a vendor basis. When Brin titles his piece, “A Library to Last Forever”, my instinctive riposte is “A Monopoly to Last Forever”, that this is the worst kind of digital enclosure at the largest possible scale. This is really one of those moments where we either make digitization something that permanently opens up a knowledge-producing commons or something that permanently is controlled and exploited by a single interest.

In that context, it’s not only unconvincing for Brin to defend the project in terms of its urgent necessity, it’s actively hackle-raising that he does so. When I hear something like, “Hey, don’t worry about the fine print or the nitty-gritty details, we can work that out later. The most important thing is that we get it done, right? Think of the children!” what I hear instead is, “Ya got trouble, my friend, right here in River City”.

Posted in Academia, Books, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 6 Comments

Pile-On

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I just have to say it. President Obama?

It kind of says something about the world in general (as well as the past Administration) at this moment if default statesmanship carried out within ordinary interstate institutions seems like a major contribution to peace.

Yeah, I get it, it’s for being Not-George-Bush.

The Nobel Peace Prize kind of seems to me to need a conceptual overhaul. Make it something more like the Nobel Prize for Contributions to Democratic Civil Society or some such.

Update: Memorable quote from State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley: “We think that this gives us a sense of momentum when the United States has accolades tossed its way rather than shoes.”

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

From Gourmet to the Daily Gazette

Posted on October 8, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I was reminded for the first time in years of the existence of Gourmet magazine a few weeks ago when a foodie colleague of mine started talking about some recipes she’d made from it recently.

I used to subscribe to Gourmet some years ago. I stopped reading it because at some point, I just didn’t enjoy a monthly reminder of travel I’d never be able to afford, dining I was unlikely to indulge in very often, and recipes that mostly didn’t excite me. When Gourmet made the news this past week due to its cancellation, it turned out that I wasn’t the only person who had felt the same way.

I didn’t stop being a foodie when I stopped reading it. I didn’t stop reading it because the Internet came into being and replaced old-media. Something did change in my media and consumer habits, though, and maybe the Internet has had something to do with this change (whether cause or effect, I’m not sure). I stopped thinking of some of my media and leisure consumption as habitual, or as a kind of personal tradition. And I started having a much more pronounced hair trigger when it came to changing that consumption. Gourmet or anything like it stopped being habitus, a thing that defined an aspirational life or state of mind. I started reading Cook’s instead because it seemed practical and useful. But I’m just as much on a hair trigger with that as I am with anything these day. Christopher Kimball’s completely inane frontspiece to every single issue is enough alone to make me pull that trigger, but in the latest issue, they’ve started sequestering some of the content in the print magazine behind a paywall on the website. That’s pretty much the end for me.

This is the real issue for a lot of old media. They used to be a habit, a tradition, a part of life. As such, you ignored what you didn’t use or like the same way you ignore a tear or a stain in a piece of furniture that you otherwise find comfortable and can’t afford to replace anyway. But now I think a lot of audiences have a much more active imaginative engagement with what they read, and much less patience for a publication that isn’t nimble in its response to the needs and desires of its readership. You go to old media for a kind of quality you can’t get in new media, but now we expect much more for our (relatively small) payment.

——-

On the other side of the fence, though, it’s curious to see how much an old rhetoric about an expectation of quality still informs the way that some readers interact with new media. I was struck a bit by this right here at Swarthmore recently. In recent years, there’s been an online campus newsletter, the Daily Gazette, in addition to the regular campus newspaper, the Phoenix, both published and written by students.

Both publications have editorial staffs and operate under an old-media umbrella in the sense that they’re composed of articles that the editorial staff has commissioned or reviewed and decided to publish, rather than being new-media platforms that are open to any content. In practice, though, it seems to me that any student who really wanted to write something could publish it in either, particularly in the Daily Gazette, which is purely digital and isn’t affected by an economy of limited space.

Recently, one student published a satire aimed at the activists behind the Kick Coke campaign here. Several students wrote a column in reply complaining about low standards in student journalism and calling upon editors and reporters to publish better, more meaningfully investigative work.

The divide between old media environments and new media ones isn’t about print and digital. Mostly, old media is now clearly a packaged product. I buy it, I consume it. If I’m sufficiently unhappy with it, I stop consuming it. Print journalists lately have been proclaiming themselves instead to be public servants, to be an organ of civil society, and made it out that the consumption of print journalism is a form of republican virtue. This may have been true at some point in the past, but if that’s the social contract between readers and reporters, the reporters broke the contract unilaterally some time ago.

If I’m unhappy with the content of new media, well, first off, change the channel. There’s a lot out there. If I don’t find the blogs I like, switch to Twitter feeds or asynchronous bulletin boards or what have you. More importantly, roll my own, if I can.

Sure, I couldn’t do a blog reporting on current conditions in Guinea because I’m not there at the moment. But somebody can. But I could and do blog about issues in higher education, scholarly writing, U.S. politics and popular culture. Making your own media tends to connect you to others who are making media that provides some of what you can’t provide for yourself.

In a new media environment, complaining that someone should not publish work that you find to be of low quality is mismatched rhetoric ported over from old media consumption. You can certainly criticize such work, though often I think it’s best to just ignore what you really disdain. If it’s not what you think should be said, though, it’s up to you to say it. So in the case of the Swarthmore debate, for example, it feels oddly antiquated to me to see students (especially students with activist aspirations) arguing that it is the responsibility of student editors to provide the readership with a different kind of content while suppressing other kinds of content. A digital publication can shrink or grow dynamically in response to the amount of material provisioned to it by authors and creators. It doesn’t have a resource or price limitation that forces an editor to choose to publish a satire or an investigation, a light piece on fashion or a serious treatment of a public issue.

For a student at a college like this one, there’s nothing easier than writing what you’d like to write about the life and culture of the institution. There’s a lot of information lying around waiting to be used. The best complaint is not a demand that others write and publish differently. It’s rolling your own, saying what you think ought to be said, putting your own name and reputation on the line.

I’m completely happy to relate to some media and forms of information passively, to buy it and stop buying it as a product depending on my satisfaction with its quality. I might even warn a producer that they need to change the product to keep me pleased. But if it’s the kind of media where barriers to an active, participatory role are low, that’s not the right kind of response. Then my job is to make what I want rather than demand that it be made.

——-

Addition: It turns out Christopher Kimball knows that people hate his stupid frontspiece and doesn’t care. Bang! Goes my hairtrigger.

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Food, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Swarthmore | 6 Comments

Less-Convergent Culture

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I’m broadly sympathetic to celebrating the power and range of audience productions of culture and to Henry Jenkins‘ arguments about convergence culture and about reading the total range of textual production around a cultural property.

Sometimes Jenkins gets carried away: I don’t think consuming the totality of productive work around The Matrix rescues the second two films, to mention one somewhat infamous example of his tendency to argue that paratext and metatext inevitably or commonly elevate the richness and value of cultural production. In fact, the wider range of Matrix-work has frequently been just as wretched or pretentious or half-baked as the two sequels were.

I was thinking about this issue tonight because my daughter has a Halloween-costume request that I felt sure would be easily served through standard commercial channels. She wants to be one of the female X-Men, partly because she’s been watching the more kid-friendly X-Men animated series X-Men Evolution.

So I know my X-Men pretty well, though I took a long hiatus from reading their books during much of the ghastly 1990s and really only dialed back in somewhat during Grant Morrison’s run on the title. My daughter’s favorite character, unsurprisingly, is Kitty Pryde. I pointed out that over her lifespan as a character, she’s mostly known for having hilariously bad costumes. I offered to see if we could find the somewhat standard-issue black leotard with yellow overlay that a lot of the X-Men have worn at times and some wear on the cartoon show. Rejected. I showed her pictures of other Kitty/Shadowcat costumes. Agreement that they’re pretty horrible, she’s less committed to Kitty Pryde.

So we move on to Rogue. Daughter loves the more recent Rogue costume, the green-and-white one with a hood. I take note, but suspect that’s going to be a cosplay-only sort of thing. Maybe the older green-and-yellow thing with the headband. I show her some Phoenix costumes, she grudgingly allows that these might be ok.

So I sit down afterward to do a bit of searching. Here’s what I find as far as standard commercial outfits. If you’re female and a kid and you want to be a superhero, you’re basically out of luck unless Wonder Woman is your favorite.

Well, not quite. You can be an X-Man, it turns out. You can be Emma Frost. Well, not the usual slutty Emma Frost outfit if you get the kid version, just, well, it looks like a slightly repurposed angel costume. If you’re a tween and up, though? You can go full-slutty Emma Frost. I don’t even think she appears in the Evolution show. If she did, I doubt she’d be the kind of character a pre-teen girl would love to dress up as. Heck, even given her more heroic turn in recent years, she doesn’t exactly scream out “role model for young girls”.

So. What else? There’s still a few Teen Titans costumes out there, but she was the cartoon version of Raven last year. Most Batgirl, Catwoman, Supergirl costumes are for teens or adults or have a much more sexualized look. (There’s a Catwoman costume for girls based on Halle Berry’s fetish-style costume from the film. WTF?) There’s a Girl Captain America. There’s Pink Spider-Girl.

About the only one that I think is kind of ok besides the Raven costume that she’s worn already is Violet from The Incredibles. Or she could be a female Green Lantern, I guess. These suggestions are shut down immediately.

So I start to think about making a green Phoenix outfit, which seems a bit easier to contemplate than the Rogue-with-green-hood outfit. A green leotard as a starter seems doable. Then I start searching for yellow vinyl boots and gloves and end up pretty much right away at lingerie-and-naughtier web sites. Time to put this aside for a bit and figure out how much work I’m going to do here. (There’s cosplayers selling outfits but they’re adult sized and mucho money, as they should be.)

To go back to where I started, though, this is where you start to see how much some subsidiary systems of cultural production are curiously impoverished when it comes to standard commodities that align with the readings and desires that various pop-culture audiences can produce.

Yes, I know full well that the superhero genre comes into the game with all sorts of hugely sexist preloading. I mean, I started throwing out other female superheroes to my daughter to see what else might work, and I had to bite my tongue on most of them just in case she agreed: Zatanna? Black Canary? Um, no. I don’t really want to start googling for sites that sell pre-teen-sized fishnet stockings, thanks very much.

I really do think that women and girls who read comics make much more out of them than what the source text ostensibly provides. I think that kind of work happens in all media, with all texts. It’s just that the whole system is a series of funhouse mirrors: an audience makes the text richer and then turns to look for some other product which will echo or redouble the work they’ve done, only to find most secondary commodity systems even more impoverished and threadbare. Or, as in this case, they find the sexist content of the core properties is hugely amplified. (It doesn’t help that the sexualization of Halloween has gone from being one dimension or angle of adult participation to being pretty much the only commodified approach available to women. At this point, if you’re a woman and you don’t want to be “Whore Nurse”, you’re pretty much going to be making a concept-costume for yourself.)

Whatever the political and social significance of that amplification, I can’t also help but feel that it’s also a lost business opportunity. I don’t know that there’s that many girls my daughter’s age who want to dress up as Rogue, but surely there’s enough who don’t want to be “Pink Female Captain America” for there to be a payoff to manufacturing some slightly more expensive superheroine costumes.

Posted in Popular Culture | 7 Comments

Course Zero

Posted on October 6, 2009 by Timothy Burke

There’s an interesting article at Inside Higher Education about the new breed of peer-to-peer style sites for collecting student notes and course materials, officially for the purposes of providing study aids. In reality, at least some of the sites in question look more like an open-source reinvention of the ye olde buy-a-term-paper services, or as IHE points out, the old file-cabinet-in-the-frat-house that collects old exams.

I’ve never gotten too agitated about this kind of site before, because I partly think that there’s an easy way to avoid being vulnerable to the misuse of these kinds of resources: don’t use the same exam year after year, and don’t give essay prompts that are conventional or typical assignments on a common subject matter. It’s easier to spot a student who has turned in someone else’s work when what they turn in is weirdly non-responsive to the particular prompt you handed out.

That said, I think it’s worth keeping tabs on what these kinds of companies are up to. So I went off and looked at Course Hero, the main focus of the article. All I can say to the CEO of Course Hero is, don’t insult my intelligence by claiming that you don’t use webcrawlers to prowl .edu domains to harvest content for the site. What you find in the folders for Swarthmore is a bunch of junk pulled straight out of specific folders on the server, with the server folder titles on it, most of them connected to the oldest layers of our web presence. Almost none of the stuff in there has got anything to do with actual courses taught here: it’s some old .pdf handouts, some faculty c.v.s, a few papers or publications by faculty. Useless to anyone, especially to some would-be plagiariser at another college who is hunting for a paper to rip off. It’s a lot of noise. But seriously, don’t even try to pretend that this is all coming from user submissions, that’s laughable.

I assume that the main reason for stuffing the site full of junk grabbed by a crawler is to give the impression that the site is full of content in order to incentivize students at various institutions to submit their papers and exams in order to gain access. If you look around the web, you see a lot of sites with user-created content that kind of fell short of a critical mass and now are struggling to figure out how to get people to continue to submit content. Review-based sites in particular often struggle to keep users motivated to contribute content on a regular basis rather than just when they’re really pissed off at a service or product. I don’t think this kind of strategy is going to work for getting around that problem: it’s just a digital Potemkin Village, and pretty easily seen through.

The one open question for me about a site like this is what I ought to think or feel when I do happen to spot a student’s work that’s been uploaded to the site, which I think I might have spotted while looking through our campus folder there. There isn’t any way to forbid a student to share their own intellectual property, and I wouldn’t want to try. On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel wary about someone who participates in a site of this kind, because I can’t see any genuine motive for it. A digital activist who is exploring how to use social networking for the general good is going to invest in some other kind of project, and a student who wants feedback on their work is also going to look elsewhere. A student who needs extra support for coursework at a place like Swarthmore has a host of local options that are high-quality and very targeted, as opposed to the assortment of junk and miscellany cluttering up a site like Course Hero. Why would you upload papers and exams to a site like this if not to keep the option of grabbing a paper or two when crunch time comes?

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property, Swarthmore | 4 Comments

One Man’s Moose

Posted on October 5, 2009 by Timothy Burke

There was a sort of mini-meme earlier this month circulating around left and liberal blogs, a response in a thread at digg.com satirizing conservative hostility to government by calling attention to all the high-quality services provided by government that we depend upon in an average day.

It’s an old sentiment, and a perfectly sensible reply to the notion that the state taints everything by its very nature. It’s not likely to convince people who have an impossibly sanctified conception of the market and its capacity to enhance human life, or an equally determined vision of the state as purely and inevitably demonic (save, perhaps, its military or police capacities). But liberals not unreasonably hope to remind most people of the lasting benefits that have followed the early 20th Century expansion of the idea and reach of public services and government responsibilities.

On the other hand, there’s a danger to defending the state as an institution by listing its productive integration into everyday life. For one, it’s important for educated elites in the U.S. and Western Europe to seriously consider the degree to which that state, the state that provides services and protections, is an institution to which those elites have privileged access. It is in some sense “their” institution: they provide its upper leadership and fill out most of the middle management in areas that process or generate expert knowledge and intervention. They feel more comfortable interpreting the state’s activities and interacting with its operations. If they feel at risk from the actions of the government, they’re often more comfortable negotiating or actively blocking those actions. (If nothing else, you’re going to be a more successful NIMBY if you’ve got some money and some education on your side.) When you feel more comfortable with government, it’s hard to understand why anyone else wouldn’t feel the same way.

I’ve pointed out before in the context of U.S. politics why some constituencies flatly reject portrayals of government as a potential savior despite the fact that they’re beneficiaries of many governmental programs and actions. The manipulative cynicism of many conservative pundits aside, a more grass-roots rejection of government often stems from a feeling that the state is simply not capable of systematic improvement to the circumstances that some communities find themselves in. It’s not that it’s incompetent to do so, more that those communities feel a fatalism about the drift of history, a sense that if life is growing steadily worse in its moral, economic and social character, there is no policy, no expert opinion, no government agency, capable of addressing that situation.

There’s another aspect to this populist skepticism about government that I think is much more widely shared and not really ideologically conservative by its nature. This New York Times piece today about a public struggle over the fate of some deer and a moose in Vermont is a pretty good example. On one hand, you’ve got experts trying to manage animal populations so as to minimize the threat of chronic wasting disease on behalf of the public interest. On the other hand, you’ve got a guy with a pet moose that he loves.

The experts are trying to do their best to look out for the people of Vermont and their environment. The policy on chronic wasting disease has the same intent as all the other things that the state of Vermont does to protect its public lands and the health and welfare of the state and its people, all the invisible things that the digg.com poster was trying to remind us that we depend upon and expect.

But each of us knows and lives our existence at a more intimate scale, where the abstraction of the public interest seems impoverished and cold compared to the vivid individuality of real people and real circumstances. Pete the moose’s owner is wondering why it can’t be “arranged where nobody wins and nobody loses”, why you can’t have a general policy about moose and deer and elk together in a hunting farm that also makes an explicit exception for Pete or for some deer or for the circumstances of one man’s facility. Vermont’s a small state, after all, and the elk-hunting farm in question is one of only two in the state. Shouldn’t that make it possible to make law and policy which is flexible and circumstantial rather than dispassionate and detached?

The reports about government action which are told and circulate as horror stories are often this kind of tale, where government officials intervene crudely in the name of a policy or procedure into subtle circumstances and produce individual injustice or suffering while claiming to protect a higher or more generalized principle. Sometimes that has something to do with the petty authoritarianism of official culture, the same kind of license that a TSA screener who makes your life miserable is abusing.

Often, however, this is just about an incompatibility between public and individual scales of life. If you start cutting separate deals with everyone who pleads that their circumstances are special, that a legitimate attempt to safeguard the public shouldn’t apply to them, you’ll end up with a public policy that applies to no one. Let’s suppose that the regulations proposed in Vermont are a good way to contain the potential spread of chronic wasting disease. (I’m well aware that you could question them in purely expert terms, but for argument’s sake, let’s put that aside.) So Doug Nelson and Pete the moose get an exemption. Presumably the other elk-hunting farm in Vermont should be offered that too, if it’s asked for. What if someone else rescues some deer and moose under circumstances similar to Nelson and ends up feeling equally attached to them emotionally? The whole point of making an exemption is to recognize the quality and depth of Nelson’s individual feelings and experience with Pete: how could you refuse a similar circumstance in the future merely because it happens after a policy gets made?

What if, what if, what if. These are the counterfactuals that policy-makers tell about exceptions and circumstances, as a kind of totemic ward against their power. If we had to consider circumstances, they say, we’d never get anything done. Or we’d open ourselves up to a kind of corruption and abuse because you would necessarily have to devolve authority to the most local levels of a bureaucracy and trust those individuals to navigate intimate circumstances of real life with discretion and sensitivity. That worries many people as much as inflexible or blanket policies. It’s unnerving, that idea that you can’t really say what an institution or government is going to do until the actual circumstances of action present themselves. It amounts to a blank-check invitation to small-town Bonapartism.

This is the well-worn terrain on which 19th Century liberalism and the modern nation-state were born and it has ever since been the proving ground for that ideal and that institution. I don’t see a way off the map, but it’s well to be mindful of Pete the moose every time we’re tempted to recite the catechism of government’s benefits.

Posted in Politics | 8 Comments

Effect Size (Again)

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Deirdre McCloskey’s great little pamphlet The Secret Sins of Economics, which you can read in expanded form in her books The Cult of Statistical Significance and If You’re So Smart, argues that one of the two “secret sins” mentioned in the title is that economics treats statistically significant results as if they were significant in every sense of that term. I don’t agree with her that this is peculiar to economics, however. A lot of social science that rests on quantitative data has the same issue.

I agree that if a researcher can establish that a particular effect or phenomenon has a statistically significant influence or role in social behavior, it matters, that this is a finding worth reporting. The problem is, as McCloskey notes, that some findings matter more than other findings, and that the reason they matter more or less can only be worked out through something other than statistical argument, that the weight we should give such a finding has to come from some philosophical, moral, political or normative claim.

This perspective hit me most forcefully when I first started reading the literature on media effects in relationship to violence and children’s television (mostly from social psychology) and it still holds for most media effects studies, such as work on video games. I’ve written before about how astonishingly weak some of the earlier foundational research in the field is when you look at it closely, such as Albert Bandura’s “Bobo doll” experiments. But I’m perfectly willing to accept that some of the later research demonstrates that there’s some kind of hazy relationship between media consumption by children and an immediate propensity to act aggressively in a controlled setting, some quantifiable effect. It’s just that it strikes me as pretty minor compared to all the other influences on behavior that are in motion in the complexity of the real world, in the explanation of real actions.

In part, I think that it’s minor because if the effect size were significant enough as to warrant serious discussion of a major change in public policy towards the content of popular culture (a change which would have, to put it mildly, philosophical or moral implications for an open or free society), the effect would have very singular and visible consequences on a large scale. At a general level, it’s fair to summarize the history of visual media accessible to children in the United States as having the following trends between 1940 and 2009: vastly more media consumption, far more unmediated by parents or adults, and media with a wider variety and type of representations of violence. So if you’ve found in a laboratory setting that among children there’s an observable relationship between consumption of representations of violence and some action that can plausibly be labeled aggressive, and you stack that up against the basic trends in children’s media over 70 years, you have a prediction. Several generations of children should be successively more and more aggressive or violent. It doesn’t work out that way, however you want to talk about what constitutes measurable violence at the large scale of American society. There are trends in violent crime, trends in interpersonal violence, trends in social tolerance of aggression, but they don’t match at all well against the steadily increasing prevalence of violent images in media accessible to children. That’s just sticking with the United States. Get comparative on a bigger scale and it gets even messier.

So if you want to argue against children’s media in general, or against representations of violence, you need to stop saying that the science proves it, that it’s all in the numbers. The studies that found small laboratory effects represent a prediction about large-scale consequences that already went bust, didn’t pan out, not going to happen. You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and get into arguments about morality and politics, freedom and constraint, rights and ethics.

Sometimes when I make this argument, the rejoinder I hear from people who are strongly invested in media effects research is that media effects only become important when you’re focusing on uneducated and impoverished populations, that they’re cancelled out by education or wealth or strong family structures or good parenting, etcetera. Fine. Then the point still holds: focusing on media effects is a red herring, when the discussion should really be about education or poverty or family life or parenting practices.

——

I’m thinking about this today in part because I heard this morning on NPR a news story about new figures on average life expectancy in the developed world and how they’re expected to continue to climb steadily in the future. The researcher who was interviewed noted that the basic driver for this increase in life expectancy is the relative wealth of those societies and how that produces beneficial health dividends at several key points: better nutrition and caloric supply in childhood, better clinical medicine, better geriatric care, better standard of living all around.

The interesting thing is that the increase in not just life expectancy but to some extent quality of health during life is something that most people in Western societies are aware has been occurring. Sometimes I find that people project recent trends towards longer life backwards too far into the past, concluding that most premodern people suddenly dropped dead at 30 because that was life expectancy back then, when the truth is that most people born dropped dead before they were a year old. If they made it past childhood, they usually lived a lifespan not that far off the mid-20th Century norm. Human beings stopped dying so much in infancy first, well before they started living in steadily greater numbers past the age of 65.

So we’re aware that in this pretty important sense, the population of the developed world is healthier at this moment than it has ever been in world history, and barring some sudden catastrophic intervention such as a devastating pandemic, this trend appears likely to continue. In the developing world, not so much. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe, for example, has been moving full-throttle in the opposite direction for the past decade. Life expectancy is also a big indicator of inequality within societies, as different populations have often quite varying life expectancy.

Anyway. I raise this in relationship to the effect size problem because on the whole, this overall trend in the health of human populations ought to be a meaningful check or consideration to certain other kinds of conversations about public health. By no means all or even most of them: if you’re a researcher studying the health consequences of heroin addiction or the impact of antibiotic-resistant staph or innumerable other trends in conditions that have pronounced effects on particular groups or individuals, it hardly matters that as a whole, human beings are healthier and more long-lived than they were a century ago. But if, for example, you’re seriously concerned by rising obesity and you think that trend is very serious, you need to think about which kind of serious you mean. If you mean, serious in the sense of “more obesity means higher health care costs”, that’s pretty valid. If you mean, “more obesity means lower quality of life”, that might be, but you just started chasing a different kind of argumentative white rabbit down a different kind of hole at that point. If you mean, in some form or another, “more and more of us are going to die earlier and earlier”, it sort of looks like you’re wrong. And yet, I think if you look at popular rhetoric in the U.S. about rising obesity levels, that’s pretty much what it sounds like. You might do what media effects researchers do and clarify to say that what you really mean is that poor people are going to see a larger hit on their life expectancy because of rising obesity in their demographic, but then, as with media effects research, why get hung up on something other than the underlying problem, poverty? Or maybe there is an effect on life expectancy from rising obesity across the whole of society that is substantially cancelled out by trends in much larger effects (quality of medical care, overall nutrition and calorie supply, basic levels of physical fitness, etc.) In which case, you’re getting too strongly worried, in terms that are too strongly voiced, about a phenomenon that isn’t as forcefully important as you think it is.

There are a lot of examples like this spread across social science and natural science. Probably one of the root issues here, which I’ve talked about a lot on the blog, is that there’s very little interest in or reward for research which makes modest claims about mildly significant results. But maybe this is an even more important kind of research than straightforwardly negative findings, at least as far as fueling public policy and public discussion. If we don’t know what kinds of effects are present but not hugely significant in our lived environment, we can’t really know where we need to take small incremental actions instead of sweeping and drastic action that’s festooned with alarm bells and cries of urgency.

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture | 4 Comments

Student Blogging as Transparency and Education

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Timothy Burke

There’s an interesting piece in the NY Times today about colleges that encourage student blogging as a method of disseminating information about the culture of campus life to prospective students and other outsiders.

MIT, unsurprisingly, is the institution with the strongest commitment to this approach: when it comes to using information technology in synergy with their curricular and institutional commitments, MIT remains the heavyweight champion.

I suppose it’s unsurprising that my position is that an open invitation to students to blog on a college or university-supplied platform is entirely a good thing, as long as it’s also understood that whatever happens with those blogs is up to the students.

The first reason to do something like this is not promotional, it’s educational. There was some interesting discussion earlier this year at Swarthmore about whether we needed to do more to help students learn how to present their work and themselves in public or group settings. I think we should be doing more, but I don’t want to narrow the focus of that effort just to public speaking. It should include how to apply for grants, how to write letters on one’s behalf, how to talk about a project you want to pursue, how to read and react to audiences and institutions to whom one is presenting in real-time, how to get a feel for the manners or formalities that govern the presentation of self in specific settings. Swarthmore and its peers do some of that kind of training already, but it’s more likely to be done in a concentrated way by staff than it is by faculty, and I think it ought to be a shared mission.

Blogging seems a pretty good way to tackle some of those objectives. It doesn’t help with learning the art of public presentation in face-to-face situations, which is even more important. But it’s a good way to learn about what works and doesn’t work when you’re trying to explain yourself, your experiences, your interests, your commitments, to figure out which audiences you want to talk to and which ones are peripheral.

It’s also a good way to learn about how hard it can be to stay consistently committed to a voice or mode of self-presentation and to keep plugging away at it, refining it, rethinking it. This is one reason I think class blogs often feel vaguely unsatisfying: when they’re an assignment, they don’t often produce a self-sustaining engagement with course material. That’s often why students struggle to present themselves in a persuasive or compelling manner outside of familar exercises like writing papers for professors: there’s no inner engine driving that self-presentation, that appeal for resources, nothing that’s practiced and sustained enough to survive a skeptical or probing examination from an unexpected or unwanted audience.

Student blogging also seems a great way to give outsiders some sense of what life is like at a given college or university, though. When that kind of promotional window to the outside is too controlled or manicured, too in alignment with the idealized image that an institution would like to project, it fails. That’s because the digitally literate (presumably those most likely to find and read such blogs) are generally extremely sensitive to that kind of manipulation and bowdlerization.

Certainly it would be nice if a population of student bloggers was diverse enough that it captured the range of student experiences at a given institution. Much as I loved and still love Justin Hall’s pioneering personal web page, I think it’s fair to say that Justin was not the typical Swarthmore student, if there is such a thing. The people who are most immediately motivated to start and sustain blogs may rarely fit that description. (cough, including yours truly).

You also can’t just pick a few people and hope they automagically start blogging. You need an open platform ready for all comers first. That also is not enough. You can lead some bloggers to the phosphors but you can’t make them post. You need to work at nurturing the expectation that this is something that students (and maybe others) should do, that it’s part of what they’re at college to do.

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Swarthmore | 4 Comments

The Rules of the Game

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Someone asked me in email last week what I thought of James O’Keefe’s video expose of ACORN, specifically whether I thought it was unfair or distorted because O’Keefe wasn’t showing all of the videos where ACORN staff didn’t rise to the bait.

Sure, yes, that’s not fair. But don’t come complaining about cherrypicking attacks of this kind unless you’re fairly consistently against them, unless you’re first concerned with the ethics of how you use evidence. You can’t say that it’s ok for Michael Moore to do it and then complain when someone imitates his tactics. The reverse, of course, is also true: if you thought O’Keefe raised very serious questions about ACORN as a whole organization blah blah blah, then you must be very impressed with Michael Moore’s thorough and careful indictment of the health care system or of contemporary capitalism.

I would be the first to say that Moore can do some pretty funny and clever agitprop, mind you. But if we’re just talking about the aesthetics of being a provocateur, O’Keefe is no slouch. As entertainment, it all falls under the same broad heading that Jackass and Punk’d and similar sorts of latter-day Candid Camera programming, and there’s some appeal to that genre of schadenfreude. I wouldn’t want documentary or polemic to have to skew to the completely opposite end of the scale and be nothing but Ken Burns-style snoozefests, safe for the NPR pledge drive and soccer moms but of no use otherwise.

Still, if you want to treat any cherrypicked playing-to-the-peanut-galleries work as actually persuasive, though, congratulations on paving the road to Idiocracy. What bugs me more is trying to raise a selective stink about this kind of work just when it comes from political opponents.

There’s really only two ways for me to read someone who comes knocking around trying to raise the alarm at that kind of moment.

Either the only thing that really matters to the person complaining is that it’s their opponents that are doing it. In which case, complaining about rhetorical or evidentiary standards is just an attempt to mobilize people who care more about those standards than which faction is doing it. As soon as the controversy dies down, the partisan is likely to go right back to complaining about the centrist or independent or non-aligned person who is worried first about standards of argument or about the basis for collective action and second about the content of a given political argument. So don’t come knocking on the door and pretending to be concerned if you’re just trying to concern-troll some people onto some “me-too” bandwagon.

If, on the other hand, how we argue matters, the standards for evidence matter, if the point is to maintain some kind of rigor when we’re considering collective action or making public decisions, then it needs to matter even when you’re hearing a message that’s otherwise appealing to you. You can’t get away with privately supplying the serious evidence that you personally know about if that’s wholly lacking from the polemic in question, or taking out odious manipulations in favor of imagined probity.

Posted in Blogging, Politics | 7 Comments

I Had to Burn the Park to the Ground to Clean It

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Timothy Burke

So my daughter and I were playing Scribblenauts for the first time last night. Based on our experience, I think it’s one of those rare digital games that people who don’t often play or like games will like. (As well as people who do play them.) The basic gimmick is that you control a character who has to solve little physical puzzles. You do it by typing out the names of objects you’d like to have that will let you solve the puzzle. The variety of objects which can appear is pretty amazing: so far the only things we haven’t been able to make are copyrighted or are abstractions. (You can even make some abstractions appear if they have a common personification. Type “death” and a little grim reaper will appear–and then he’ll do what the grim reaper does.) When you solve the puzzle, a little star appears that you can collect and move on to the next puzzle.

We did the first couple of puzzles the obvious way. Give a chef something he wants, ok, a rolling pin. Give a fireman something he wants, ok, an axe. This was when we discovered the game’s main problem, which is that the control interface really sucks. I tried to pick up the axe and hand it to the fireman, but instead ended up killing him with the axe. Start that puzzle again.

A couple of puzzles later, I decided to try more exotic solutions. We were supposed to clean up three items of garbage in a park and get rid of a fly. It turns out that your character can just pick up two of the items of garbage and the fly himself, leaving only an item of garbage high up in a tree. So I thought, let’s get God involved. I type God and he dutifully appears. God in this game appears to take the position that he helps those who help themselves, so he just wanders around enjoying the park. My strategy not being successful, I thought, eh, let’s get Satan and see what happens. Satan appears. God kills him. Hm. So I summon a bazooka and see if we can get God out of the way. God doesn’t care for that and kills my character.

Let’s try again. How about “apocalypse”? This produces a nuclear weapon. Click on it and it counts down to activation. One nuclear blast later and the star actually appears, indicating that I have successfully cleaned up the garbage in the park. Unfortunately I am dead and can’t claim the star. So let’s try again with “bomb shelter” plus “apocalypse”. Click on nuclear weapon, get in shelter. The ground crumbles and the shelter falls through. The star appears but I am dead.

So another strategy. Clean up most of the park by hand. Now summon a flamethrower. Burn the tree with the garbage in it to the ground. Voila! Puzzle solved. The park is now clean of garbage.

What’s fun is that there are many equally creative non-violent solutions to many puzzles. It can be aggravating when things that should work don’t work: the game’s internal logic is sometimes pretty arbitrary or counter-intuitive. But still, it’s a hoot.

More importantly, I think it’s about as great an educational game as you’re ever going to find. If you wanted to motivate kids to learn to spell and to broaden their vocabulary with a game, this is about ten thousand times better than the kinds of serious learning games that educational designers typically come up with.

Posted in Games and Gaming | 4 Comments