You can keep your Robert Pattinsons and Miley Cyruses and whichever other beautiful prepubescent sexy people you young people idolize these days. My idols are people like these folks:
That guy in the lower lefthand corner is Howard Rheingold, who is by just about all accounts one of the kindest, happiest, most curious, most fascinating, most colorful, and most thought-provoking media theorists around. (If you want proof, take a look at this little gem of his writing.)
Because Howard is kind and supportive of other aspiring intellectuals, I’ve had email conversations and twitter conversations and blog conversations with Howard. There’s this interesting feature of the new technologies that swell around us, see: They efface the distance–perceived and real–between our idols and our selves. If you’re patient enough and quick enough, you can use these new technologies to climb right up on the pedestals your heroes are standing on and tap them on the shoulder.
And today in a webchat I got to talk to Howard–with my voice–about crap detection, participatory culture, and pedagogy. It. Was. Awesome.
It may soon enough be the case that the structures and norms that allowed us to toss up celebrities and intellectuals as cultural heroes–well, it may soon enough be the case that those structures crumble, leaving our heroes in the rubble at our feet. I’m young enough to hope it’ll happen in my lifetime but old enough that I may not be able to fully shake the notion of the celebrity as icon. After all, I grew up alongside this:
And yes, I know that a huge chunk of Americans have never even heard of Howard Rheingold (or Lisa Delpit or Paulo Freire or Jim Gee or Henry Jenkins or Yasmin Kafai) and that these people don’t count as ‘celebrities,’ as least not in the “zomg the paparazzi are everywhere” sense. I don’t care. As Intel explains, our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars.
Here’s an inalienable right for you: the right to informed citizenship.
Citizenship, the informed kind, has two distinct angles to it. The first is the personal: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to the information that allows us to act in a civic and socially responsible way, and Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The second is the social: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to live in a society populated by informed citizens. We have a right to live among an informed citizenry, and any policy, law, or practice that restricts this right exists in opposition to a free and functional democracy.
In America, we embrace the right to informed citizenship; or, more accurately, we shout our support of informed citizenship up to the very rafters. Then we give Big Business a million incendiary devices to burn down that house.
Then there’s the kindling, the petrol, the oxygen that keeps the fire blazing. Among the most powerful of these is the news paywall, which sequesters off information to which citizens have an absolute right. In theory, paywalls are no different from their precursors, subscription fees and newsstand prices. But two things have changed–our model of citizenship, and our access to circulated information–since those pre-internet days.
For example: In 1990-1991, during the first Gulf War, news was circulated fairly evenly across multiple platforms. An American who didn’t want to pay for a newspaper could still gather information through television and radio. She could walk into a library and read the news for free. Certainly this wasn’t a utopian ideal of a free press on every street corner, but the news that enabled a citizen to act was available through multiple outlets.
Today, the speed and reach of internet news sources make them by far the dominant news circulation platform. Indeed, the speed and reach of internet news are part of why a new model of citizenship is emerging. If there was ever a time when it was possible to measure civic engagement by looking at voter turnout on Election Day, that time is long past. Today’s civically engaged citizen is the one who is aware of Facebook’s abominable approach to privacy and has made decisions about how (or whether) to use Facebook as a result of this knowledge. Today’s informed citizen may not know how many electoral votes are needed for a candidate to win the presidency, but she knows how to find that information when necessary. She votes on Election Day, sure, but she also votes with her feet and her eyeballs and her fingertips, constantly making informed decisions about how to parcel out her energy and time, when to dance along with corporate and political influences and when to resist, when to leave the dance floor entirely.
Paywalls make it harder for an informed citizen to stay informed, which in turn restricts my right to live among an informed citizenry. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the news that sticks is the news that spreads–via blogs, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and news aggregating sites like Boingboing. News that’s stuck behind a paywall is news that can’t spread and is therefore news that dies.
And that’s not all: I believe that news paywalls are likely to have long-term effects on citizenship, as well, since I agree with James Seddon’s point in his recent Wired article that young people who grow up without unfettered access to local news are likely to grow up without a sense of social and civic connection to their communities.
I recognize that the current business model for print journalism isn’t working. I recognize that newspapers need to do something if they want to try to save their jobs. But in America, the eight-year reign of Baby Bush notwithstanding, we don’t let business interests trump fundamental human rights.
I’m rooting for newspapers, I really am. I hope they survive this challenge. But news paywalls are in direct opposition to our fundamental right to informed citizenship, and my message to the print media folks is this: Find another way.
I recently participated in a local event called Ignite Bloomington, where my co-presenter, Christian Briggs, and I performed a poem we called “the social beat.”
The design of the background images, the development of the poem, and the planning of the performance were all completed collaboratively; this was by far the most collaborative creative project I’ve ever been involved in. I say that as a graduate of an MFA program who spent three years doing almost nothing but creative work. I say that as someone who intentionally moved away from what I’m coming to see as the antiquated approach to writing that pervades creative writing programs around the country.
I write more now, and more creatively, and with more enthusiasm, than I ever did during my days as a ‘poet.’ In part, this is because the primary type of writing I do these days is far more public and persistent, and more closely linked to issues that matter deeply to me, than was the writing I did as a creative writing major. But the writing I do nowadays is also more aligned with my ethos: These days, I embrace openness, collaboration, and collective knowledge-building; and producing, circulating, and building upon others’ ideas online meets these interests nicely. In fact, this “writing publicly for a networked public” thing meets my needs like gangbusters.
Creative writing, at least in the MFA-program sense of the term, never did meet my needs or interests. It felt too far out of my control. We more or less buy the idea of the “muse”–call it flow if you want, call it the zone, call it whatever you want, but what it means is that we embrace this strange idea that the greatest works emerge when you can set your conscious mind a little bit to the side and let your unconscious break through to the surface. It had to happen in silence. It had to happen alone. And you couldn’t control it. You could only control the circumstances that make it more likely to happen.
Sure, fine. We need people to make those great brilliant works by betting on the muse. But that way of thinking about writing is just not for me–it never has been. I’m more into the “how do you get to Carnegie Hall” approach to writing, which is why blogging, and the attendant potential readership, appeals so much to me.
And when it comes to creative writing, I’m kinda into this “collaboration” thing. Coordinating the partnership is tricky and time-consuming, but if you find the right partner you end up standing on each other’s shoulders, finishing with something better than any one of you could have written on their own. One thing I know for sure is that the work that came out of my collaboration with Christian is better, stronger, more powerful than anything I could have come up with on my own. I’m proud of this work, maybe prouder than I was of any poem I wrote on my own, and I’m proud to include the poem and a video of our performance of it below.
the social beat {implosion::explosion} Jenna McWilliams & Christian Briggs
let’s walk it backwards: when a girl in a field face shielded from the sun looks out at you and smiles you think something has begun but that’s not a smile it’s a grimace it’s a sneer you’ve got that camera around your face and a 21st century leer
but it’s a circle, a cycle, a snake that eats its tail explosion, says mcluhan, split the instrument from the wail and now we’re walking that split backwards to where the hammer meets the nail to where the language meets its speaker and the face removes its veil
is this a flat world? a kind world? a world framed as a game? what’s the win state? who’s losing? should we send it all up in flames? and with every change we fight for does it all just stay the same?
explosion: in 1984 papert blew up the school or said computers would {they didn’t or if they did, they hid it} it’s a long revolution a slow evolution characterized by dilution and diffusion and confusion sometimes, but joy too, and profusion, collusion and elocution and hope, and motion, and implosion of space and time and multiple uses we lifted our tech and it calmly spoke through us.
implosion: the same plane with the same name moves us and rushes us and smooshes us together that long walkway is us walking away from the everyday pulleys and gears of our years we climb onto the tech we climb into the sky we can collaborate now we can elaborate now we can fly
it’s gonna crash the school becomes a skull its planks and its floorboards and its chalkboards and its front doors flash past us like shrapnel as we dash past with laptops the floor’s falling in and we have them building backdrops and stage props in woodshop.
they’re gonna fall explode in on themselves, the freight and the chaos beams buckling, roof knuckling under the weight as crowds spill like kindling into the street meeting each other again flinting and squinting again in the sun {ignite}
it’s all going under it’s all yellow light slanting sideways across shining faces it’s thunder it’s traces of ozone it’s acres of blight as we push back the night as it grinds to a crawl as the old ladies watch and wonder they’re gonna go under
but the story’s not finished they’re gonna defend they’ll never give in. they learned how to stand in an age of their father’s machine. they’re clean. so they defend. and they default. and they defer to the icon and its policies and its politics and its poetry we automate the manual. now our hands are clean on the path to hell
cue eye roll. we know how to build, we can do it again. so we build. and we machinate. and we slap down machines to palliate the children we fill them as if they were containers. it’s heinous. it took two days for those green machines to fill up with guess what? porn.
we’ve had millennia now of dissemination, maybe it’s time to change the story to disovulation: one perfect idea at a time, sent out into the world then we’ll let you guys fight over who gets to claim it. or blame it. millennia now of the Churchills the Hitlers the Gateses the Jobses the Spitfires and Messerschmittses and Habermas and Hobbeses
like a girl in a field face shielded from the sun is still inside the lines where something has begun
it’s the circle, the cycle, the snake has caught its tail the explosion’s moving backward though the timid first will fail
the tots will test it, resisting with a poke, a prod, a post the slightest and the smallest seem the most benign of rabble filling up the tubes with what will mostly seem a babble to defenders of the past
now they’re teens on the street the lines are giving way babble turned to business as the structures start to sway but still defenders are within this scene, clutching for the days…. that will no longer be..
you see…
the teens have grown and jumped the lines we’re not walled in and not walled out nor confined by any doubt instead we clamber for the time when all that’s in will all be out a coalescing of the minds whose synaptastics speed the time
technology will take its place a toy a tool connecting us aiding a collective us crushing in both time and space freeing up the play in us
we are those girls in our fields faces turned toward every one collectively reflecting on the thing that has begun or is it ending as it rends us? the scream igniting as it mends us? unbends us and upends us: a lick of flame, a bonfire, night brought shrieking to the sun a slow sermon whispered softly: there is much that must be done.
Monday, March 8, 2010, is International Women’s Day, and Gender Across Borders is helping to get the word out by asking people to blog on this year’s theme: “Equal rights, equal opportunity: Progress for all.”
Today is the one-year anniversary of the establishment of this blog. I count my decision to start this blog, and after that decision the decisions to cultivate it, populate it, and spread the word about it as the most significant aspect of my developing identify as an academic.
And I don’t mean “academic” in the stuffy, yes-quite kind of way, either. I mean that the decision to start this blog–a decision that came suddenly, without much by way of any warning–was a decision to speak. It was a decision to move from “Yes, that’s something I care about, and I wish there was something I could do about it” to “Yes, I care about that, and here’s what I think about it and here’s what I’m doing to change things.”
I love blogging. It has opened doors for me. It has allowed me to say things I wouldn’t have otherwise had the space to say, to people I want to hear those things. And if I sometimes go a little overboard on extolling the virtues of blogging, it’s only because I hope for everyone to experience a similar falling away of the weights and chains that for so long kept me close to the earth.
I have a dim memory of the person I was before–a much smaller, much timider person who was horrified at the prospect of taking up too much space or too much of your time. I know that version of me is killed for good, and I’m glad for it. I hope that all of you have the chance, at least once, to experience this kind of total transformation. I hope you get the chance to experience the power of some tool, some network, some community, some practice, online or off, to change your life and trajectory and goals and plans for good.
In case you’re looking for some last-minute gifts for the bloggers you know, I offer the following products designed to show how much you love and value their work in that nebulous place we call the blogosphere.
T-Shirts, stickers, and mugs
I actually don’t know many bloggers who would wear T-shirts advertising their blogging practices. I’d probably be more likely to wear a T-shirt that advertises my blog’s URL than I would to wear any of the shirts below, but on the other hand, I’m a big fan of the last two designs.
Mugs for bloggers, by zazzle.com. At the risk of stereotyping: If there’s one thing bloggers use, it’s mugs.
Cafe Press gifts: T-shirts, stickers, and mugs. These are fairly clip art-looking, but there are some gems in the pile. There are also some clunkers, exemplified by this kid’s hoodie encouraging caffeine addiction and antisocial behavior, if the imprinted message is to be believed:
Happiness is… Your favorite pen a great plot line, a hot cup of coffee, and an entire day alone.
Gift Lists from Elsewhere
Ten Great Gifts for Bloggers and New Media Moguls, by Catherine-Gail Reinhard (Mashable.com). I offer this link even though I think only eight of the ten gift ideas proposed in this article are actually useful for your typical blogger / new media mogul. Idea #2, a laptop hideaway, is basically a $50 paperweight since no blogger worth her salt actually chooses to or even wants to stow her laptop out of sight. Suggestion #8, typewriter jewelry, is perhaps useful for some bloggers, but others of us spend so much time stuck to a laptop that we don’t have time for things like personal adornment and / or hygiene.
50 Perfect Gifts for Webophiles, Bloggers, and Internet Marketers, by SEOmozBlog. This list is fairly gadget-heavy, with several desktop toy-type items (including the Cranium Poindexter doll at right). In my experience, bloggers tend to lose / drop / break things with a fair amount of frequency, so exercise your good sense here. I do like the emphasis throughout this list on gadgets that can clean / feed / organize the typical webophile.
Gadgets for Geeks, from Skimbaco Lifestyle. This list is exactly what the title suggests: a short list of a variety of geeky gadgets, including clocks, quirky USB drives, and the Kindle.
HoMedics Shiatsu Back Massager This is a must-have for any blogger. Well, okay, it’s a must-have for this blogger. I tried one of these at a local pharmacy the other day and I almost slid out of the chair. I was JUST THAT RELAXED.
Below are my nominations for the 2009 Edublog Awards. If you’re interested in submitting your own nominations for this year’s awards, you’ll need to act fast. The deadlines start rolling in this week:
Nominations: Close Tuesday 8 December
Voting: Ends Wednesday 16 December
Award Ceremony: Friday 18 December
Click here for more information about the awards and nomination process.
Best individual tweeter: Alec Couros. (Couros is a professor of educational technology and media at the Faculty of Education, University of Regina. He’s a regular tweeter who engages with a range of topics and with other twitter users; his tweets are informative and the links he offers to his followers are always interesting.)
Best resource sharing blog: Open Education News, a site that aggregates information about research, materials, and news about the open education movement.
Most influential blog post: a few notes about openness (and a request), by David Wiley. This post hits on a key tension within the open education movement: How do we define openness? He writes:
First, “open” is a continuous, not binary, construct. A door can be wide open, completely shut, or open part way. So can a window. So can a faucet. So can your eyes. Our commonsense, every day experience teaches us that “open” is continuous. Anyone who will argue that “open” is a binary construct is forced to admit that a door cracked open one centimeter is just as open as a door standing wide open, because their conception of the term has no nuance. Alternately, they may adopt an artificial definition, in which a door opened 20 cm or more is considered open, while a door opened 19 cm is not considered open. But this is unsatisfactory as well.
Wiley has since addressed the question of openness in a systematic, deliberate, and useful way; but I consider this post more influential than even the ideas it gave rise to because it so clearly delineated the problem and so clearly demonstrated (in the tone of the post and in the comments below) the emotional tension underlying this issue.
Best teacher blog: Kevin’s Meandering Mind, a blog maintained by Kevin Hodgson, a 6th grade teacher, National Writing Project teacher-consutant, creative writer, and author. It’s absolutely essential reading for anybody interested in questions about how we might teach the “new” writing.
Best educational use of video / visual: viz.: Visual Rhetoric — visual culture — pedagogy.
I’ve been following technorati’s 2009 state of the blogosphere report with the level of interest you might expect from someone who spends the vast majority of her free time blogging. Much has been and will be made of the following statistics, culled from technorati’s survey:
• Two-thirds are male • 60% are 18-44 • The majority are more affluent and educated than the general population ◦ 75% have college degrees ◦ 40% have graduate degrees ◦ One in three has an annual household income of $75K+ ◦ One in four has an annual household income of $100K+ ◦ Professional and self-employed bloggers are more affluent: nearly half have an annual household income of $75,000 and one third topped the $100,000 level • More than half are married • More than half are parents • Half are employed full time, however ¾ of professional bloggers are employed full time.
These statistics are worth mulling, as they point to a disturbing trend toward the mainstreaming of what was previously a counterculture form of communication. Others have begun exploring this in depth.
What interests me most at the moment, however, is the statistic on journalistic credentials. According to the report, 35% of respondents have worked in traditional media formats, including newspapers and magazines, radio, and television. Compare this to the less than 1% of the entire American work force employed in traditional media fields.
And one more statistic before we dive into analysis: Of those who identified as having employment history with traditional media sources, 72% are no longer employed by a media outlet. This means that just over one-fourth of the bloggers surveyed are formerly affiliated with traditional media outlets.
Why does this matter? Because it points to two interesting and important trends among bloggers: They have had more exposure to traditional journalistic ethics than does the average American; and they are disproportionately drawn to blogging as a news circulation format. This is, in my view, a double smackdown to those who fear that the shift away from traditional news sources will lead to a decreased quality in reporting.
journalistic ethics, carried over As I’ve explained before, I’m a former newspaper reporter whose paper folded after a long slide toward decreased advertising revenues. Not all of us who worked at that local paper were journalists, exactly–our crew included two sales reps, two assistants, a circulation manager, and various part-time employees–but everybody at that office embraced a deep commitment to honest, responsible information delivery. It kind of came with the territory.
Journalism is guided by an ethical framework–what we might call an appreciative system–that’s undergirded by intellectual rigor, critical curiosity, and chronic curmudgeonry. Though this commitment is move visible in its breach (which is in part why Jayson Blair became a household name), it’s a big piece of what drives so many people into traditional journalism even as its dying gasps turn into death rattles.
disproportional representation: paid journalists become voluntary journalists Old journalists never die, they just get de-pressed, har har. In fact, the thriving popularity of blogs and their potential to reach a vast–indeed, potentially almost infinite–audience is by my lights part of what draws us traditional media curmudgeons to new media. Though I can’t speak for all traditional media-affiliated bloggers, I can tell you that I was drawn to journalism because I believed in its power, believed in its transformative potential. I believed, even before I could articulate it, in the power of a free press in a democratic society. That’s free as in speech, not as in beer.
Now, as a blogger, my understanding of “free press” has changed: When I talk about the power of a free press, I now mean free as in speech and as in beer. This does not, contrary to commonbelief, mean that I believe we can sustain a thriving communication system without funds; I just don’t believe that the people should be required to pay for information. I have elsewhere delineated between ‘news’ and ‘the news’ and discussed various approaches to funding that may be more sustainable than the current system, so I won’t go into that here; instead, I only want to submit that for many traditional-media types like me, blogs offer what a career in journalism did, only more so. More communication of ideas, more potential readership, more opportunity for direct conversation between the writer and her readers. News can be broken, immediately, to overwhelming impact, via blogs; ideas can be offered, discussed, and modified; a reading public can be mobilized to act.
There are those who will (and do!) argue that unpaid citizens will never be willing to commit to reporting on local, national, or international news without pay; or that even those who are willing to do so will offer substandard, biased, or useless content. These charges may be true, but only of a subset of the online journalistic population. For the rest of us, our commitment to delivery of high-quality, well researched and useful information has never been higher or more valuable–essential, really, to a democratic society built on a presumption of freedom of speech and of the press.
In my search for interesting new blogs to follow, I recently realized I could easily crowdsource this search to the Twitter community, assuming I could get enough users behind it. Twitter users have leveraged the #followfriday hashtag for recommending follow-worthy users and #musicmonday to offer musical suggestions, to roaring success.
I’m going to try starting a #blogroll hashtag, intended to share interesting blogs with other users. I think this will work best if the blogs are grouped by category, so that people who search #blogroll will be able to sort by their interests. So a #blogroll tweet might look like this:
If this works for you guys, then perhaps we should choose a day. I nominate Wednesdays, since for some reason that’s the day I most often find myself looking for new blogs to read.
I’ve been accused, off and on, of being a technological determinist. I’d just like to point out, for the record, that the five most common terms I’ve used are, in order or frequency:
new
media
people
like
social
Emphasis on the social effects of new media for people who like stuff FTW.
