digital digs

change.gov and the social media citizen

Stories right now on Huffington Post and Salon.com about the backlash over Obama's selection of Rick Warren to speak at the inauguration. Thousands of posts on the change.gov site the Obama team has created are just the tip of the furor. Of course the idea of the change.gov site was/is to bring Obama's supporters, and other Americans, into the conversation about reform and thus to capitalize on the advantages of social media during the election for Obama.

Will it work? Who knows.

I'm pretty sure about this however. I think Obama is a moderate, particularly on the kinds of social issues that really get people angry: gay rights, abortion, etc. However, I also think that we may have reached a historical moment where it is no longer possible to have it two ways. It is appropriate that Obama is always quoting Lincoln. And it may be true that Lincoln had a cabinet of rivals and was open to hearing the voices of those who differed from him, but Lincoln obviously presided over a civil war. Assuming that the outcome of the war was not certain (which of course it couldn't have been), Lincoln was willing to risk the destruction of the US rather than allow the status quo to continue. For Lincoln it was a matter of declaring that certain practices and values, certain ways of life, would no longer be acceptable as part of American culture. And Americans killed each other over the matter, and in many ways, we remain divided.

So Obama is happy to say that change is necessary. But at what cost? What will he be willing to risk? What you can see on change.gov is what you can see on 1000s of other sites, which is that Americans who could be bothered to write anything at all have very strong disagreements. They have absolutely nothing to gain by trying to come to an agreement, and if anything, there interaction on sites like these seems only to harden their respective resolves. Maybe at some future point we will achieve some ethos that compels us to try to get along online, but I doubt it. Would we ask the 19th-century abolitionist to get along with the plantation owner?  I don't think so. At some point, something has got to give.

If Obama is going to be a president of the network, who listens to the network, he is not going to discover his mythical "united" states. If he looks closely enough, he might see the post-human, dissensual state of America and the many apparatuses of capture working to map dissensus onto an ideological map. What one does with such knowledge as a president I have no idea.

UPDATE: David Weinberger has an interesting take on this on the NPR site defending Obama's choice.

education, reform, and assessment

I was listening to NPR yesterday on my brief drive to the gym and heard part of the discussion surrounding Obama's selection of Arne Duncan as education secretary. As we know, the crossfire discourse of education pits teacher unions against those who call themselves reformers. The latter group tends to support testing, merit pay for teachers, and similar measures, which the unions generally have opposed. The unions call for increased funding for schools, but opponents say that throwing money at the problem isn't a solution.

The guest on the show, from the "reformer" side, suggested that in the classroom one must balance the interests of the adults and the children, but that in the end we must come down on the side of the kids. The obvious suggestion there is that the union position is self-interested in protecting the adult teachers in the schools whereas reformers are doing it "for the children" (if we could only strike that tired rhetorical ploy from the human conscious!). I would hope NPR listeners are savvy enough to see through that pathetic tactic. This is an ideological conflict.

First of all, you'd have to be fairly dimwitted to think that the "problem" of education is "in the schools." For example, in Onondaga county, when you look at the suburban schools, basically 95% of high school students are passing the state's math regents exam. Go into the Syracuse schools and that number drops below 60%. Do we really think that the teachers in the city schools are that much worse? Is it really a lack of new textbooks or computers or school supplies that are creating this difference? I am not suggesting that we shouldn't do everything we can to make these schools as good as they can be. I just think we are overlooking the obvious broader socio-economic conditions.

Second, I would think that anyone with kids realizes that "teaching to the test" is simply destroying our schools. My kids are in one of these suburban school districts were 90+% of the kids are passing these tests. It seems like they have a high stakes test every year, starting in first grade. My kids rank in the 99th percentile on these tests (yea from them). But they would probably do about the same with zero test-prep. It's difficult to gauge how much time they are wasting sitting in that classroom, but it's a lot.  My daughter does her math at home through an online program from Stanford, and she moves at about triple the speed of the class (and that's spending only 20 minutes a day, five days a week doing it). Sure, maybe there are only 2 or 3 kids in each classroom that are having an experience like this, but on the flipside, there are probably only 4 or 5 kids in the classroom who are in any real danger of not passing the test.

That of course brings me to "merit pay." If it goes through, I will be auctioning off my kids to the highest bidding teacher.

As a professor, I know well enough to not take responsibility for the great successes of my students. I also know not to take responsibility for students who fail. So what exactly is it that teachers do then? When someone can actually map the socio-cultural-cognitive network of learning, I will let you know. I do know that the classroom is not a factory, that students are not products, and that you can't quality-control the classroom-factory by testing the products. Sorry. In a way I wish it was that easy. But on the other hand, as a member of the human race, I'm glad I am not subject to the kind of psychological domination that would be required to make the classroom-factory model really work.

As I stated at the outset, the problems are ideological. Culturally we don't value education; we don't like "smart people;" we don't trust or like teachers; we certainly don't trust or like professors.  Furthermore, as Ken Robinson has suggested, we have a limited view of intelligence and creativity. We conceive of learning as a rational process, when rationality is clearly a poor articulation of how cognition actually works. In terms of these issues, teachers and reformers are equally parts of the problem. 

Addressing the challenges of education will require as large a cultural shift as moving Americans toward a sustainable culture.

scenes from America's fourth republic classroom

On Salon, Michael Lind offers a historical perspective on the dawning of America's fourth republic.The first goes from Washington to the Civil War. The second then up to the Depression. And the third until 2004 (read the article, he explains). Basically they are all about 70 odd years long. Lind suggests each period begins with the centralization of government power and ends with a swing back partially in the other direction. Think of the difference of FDR-Johnson vs. Nixon-Bush. Lind offers an industrial-economic pattern behind these shifts that is fairly recognizable. The shift to steam power and railroads in the mid-19th century. The shift to electricity and internal combustion in the 1930s. And now? A green economy? Maybe.

Lind writes:

It remains to be seen what energy sources -- nuclear? Solar? Clean coal? -- and what technologies -- nanotechnology? Photonics? Biotech-- will be the basis of the next American economy. (Note: I'm talking about the material, real-world manufacturing and utility economy, not the illusory "information economy" beloved of globalization enthusiasts in the 1990s, who pretended that deindustrialization by outsourcing was a higher state of industrialism.)

Not surprisingly I am less derisive of the "information economy" than Lind. I don't know how Lind imagines that the nanotechnologies industry will operate outside of an information economy. Yes. Somewhere there will need to be nanotechnology factories. But that's not going to work like the automobile industry. If energy prices rise this may create some advantage for local/national production because of the costs of transporation on a global scale, but I wouldn't really count on that, b/c the raw materials for automobiles, for example, will still need to be transported globally anyway. On the other hand, one advantage of the green economy is that it requires a necessary local element. The windmills need to be where the wind is.

rhetoric of a new America

Certainly much talk about the historic election results. On CNN, one of the Republican commentators referred to his own party as a "Southern party," so much talk about they need to do. Also conversation about whether the Dem landslide means the nation has moved leftward. Predictably all the right-wingers who were decrying Obama as the "most liberal" member of the senate, even socialist, are now saying that he won b/c he adopted traditionally Republican values: tax cuts, etc. Also similar talk that Dems winning in Congress are also more centrist, though certainly that was not what was being said about them a week ago!

Who can believe any of this self-serving analysis?

This is what I see that's interesting, though predictable, in CNN's exit polls. Nationally, whites voted 55-43 for McCain, so non-whites won this election for Obama. Even more specifically, whites over 30 voted approx. 57-41 for McCain, while whites under 30 voted 54-44 for Obama. Some how I doubt that there's ever been a presidential election where the clear choice of whites over 30 was not elected. And not only was not elected but lost by a significant margin.

The exit polls reproduce the divides of the elections of recent memory remain intact. White, less educated, Christian, older, rural men and women make the vast majority of Republican voters. Of these, education is probably the least determining fact. That is if a voter has all the other characteristics, s/he's voting republican for the most part, regardless of education (though those with postgrad education vote Dem). On the flipside, urban, non-white, less religious or non-Christian, younger voters are the Dems. it would seem that the primary difference is that there are now more of these kinds of voters in a larger number of states (like VA, NC, FL, CO). But that doesn't explain everything. It doesn't explain Iowa, for example.

The big question now might be whether or not this election means that we have moved to the left as a nation. Were the right-wing pundits correct last week when they were saying how liberal the Dems are or are they correct today when they are saying that the Dems won by masquerading as or turning into Reps?

Or maybe, in our most pollyanna moment, we imagine moving beyond binary politics.

As I've written earlier, I don't believe that democray is a rational process. Politics are affective. Trying to deduce a rational interpretation that says what an election "means," to assume that a rational message is sent from voters, is misleading. And this is not in anyway a slam against American voters. It is instead a position on what human behavior is like, especially on such a scale. I include myself in this. I cannot imagine any realistic conditions under which I would vote differently. Is it rational of me to say there is absolutely nothing one candidate could have done or said to persuade me? I don't think so.

But rationality is over-rated. It's a good faith but ultimately insufficient attempt to explain agency. And the left-right binary is just another part of that Cartesian mapping of political consciousness. Not that such matters are likely to drift into the mainstream any time soon, but I think that if you want to understand the new America, you'll have to move to a post-Cartesian, post-rational mapping of the political subject.

spread the wealth; build the wealth

Two interesting reports, both of which I came to through the Creative Class blog, that connect well with our current political discourse. Of course both candidates are promising everyone in America above-average incomes, b/c they believe, quite rightly, that Americans can't handle the truth and are quite happy to slay the messenger. But I digress.

A new UN Report (reported here in the Vancouver Sun) indicates that "Major U.S. cities including New York, Washington, Atlanta and New Orleans have levels of economic inequality that rival cities in Africa." No, the poor in the US obviously aren't as poor as the poor in Africa. But the difference between the poor and the wealthy is as wide. That jives with this OCED report (from AP) that also reports on inequality. This report notes that social mobility is lowest in countries with high inequality such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy. Richard Florida has noted that this kind of inequality seems common in US cities where the creative economy is taking off.

10 seconds of exigency

So I'm loading groceries into my car this afternoon, and this senior citizen pulls his car up behind me and rolls down his window. He eyes the Obama sticker on the back of my car and says something like, "You know your man Obama has ties to terrorists. Maybe you should think that over." I just blew him off, told him to feel free to think whatever he wanted. After all, am I going to get into some political dialogue and/or argument with some old man in a parking lot?

I don't think so.

But I'm curious about the motivation. We've all seen bumper stickers and shirts with various slogans that we might take issue with. How many times have you felt the need to say something? What's going on in the mind there? Does the guy think he's honestly going to change my mind this way? If so, did he consider what might be the best argument he could offer with his ten seconds? Not that it would have mattered anyway.

Of course I don't think purpose was on his mind. This is just verbal diarrhea, a need to express some frustration at a worldview he can't understand.

the pro-american world vs. purple states

You've probably read about Palin's remarks about the "pro-American" parts of the US. Of course she tried to clarify that statement, but everyone knows what she's talking about. And while I would use the term "pro-American," we can all recognize the serious ideological divides in our nation. The Republicans are playing divisive politics right now with comments like this and McCain's accusation that Obama is playing at "class warfare." I recognize the strategy; it's an effort to energize the conservative base. Meanwhile the Obama and Biden have been sticking more to the idea of everyone coming together, something we've since since 2004 from Obama. I recognize that strategy too. And I think both sides believe in the claims that lie behind those strategies. I wish I could believe that we could come together. My skepticism regarding that possibility is one of any number of reasons why I wouldn't make a good president.

If you look at the polling, you will see nothing surprising. Across most of the South and the Plains, the Reps have double-digit leads. The Dems have similar leads in the NorthEast, the West coast, and across most of the Mid-West. So are these really different ideological universes? The opposing view has been this idea of "purple states" (purple state maps),  that the mixture of left and right in America is more pronounced than what the red-blue state story would tell. I guess that depends on your viewpoint. Even if you live in the country in a deeply red state, say 2/3 McCain, one of your neighbors is voting Democrat. But is that person voting Obama because they share ideological perspectives with the majority of urbanites? Or you can switch it around, does the Manhattanite voting Republican share an ideology with the rural Texan? I would think not.

So the patriotism line is a rallying call for a particular ideology of course that claims to celebrate the American individual (as long as those individuals think like me: if not then they hate America and are terrorists). On Larry King last night some conservative talking head called Obama a Marxist. King asked if that meant that Republicans were fascists. Of course not was the reply, b/c Republicanism is about the individual. This was the obvious retort but King didn't go there.

Now I don't expect or desire to live in a country were everyone share the same ideology. There have likely only been a few short periods when Americans came together like that: Pearl Harbor, 9/11, etc. But then soon afterward we were divisive again.

But most importantly, we shouldn't imagine that democracy is a rational process. If you have a preference for McDonalds over BK or Coke over Pepsi or Bud over Miller, are these rational choices? Or would it be more accurate to say that they are affective responses? That one feels better. If you thought that the election of Bush in 2004 was irrational, if Obama gets elected this time around, do you think it will be b/c Americans suddenly became rational? And you can flip that around if you are coming from the other political perspective. What % of American voters do you think can give a reasonable accounting of the candidate's policies and offer a logically functional argument for why they prefer one over the other?

You know it can't be more than 10% or so. Besides even the experts can't say with much certainty what, if anything, will work to fix our economic and political woes. So how can anyone make a rational choice between plans? No, the election has to be pure ideology and affect. And I absolutely do not mean to suggest that we should abandon the democratic process! I just mean that we can't expect the process to be rational.

politics, advertising, and the 24/7 news cycle

Campbell Brown, one of CNN's anchors, offers the following observation: McCain and Obama will spend $30M between now and election day on advertising. If they really cared about Americans then shouldn't they be donating that money to feed the hungry or something?

And I wonder what kind of cynical political hash would be made of such a move? But more to the point, this self-righteous contention conveniently overlooks the complicity of CNN, other news networks, and the rest of the media (new and old) who feed off of all this garbage. Like many, I've been following the news more closely of late, partly because the election and partly because of our economic situation. How many times do they come on and say "Americans don't care about Bill Ayers or Joe the Plumber"? And then the next sentence is a story about this kind of negative campaigning. Negative campaigning gets most of the attention.

Who is so obtuse as to not see this formula. Here's 30 minutes about negative campaigning and people's reactions and some polling data (as if an election were a horse race). Then we hear voters say, "I don't know enough details about the candidates' economic plan." Well how 'bout we spend those 30 minutes of news time doing some actual reporting and investigating?

Understanding money and debt

I won't pretend to be an expert in economics but here is a fairly straightforward, if lengthy, video about the evolution of money and the concept of debt. Toward the end the video gets less historical/documentary and more polemic, but it is also prescient, since this was uploaded Feb 2007.

Let me know what you think.

how bizarre is this vp choice?

Anyone who reads this blog knows I have never written about politics in the conventional sense, but I must admit to being flummoxed by this one. I guess the strategy here is fairly obvious. The GOP wants to go after the disaffected Hillary voter, particularly women, who have regularly voted democrat. So they decide to nominate a woman for VP. OK, what other qualifications:

• someone in the party
• someone more socially conservative than McCain (b/c he's got problems on the right)
• someone not associated with the current admin (sorry Condi)
• and someone who can pass the vetting process

Mix together and stir. The result? Sarah Palin. Age 44. BA Univ of Idaho in Journalism. Former sports reporter. Former mayor of Wasilla. Of course you'll hear all this.

Now here's the thing I don't get. All the GOP ink spilled on Barak's experience. McCain would be the oldest person ever elected as president. He may be in perfect health right now. But honestly, you have to say there's a reasonable chance he could be seriously incapacitated or even die in office. This woman is ready to be president? What, did she take a class on being president at Idaho? Being Gov. of a population of 650,000 folks in Alaska for two years makes you ready? Can she name any of the leaders in China? Does she have a sense of who is likely to be the next president in Pakistan?

Just as point of comparison, the population of Alaska is roughly the same as that of the metropolitan area of Syracuse, NY. Our county executive, Joanie Mahoney, is a female republican. Why not nominate her for VP? She's about the same age as Palin and has a law degree from SU. She was a criminal prosecutor for a while. That's got to beat being a sports reporter in Anchorage.

But really this strategy does not make sense. Are HIllary voters really going to vote for someone who is pro-life? Are they going to vote for someone who supports the teaching of creationism in schools?

I could see if McCain had nominated a social moderate woman, someone closer to his own politics, that this might have worked. But I don't see how you attract HIllary voters and social conservatives with the same choice. I guess we'll see.