Archive: Apr 2009

What does this comparison between California’s prison spending and it’s spending on higher education say about the state’s current and future priorities?

So a developing meme about our current president is that he’s not kickin’ enough “evil doer” butt….let’s call it the “politics of wuss.” He bows to the Saudi kings, he proclaims respect for the Persian empire, he’s going to allow my abuelita to visit her Cuban birthplace without restrictions, and he receives lefty books about colonialism in Latin America from dictators without using the text as a blunt instrument to beat Chavez for his insolence.

The right-o-sphere is appoplectic about this “politics of wuss.” They view it as a confirmation of an underlying relativism and moral ambiguity on the part of the president that will lead him to capitulate to, or be manipulated by, the dark forces in the geopolitical order. The left-o-sphere sees it as a “politics of dignity” welcome change in foreign policy towards a more cosmopolitan worldview where you respect other differences and listen to their concerns.

I see it as the politics of capacity building. The right is generally more enamored with a foreign policy in which you signal your intentions through force or the possibility of force, not through capitulation or admitting past wrongdoing. Critics on the right have criticized Obama’s approach to admitting past U.S. mistakes for not yielding immediate results from European allies during the latest G-20 summit.

Many on the right act as if foreign policy is a “one off” interaction rather than a set of repeated games in which actors learn from the interaction how to gain concessions from each other. Whereas the Bush administration’s approach to power was a “power over” approach where they sought to use their hegemonic world status to generate compliance from other state actors (see Pakistan, Turkey, etc.). The Obama administration is using a “power to” or “social production” approach where you distribute carrots in the hopes of building trust relationships with strategic actors that allow you to accomplish future goals. I’d argue that in a complex, hazy world where nations can form effective alliances without the United States, you’re better off going with a “power to” view of the world.

The interesting thing Obama is doing is that he is using “symbolic benefits” to build coalitions –“”power to.” While perhaps not as effective a “glue” for building relationships as material benefits, symbolic benefits are important. If nothing else, because it sets the conditions for other countries to go to their public for concessions that might be in the U.S.’ interest. The best part of symbolic benefits is that they are free…they cost nothing monetarily.

The general feeling on the right is that these symbolic appeals do cost something. It makes the U.S. appear weak or timid, as the very coiffed and masculine Mitt Romney opined. For these critics, there are only interests and at the end of the day, the way you appeal to leaders is to appear strong and stoic. Unbending. Unyielding in your position. Manly, if you will. No “power to” allowed, or the “evil doers” will pursue their interests of world domination or something of that ilk.

In my view, it is more naive to think that you are a hegemon when you aren’t than to admit mistakes and move forward on seeking common ground. Does Venezuela change its stance towards the US because Obama accepted a book from Chavez? Maybe not. But if the president’s response was to excoriate the dictator for deigning to bring up the subject of colonialism in the president’s majesterial presence, what exactly would that gain? Reactions like Newt Gingrich’s or Mitt Romney’s to the Obama/Chavez exchange are not some heroic call to steadfastness in the face of evil. Rather it is based on some intrinsic and dangerous sense of moral rectitude on the part of the right (don’t get me wrong….the left has it’s own moral rectitude problems). It’s an impulse that I can’t say I fully understand. It’s the impulse that drives fundamentalist parents to abandon a gay child because they are “sinning in the eyes of god.”

Personally, I think we’ve had a good long run of foreign policy being dictated by a “power over” approach. Let’s see how the “power to” works. Does tilling the field with “symbolic benefits” bear fruit by the end of Obama’s first term? Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure it will be better than where we’ve been.

What Nick Carr thinks of Twitter:

The great paradox of “social networking” is that it uses narcissism as the glue for “community.” Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self’s bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can’t quite bring myself to believe that I’m real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I’m walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

I’d buy his argument if the majority of the activity in the blogosphere was taking place among atomized, yearning individuals lost in the anomie of consumer culture. But in my experience, on-line communities augment, rather than replace off-line interaction. Facebook research is still in its infancy, but what’s emerging is that Facebook uses extend their existing off-line networks on-line (see Danah Boyd’s work on this question).

We are “symbol(s) speaking of symbols to other symbols:”

Insert speculation du jour:

HT: Matt Yglesias

Personally, I’ll go with Nancy Birdsall’s useful distinction between destructive and constructive inequality:

inequality is constructive when it creates positive incentives at the micro level. Such inequality reflects differences in individuals’ responses to equal opportunities and is consistent with efficient allocation of resources in an economy. In contrast, destructive inequality reflects privileges for the already rich and blocks potential for productive contributions of the less rich.

That large of an accumulation of wealth at the top is destructive because it can buy that much more privilege for those associated with that wealth.

Given Jose’s post below, and some of our previous discussions about entertaining politics on Thick Culture–here’s a link to my new article on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the Southern Communication Journal. You may need to go through Google Scholar or another university search engine to access it:

www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a910538638~db=all~order=page

If anyone has a chance to read or skim through it, I’d welcome any critiques, additions, random thoughts growing out it, etc.–as I’m planning on extending this research over the coming years (the next step is an article I’m currently writing on The Onion News Network). — Don Waisanen

Jon Stewart’s piercing analysis of the cable news media’s coverage of the “tea-party/bag/kettle protests”

Fox News = Pacifica Radio
CNN = Fox News
MSNBC = The sexual innuendo channel

George Will attributes the decline of Western civilization to 501’s.  While the blogosphere this he’s “havin’ a laugh” (as the English say), I give Will credit for offering a provocative argument about how our norms of dress affect our social conduct.

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.

For a conservative, Will’s doing some serious critical analysis here!  I’m partial to jeans and a dress shirt as my professional uniform.  I have been since my mid twenties.  As I near my 40’s, I do feel a pressure to reach for the dress pants over the jeans, particularly if I’m going to be interacting with peers.

I don’t think I wear jeans to signal “indifference to appearances,” although do we ever fully know ourselves 😉  I think I do it to convey a sense of approachability and informality.  As a university professor, and maybe as a person, I’m uncomfortable with conveying a sense of elevated status through wardrobe.  Through wearing jeans, I’m critiquing received power structures and signaling to students that authority should be earned through interaction and not “read” through wardrobe.

But, let’s give George Will some props here.  Dress is a form of text and we’re becoming increasingly detached from our cloting choices. A few years back it was trendy for students to wear t-shirts with the words “porn star” enblazoned on them.

I remember one of my best and most courteous students wearing a “porn star” shirt to class one day. Did that student give though to how her wardrobe would be read as a signifier? Is the “porn star” shirt signifying rebellion? irony? insecurity? What?

What do you think?  Do you think dress establishes norms?  What would be the consequences of reverting back to formal dress as a marker of status.

Ken has an intriguing post below exploring issues relating to technologies like Twitter and their impact upon communication competence and media ecology. While many of these technologies are here to stay, I think that we’re all going to see many of them peak soon. Just as the car gave us traffic jams, Twitter and Facebook are probably going to hit their points of maximum capacity in the not-too-distant future, given their rapid diffusion. Yet I’m also not that concerned, at least for now, about these technologies being “minimalist” forms of communication. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson argues, “I love you” is a sound bite. This isn’t to denigrate developed analysis; I’m a big fan of book-length manuscripts and all the fruits of the printing press. But we might need to move the discussion more to one of “meaning” rather than linear quantity, to better understand the limits and potentials of new forms of social media.

There may be one trend to celebrate for now. Twitter appears to be opening up a space for more direct democracy (or at least a strengthened representative democracy) between elected officials and their constituents (see “Twitter and its Impact on American Governance,” www.communicationcurrents.com/index.asp?bid=15&issuepage=157&False). There is some evidence that, despite the limits of the channel, it is being used by officials to bypass mainstream media filters and framings. If this development continues, we’re going to have to rethink entire theoretical edifices created in the last few decades (such as McCombs & Shaw’s “agenda-setting theory”—which describes how the media sets the public and political agenda).

 How this will all work out remains to be seen. I’d like to know how much of a one-way or two-way communication channel Twitter will likely become. Right now it seems more of a one-way blast of advocacy than a considered interaction. Or, more troublingly, perhaps the form of this technology will foster a new age of assertion, rather than argument. On the other hand, it’s now well-known that the move from typewriting to word processing freed us all up to “overwrite,” being less careful about sentence by sentence constructions or the constraints of white-out and laborious re-drafting. Maybe Twitter is a countertrend to these developments—forcing writers to work within a tightly bounded channel where communicative impact, rather than spewing, becomes more of a norm again.

When I heard that HuffPo was instituting standards for citizen journalists, my initial thoughts were that this is like having cinematic standards for porn or a paparazzi code of conduct.  Jeff Bercovici explains why he feels that the 2,500 or so citizen journalists should follow professional standards.  NYU Journalism prof. Jay Rosen has a different views, evident when he explained last year why he thinks that citizen journalists have a place, in light of the Mayhill Fowler dustup about her HuffPo article based on interview with Bill Clinton, where she did not reveal she was a member of the “press.”  Rosen makes a good point here::

“When we admit the validity of both we expand the social space of the press. That is a good thing. If it has pro and amateur wings maybe the press can fly again. If the pros and lots of citizens care about things like “access” maybe that will expand the accessible zone in politics. Dave Winer said it this weekend: Blow up the Beltway. My formulation is milder: expand the press!”

“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs…If you don’t have trust, you don’t get good stories. If someone comes along and uses deception to shatter that trust, she has hurt the very cause of a free flow of public information that [Fowler] claims she wants to assist. You identify yourself when you’re interviewing somebody…It’s just a form of cheating not to.”

Hey, alleged child molesters are an easy target, so it’s all for the best, right?  Never mind that professional journalism was found engaging in entrapment of a Assistant District Attorney who committed suicide over being targeted in the “sting” operation.

While I surmise that most professional journalists would decry these tactics and To Catch a Predator would not be viewed by many as professional journalism, it highlights how journalistic integrity within that institution is far from above reproach.

I’ve argued that satire masquerading as journalism can serve the journalistic function outside the institution of journalism.  It should be noted that Colbert and Stewart are still a part of infotainment, albeit with a different stance.  I’m all for a plurality of voices and stances in the media.  I’m more interested in the journalistic function of the fourth estate than preserving some abstract notion of the institution of journalism as a craft.  I’d rather see journalists push the envelope à la Hunter S. Thompson, rather than play it safe or curry favor with advertisers.  ¡Viva Gonzo!

Song:  The Jam, “News of the World” (1978) (#27UK Singles)