College professors around the world struggle with Facebook for their students attention (It’s OK, we know). Most of them take care of this by forbidding laptops from the classroom. But doing that removes an essential tool for “note taking” or learning further about the topic (some students I know actually do this).

The Web is a useful supplement for classroom learning, opening students up to the world of ideas and concepts the may be unfamiliar with or, more to the point, uncomfortable with. However, there is the sneaking suspicion on the part of faculty that our students aren’t “taking notes” on their laptops, they are checking Facebook.

How could they not. Facebook is the biggest social networking application in the world. The site is still in its toddler phase, but has achieved an impressive global reach, with 750 million users world wide. But this ubiquitousness happenened in a matter of months. A mere three yeras ago, MySpace had a larger user base than Facebook. To Internet scholars, that seems like a million years ago. Because of Facebook’s rapid rise, we know little about the impact the application has on our experience of the social world?

I’m writing a book for Ashgate Press where I make the case that Facebook produces a preference for “the personal” in ways that make users disdainful of, although not averse to, “the impersonal”. I argue that the emphasis on disclosure and connection on Facebook colors by the nature of our engagement with public (political) life.

To return to the classroom example, the power of disclosure and connection to a network of intimates is difficult for a professor to compete with. I am a stranger to most of my students. They don’t know me. They have no way of knowing whether what I’m saying in the classroom will be useful, or uncomfortable by making them think about things they have little control over.

By contrast, on Facebook, they can build deeper connections with people they have already vetted, people to which they are socially proximate. They can share intimate, subjective, feelings and observations about the world around them. They can talk about people they like, what professors are wearing, or how much fun they had the night before. Each update from a friend is a small burst of oxytocin that is next to impossible for someone talking about macro-economics to compete with.

But what if I am saying something my students need to know? What if I’m talking about impersonal systems and strucutres that do not have Facebook accounts or provide status updates. What if a discussion about addressing the Greek debt crisis isn’t based on how you feel about Greece, but requires the development of reasoning about how one builds institutions in an increasingly complex world. What if global warming is actually a “thing out there” and isn’t subject to how you or your friends “feel” about it. A tsunami caused by radical shifts in temperature that is about to crash over you isn’t interested in whether you “like” it or not.

This is what I suspect Facebook does to us….it engages us with the appealing world of disclosure and connection when many of our large scale problems have little to do with those two things.

If you’re like most of my liberal elite buddies, you think Sarah Palin’s recent rumblings about getting into the presidential derby is a great boom for Democrats. Well, I’m less giddy. Here’s reason #1 from Ron Brownstien’s analysis of a recent Pew survey:

63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.

While Republicans have a history of elite-driven presidential nominations, Palin has one advantage that Romney, Pawlenty or Hunstman do not…. she resonates with working class whites. This group remains angry, economically distressed and “searching for their country.” Who do you think they think is going to find it for them?

You’ betcha!

Some days, you are reminded that the framers were some pretty smart dudes.  Today, the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown vs. Plata ordered the State of California to move 32,000 inmates from its state correctional facilities because their treatment constituted a violation of the 8th amendment’s restriction on cruel and unusual punishment.  Dalia Lithwick in Slate does a nice summary of the on-going case law on this subject:

In 2005, a federal court determined that “on average, an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies in the medical delivery system.” But conditions continued to deteriorate, and in 2009 a three-judge panel ordered California to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of the prisons’ design capacity within two years. (The system was designed to hold just under 80,000 prisoners, but at the time of the oral argument, it had more than 142,000, and Kennedy notes that since then the state has transferred about 9,000 inmates to county jails.) The state appealed, arguing among other points that it hadn’t enough time to remedy the problems.

In his opinion, Justice Kennedy, perhaps recognizing the limits of reasoned argument on this issue, attached photographs of the overcrowded conditions to his argument (here, here, and here).  I have lots of sympathy for the court in this instance.  They walk a fine line between having to uphold constitutional principles while at the same time legitimating them to a less informed but more petulant public.  In my courses, very few students ever take the position that people in prison should have any constitutional protections.  If we left it up to the public, the miserable conditions in state prisons would never be addressed.  As Schneider and Ingram pointed out in their fantastic book, prisoners are constructed as deviant target populations and as such politicians have no incentive to adopt legislation that would aid them.

But the court (at least five of them) know full well that the constitution is intended to protect minority interests, no matter how vilified they are by the public (even if that vilification is justified).  It does sadden me that the citizens of my state can’t show responsible citizenship in addressing the situation.  I grudgingly have to accept that the framers had it right in positing a dim view of their fellow citizens’ ability to rationally assess social problems.  Locking mentally-ill prisoners in a phone booth cell isn’t humane or rational, even if it’s satisfying in a primal way.  Can we ever move to a place where the courts don’t need to step in to do what citizens themselves should be doing.

Good Magazine has just introduced me to my next Community Development course assignment. The BBC Broadsides project is the brainchild of Boston based artist Tim Devin. He places posters around his Boston neighborhood that seeks to enhance awareness of the surrounding community. One set of posters provides what he calls “mappy facts” regarding the demographics of the neighborhood:

The second he calls “street surveys” where he engages the neighborhood by asking survey questions, like this one.

What a great opportunity to create a 1.0 version of augmented cities (or campuses)! In my own suburb there is little engagement or awareness of who lives here. I’ll keep you posted on how this works in my courses!

While a rational comprehensive approach to policy is now seen as naiive in explaining how policy is decided upon, only now are we really delving into the role of emotions in policy making…..good times in my discipline.

Miller-McCune, our neighbors to the immediate north, have a nice summary of recent research on the role of anger in mobilizing voters. As one of the scholars summarized puts it:

Anger gets people engaged…. There’s a tendency among scholars and others to say that things like negative advertising are bad. But our paper points out that negative emotions like anger can bring people out and get people more involved. So the consequences aren’t all bad.

This gets us to a key tension in civic engagement. We want people to participate in politics, but we don’t spend much time thinking about how they should participate. All the efforts aimed at GOTV efforts (here’s a good local example) presume that voters know their interests and automatically express them when they go to vote. But I question whether a politics driven by outrage and anger produces good policy outcomes.

The great challenge is to get politics to be about other emotions. While anger has its place, it is not the only, or even the best emotion to employ when thinking about public life. I think the central conceit of representative democracy whereby the “best and the brightest” filter out the passion and anger of the masses through deliberation and compromise has its value, but a core downfall is that it doesn’t place much obligation on citizens to be reasonable or civil.

In that case, how do you introduce these other emotions into civic life. For example, how do you talk about a “politics of love” without sounding like some sort of irrelevant crunchy peacenik. It is here where public life is at its most partriarchal. The only allowable feelings to express in public discourse are traditionally masculine ones. But we know from life that anger has to be controlled or kept in check. We don’t seem to hold those same standards in public discourse. Instead suggesting and anger towards government is good and a sign of “caring” about civic life. If anger and stress have negative health effects on the body, it’s possible that they also have negative health effects on the body politic.

Today, Facebook signed up to use Web of Trust (WOT) reputation ratings to help create a safter on-line experience for its users. The effort is intended to avoid phishing scams within Facebook.  Once a Facebook user shares a link:

Facebook automatically scans the links, applying WOT’s information, to determine if the website is known to distribute spam or contain malware. If the link is identified as untrustworthy, then a warning will appear allowing the person to avoid the link, learn more about the rating or continue forward.

Assessments about the trustworthiness of the site are determined by the crowd. I’m not sure exactly how it will work but presumably if enough people flag a site as malicious, a WOT warning appears.

Sounds good so far.But I wonder how this crowdsourcing of malicious links on Facebook simultaneously binds us even more closely to an “architecture of publicness” (a term I’m playing with as I prepare a manuscript on Facebook’s effect on political identity).  What I mean by this term is a on-line design structure that provides social incentives to reveal elements of yourself, whether it be your behavior, your likes and dislikes or pieces of information from your past or present.  All this can of course be aggregated and mined for marketing purposes, even if it won’t necessarily be used in this way.

Theoretically, WOT data would seem to be no different.  As you report which sites are unsavory, Facebook (and/or WOT, I’m not sure how this data is collected) learns more about your tastes and preferences and your browsing habits.

An appropriate retort would be that this is all happening in the name of making Facebook a more secure environment….fair enough.  There is no reason why the relentless revelation of your online self has to be all bad.  In fact revelation is cathartic and desirable in many ways.  However when we start to rationalize revelation by making it mundane, it does something to us (I think).  I’m not sure what that is yet, but I’m afraid there’s a part of it that’s not so savory.  How much sharing is too much sharing on-line?  I’m not entirely sure.

From Robert Wright’s New York Times review of Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace:

gaining an evangelical friend leads to a warmer assessment of evangelicals — by seven degrees on a “feeling thermometer,” to be exact — and gaining a non­religious friend brings four degrees of added warmth toward the nonreligious.

This suggests that the best antidote to religious intolerance is more religious pluralism. As numbers of Buddhists, Mormons and Muslims grow in the US and proliferate around the country, negative perceptions will be reduced. I look forward to reading their book, particularly how they reconcile Putnam’s hunkering theory that posits a negative relationship between neighborhood diversity and trust, with this finding about religious diversity.  Is race/ethnic diversity qualitatively different than religious diversity in how it affects trust?  It would seem to be.  It is conceivable than in a generation, we see interfaith tension between Christians and Muslims are significantly reduced.

My sense is that what led Putnam down this road is the potential power of religion as a “bridge” between racial and ethnic difference.  Wright’s has an interesting insight about the emerging rift between the “religious” and “non-religious” in society being a rather new cultural chasm.   More than the “clash of civilizations” the religious-non-religious divide  might be what defines the “culture war” for the next few decades.  It’s worth thinking about how the religious and self-identified non-religious talk with each other.  I’m proud to say that my campus seems to be on the forefront of having conversations between these groups.  Can athiests see the value of faith in serving as a central organizing principle for vast numbers of people and can the religious recognize that individuals can construct legitimate  ethical systems without appeals to faith-based systems?

Edit: My original post on this topic was too glib, hurried and as a result poorly presented.  I appreciate commenter thatsnotcanon for taking me to task on the tone and content of my original post and helping me vet my thinking on this.  I am duly chastened and I apologize to anyone I offended with the content of my original posting.  I have revised the post in the hopes that it makes my points more clearly and thoughtfully.

according to the Catholic Church . According to Pope Benedict, the Internet has a numbing effect on users and creates an “educational emergency – a challenge that we can and must respond to with creative intelligence.”

While responsible internet use is an important goal, it is not altogether settled in the research literature that the Internet “numbs” people or that it creates solitude.  I think Pope Benedict’s position is in keeping with a belief he has previously espoused that modernity in itself is isolating and numbing and that the church has a necessary role as a stalwart against the more egoistic and isolating aspects of a reason based culture.

While the Internet may not isolate or numb us, it does  promote is instantaneousness.   I imagine the Pope is concerned that having everything we want online when we want it might further lock us into a sense of the “good life” based on Benthamite notions of pain, pleasure and utility.  The “numbing” might serve to steer Catholics away from tradition, community and hierarchy…things to which the liberal enlightenment project has an uneasy relationship.  However, we’re not sure this is happening.  Research on Facebook users find that they are more likely to engage in off-line contact with friends when compared with non-Facebook users.

I think the Pope’s issue is with modernity, not with the Internet.  The Internet speeds up communication, but whether that communication is inherently numbing or anti-social is up to the content of the communication and the orientation and skill-set of the communicator. Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion comes to mind as a form of communication that seeks to push back against the “hardening of the heart.”  Indeed a commenter to my original post notes that the Catholic Church has its own active web presence.

I would hope the Pope turns from this initial critique of the Internet towards guiding Catholics and others towards ways in which the Internet can be used in ways that build community….ostensibly this is what he means by “creative intelligence.”  But we need more scholarship to gauge whether this is indeed a problem unique to the Internet.

I have been bad about posting…I will now be good. Thanks to Ken for holding down the fort!

This was originally posted on Girl w/ Pen on December 8th.  Adina Nack is an associate professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University and the author of Damaged Goods: Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases. ..

Adam Serwer justifiably excoriates the Democrats for not spending political capital on repealing DADT

In December the Defense Department is reportedly set to release a study showing that, like the American people, most servicemembers aren’t opposed to gays and lesbians openly serving. That’s in contrast to the vast opposition of most servicemembers to racial integration in the 1940s; if Truman had insisted on staying his hand until a political climate as favorable as this one had come along, integrating the military might not have happened until decades later.

Truman ended segregation in the military because it was the right thing to do, despite the fact that it was unpopular. Ending DADT happens to be both popular and the right thing to do, and Democrats today still can’t get it done.

If the Democrats want to begin to repair the damaged relationship with their base, taking a stand on this issue is a good place to start.  This is an issue where the business community doesn’t have a dog in the fight.

via Andrew Sullivan