Click on image to play clip - Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club on family life
I’ve been wanting to blog about John Hughes for some time and with his recent passing I’ve given it a bit more thought. Andrew’s blog on generation was the most recent time, as I was thinking about how each generation has its cultural touchstones. Gen-Xers might recall their reactions to:: coming of age in the era of Reagan or Mulrooney, the AIDS scare, seeing John Hughes films, hearing the ubiquity of pop stars like Springsteen, Madonna, and Michael Jackson, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen massacre, political correctness, being typified by a slacker young-adulthood, relating to Cobain’s angst, relating to someone from the cast of Friends, living the era of diminished expectations, dot com to dot bomb, seeing Ferris Bueller 15 years later as a broken Jim McAllister {Election}, relating to the dysfunction of life through Palahniuk or the neurosis of it through David Sedaris, 9-11, celebrating failure with Wes Anderson and the Venture Brothers, the bubble economy, market meltdowns, and seeing that shift from W to O.
I was never a fan of John Hughes films. The experiences portrayed didn’t resonate with me and the message was about the status quo masquerading as rebellion. A few years later I would be in a French lit. course realizing that I had the same reaction to the overblown sentimentality of romanticism. Hughes has a deft hand at skewering adults, portraying them as buffoons, and showing slabs of teenage life with all of its and pain injustices {See above clip of Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club}, but at the end of the day, the universe gravitates towards a social equilibrium of winners and losers. Of course, with a cool soundtrack.
My “heroes” at that time were in the UK, in the likes of Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records, Tony Wilson of Factory Records, and designer Peter Saville, all iconoclasts of a sort, whose ideals would eventually clash hard with the vagaries of market capitalism. In the mid-1980s, I felt these guys were onto something, an æsthetic and an ethos that was far removed from the suburban milieu of Hughes’ territory, which at the end of the day was just more identity posturing on my part. I remember wanting to go to university in order to start the next Rough Trade, back when alternative was post-punk or new music. So, imagine my chagrin upon seeing Hughes coöpt music that mattered to me back in the day, e.g., The English Beat {Ferris Bueller racing to get home running through yards to “Rotating Heads”, Psychedelic Furs {“Pretty in Pink”}, and the Smiths {The Dream Academy covering “Please, Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”}.
Hughes’ mid-1980s was squarely in the Reagan era and his films are evocative of the zeitgeist of the times. I think several of Hughes’ films capture this well and I can’t help but wonder how growing up in this era has affected Gen-X. Hughes was a conservative himselfand the defunct Premiere magazine dubbed him as a Normal-Rockwell-in-Hollywood type of guy. I think this 2006 Slate article has it right, his “conservatism” wasn’t one that celebrated old money elitism and stuffiness, but rather an optimistic Reagan Republicanism with a party-animal twist. Put another way, a middle-of-the-road “moderatism” of quiet desperation punctuated by good times. Rebellion was an incrementalist affair and our individualistic identities navigate seemingly treacherous waters of acceptance, but at the end of the day, nothing really changes. Misguided as it may have been, this is how I perceived many of my peers. Aware of the hypocrisy of society, but far too complacent to do anything about it. I would meet revolutionary characters from Gen-X years later, but it dawned on me that in a generation that often values the status quo, iconoclasts are going to be hard to spot, as they’re often content to be flying under the radar.
On a ThickCulture note, I finally had the pleasure of meeting Andrew Lindner at this year’s ASA. I now feel pressure to get up to speed with soccer in order to have something reasonably intelligent to say when he and José start talking about the game.
Twitterversion:: Pondering political conservatism of #JohnHughes, captured 80s zeitgeist& a GenX touchstone. Does this inform who GenX is? http://url.ie/27hk @Prof_K
Just a short blog, as I’m on the road en-route from Toronto to San Francisco for ASA. So, I got into Iowa City around 9PM last night and I saw a tweet from CBC, linking to a story on the “mastermind” behind Pranknet, Tariq Malik. The Smoking Gun goes into great deal outing Pranknet {with media clips} and their nefarious activities and BoingBoingandCanoe.cahave a short articles on the matter.
In a nutshell, Tariq and others used Skype to make various prank phone calls getting unsuspecting people to do destructive things based on appeals to authority for chatroom audiences. In a sense, it’s reminiscent of the Stanley Milgram experiments on obedience. It also reminds me of ethnomethodological “breaching experiments” but this isn’t about social science, this is for the “lulz.” See this NYTimes article on “lulz” and “malwebolence” that a friend forwarded to me last summer {HT: Terri}.
Tariq wanted to build an audience based on his comedic “genius,” but since being outed, he’s cowering in his mom’s Windsor, Ontario apartment.
Twitterversion:: {Twitter is was down, 6 August 2009 9:55 CDT} Canadian Web 2.0 “terrorist” outed by The Smoking Gun http://url.ie/26mf & http://url.ie/26mg #ThickCulture #CBC @Prof_K
Jack Layton, Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada
Notes from north of 49ºN
Update 4 August:: Video on Jack Layton from MSNBC-below.
Jack Layton is the leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada whose riding is the next one over from me, Toronto-Danforth. Over on the Huffington Post, Jack did a post on the realities of the Canadian health care system.
I have a lot of strong views on health care in the US based on my work in non-profit health and my research on the biotech industry. It’s worth mentioning that today’s US health care system began as employer perquisites {benefits}, back when health care and pharmaceuticals were cheap. The private insurance model starts to break down when costs escalate resulting in employers and employees getting squeezed and uninsured rates rising. Some say a perfect storm of events {recession, rising costs, uninsured rate of 19%, and Obama} is leading to a tipping point in health care. It should be noted that the US will not adopt a health care system like Canada’s, where the government {provinces} provide health care, but rather a system where the government finances health care delivered by private enterprise.
On the The Huffington Post, Jack makes some compelling points, whether you agree with his politics or not::
“Costs are under control in Canada. We spend similar amounts on public care – around 7% of GDP. For that price, Canada covers everyone, the U.S. just one third of the population. In case you’re worried Canada wastes money on bureaucracy, know that just 2.4% of our total costs go to administration compared to 7% of what your government spends. In end, Canadian care costs $2,500 less per capita – and covers everyone.”
He points out that the system isn’t perfect::
“Our system does have flaws. We need better prescription drug coverage, better remote access to care and better practices in hospitals and clinics. No honest advocate for our health care system would dismiss these things. But Canadian health care works — and works well.”
Does all this mean that the United States should adopt Canada’s health care system?…No. America can no more adopt our health care system than we can swap hockey for baseball as our national pastime. A good health care system reflects a country’s values, and each country’s values are different…But a system with 47 million uninsured, coverage denied due to pre-existing conditions and people thrown off plans when they become ill? That doesn’t reflect American values.”
Unfortunately, there are other competing values in play in the US, making healthcare a contentious issue. It’s not a simple matter of costs and taxes, but one that also affects innovation and entrepreneurship. Biotechnology is predicated upon using the human genome to better match diseases, patients, and therapies. “Pre-existing conditions” and genetic skeletons in one’s closet can thwart innovation in biotech because it adds additional business risk. If insurance refuses to pay, where are the revenues?
One question on my mind and one I pose to my students, is healthcare a public infrastructure or should it be treated strictly as a business? The Canadian model is one where the state is the financier and provider, where the provinces oversee a large, integrated health infrastructure. As stated above, a new US healthcare model is unlikely to be this comprehensive, instead focusing in financing. The current US model uses market mechanisms heavily, where healthcare delivery, insurance, and pharmaceuticals all having a dog in the healthcare reform fight. Altering the landscape through healthcare reform will alter business models and likely create windfall gains and losses. On the other hand, we have that perfect storm of recession, rising costs, uninsured rate of 19%, and Obama. Another implication of the current model, where healthcare is an employment benefit, is that it limits new business creation, i.e., creates “entrepreneurship lock.” A recent working paper supports this reasoning::
“Overall we find some evidence that the U.S. emphasis on employer-provided health insurance may be limiting entrepreneurship. The clearest evidence comes from the regression discontinuity results which create the most comparability in experimental and controls groups. The finding of ‘entrepreneurship lock’ is important as it suggests that the bundling of health insurance and employment may create an inefficient allocation of which or when workers start businesses.”
Healthcare can also has an affect on the arts in the US in same fashion, necessitating that creatives take on dayjobs with health benefits. One artist once told me that money {or lower costs} means the freedom to create. The current system does precious little to create incentives for cash-strapped entrepreneurs and creatives to innovate and create. Does this matter? I think it does in terms of sustainable economic growth and treating healthcare as a publicly financed infrastructure, i.e., a social good, paid with {gasp} taxpayer dollars makes more sense than the current system, but the devil’s in the details and good implementation is critical in order for a new system to be successful. That said, these challenges shouldn’t be reasons not to do it. Video:: Jack Layton on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, NDP Blog via Twitter
Twitterversion:: Jack Layton of #NDP clarifies healthcare in #Canada. Should healthcare be infrastructure? Implications for innovation & entrepreneurship. #ThickCulture @Prof_K
In California, identity politics is a way of life. Ask Pete Wilson, ex-Governor of California on how Latino politics can derail a career, as detailed in a LA Times magazine article from 2004. The same article highlights Republican concerns with shifting demographics::
“Many Republicans view the mushrooming Latino voter rolls in the same way a person looks at a growing mole: One hopes it’s benign but fears for the worst.”
Unlike in California where immigration is resulting in dramatic demographic shifts, here in Canada, a hot-button issue is Québec separatism that stems from centuries-old disputes. The province of Québec has a distinct francophone culture when compared to the rest of predominantly anglophone Canada and this cultural divide naturally affects politics at both the provincial and federal levels.
Currently, at the federal level, Canada {with a variation of the Westminster parliamentary system} has a minority government {plurality of parliamentary seats} with Conservative Stephen Harper as Prime Minister. Minority governments tend to be unstable. Indicative of this, the Conservatives had a scare last December when Stephen Harper angered the other parties, bringing the country to the brink of Constitutional crisis. Recent polls in Canada showed that about half of the voters wanted a more stable majority government, where one party has a majority of the seats. Moreover, recent polls indicated that support for the Conservatives is dwindling, likely leading to a situation where the Conservatives and Liberals have close to the same number of seats, further deadlocking Parliament. An article a week and a half ago by the Montréal Gazette brought up a controversial argument::
“Quebecers more than others have it in their power to break this log-jam, by taking a more active hand in national governance instead of ‘parking’ their votes with an increasingly irrelevant Bloc Québécois. Had Quebecers voted for national parties in the same proportion as other Canadians in the last election, we would have a majority government. The instability of minority times makes the government of Canada weaker, which serves the sovereignists’ interests but not the public interest.”
This assumes that Québec voters are more interested in federal governance than Québec interests. In Québec, the Bloc Québécois {BQ} is a political party associated with sovereignty for the province. Its raison d’être is promoting the identity politics of francophone Québec at the federal level. While I’ve noticed the BQ numbers slipping since the 2008 election on the ThreeHundredEight blog, the Gazette’s line of reasoning is unlikely to lure enough Québec voters to the Conservative or Liberal camps. According to an EKOS poll, the federal vote intention in the in Québec shows a plurality of support for the Bloc::
Federal Vote Intention-July 2009 EKOS
The 2008 federal results in Québec saw BQ making a strong showing with 49 ridings {seats} of 75 in Québec and 308 in Canada. The map below shows Bloc in light blue, Conservatives (PC) in dark blue, Liberals (LP) in Red, and New Democrats (NDP) in orange. The Bloc is strong throughout the province, while the Conservatives have support in a few rural areas, and the Liberals and NDP have appeal in or near the cities of Montréal and Ottawa.
Federal 2008 Election Results by Ridings in Québec
The relative popularity of the Bloc introduces a challenge at the federal level, one of identity politics. Last month, Liberal Party of Canada {LPC} leader Michael Ignatieff showed how hard it is to manage perceptions in Québec as the leader of a Canada-wide party. While promising restoring funding to the arts and appointment of Québecers to cabinet posts, he also said he has no plans to give Québec any special powers, if elected as Prime Minister. This opened the Liberals open to criticism in the province by rival parties.
“It’s the same good old Liberal Party of Canada that wants to put Québec in its place.”
“It shows that he’s not only been out of Canada for 35 years, he’s never known anything about Québec except what he learned at Upper Canada College and, frankly, I’m not afraid of him a bit.”
The nuances of the issue of sovereignty and its manifestations is far too complex to go into here, so suffice it to say that concerns of Québec as a distinct society are far from settled. According to Andrew Cohen’s The Unfinished Canadian, Québecers are more likely to be ambivalent towards the idea of a federal Canada, which isn’t that surprising. Stephen Harper has done precious little to appeal to Québec, while Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, in my opinion, doesn’t help things with statements like::
“The best possible Canada is a Canada where Québecers are in power…The Bloc Québécois is not a solution for a better Québec and Canada.”–Michael Ignatieff, 3 June 2009 at a Montréal fundraiser
While Ignatieff may have had his reasons, the Bloc represents a set of meanings to many Québecers and I fail to see the upside of antagonizing the Bloc. The tories went after the Bloc earlier in the summer, accusing the party on being soft on pedophiles because they didn’t support tougher legislation on minimum sentencing for child trafficking. The ads haven’t affected polls and the Conservatices are still falling behind. Having appeal in Québec requires subtlety. As stated above, Harper hasn’t done much to appeal to Quebecers, but Conservative writer Bob Plamondon in a Macleans article gets at the heart of the matter. Harper needs to understand culture in order to build social capital::
“I don’t think it was so much that those specific policies were abhorred by Quebecers…because in the scheme of government activities, they are relatively minor issues. But they spoke to larger issues—does Stephen Harper understand Quebec and can he be trusted? I think Quebecers drew the conclusion that he’s disconnected from them. They couldn’t identify among Harper’s team a particularly strong lieutenant who had near-veto power over what went on in Ottawa with respect to those matters that are of particular concern to Quebecers.”
I don’t see that happening, but I can see him using fiscal controls on Ottawa as an appeal to Québec and fiscal conservatives in other provinces.
While the Bloc’s fortunes have waxed and waned over the years, the party is currently in an era of resurgence. The Bloc’s clout with almost 16% of Parliament representing a culturally distinct region is a good case study for California legislative politics, if we assume Latino political identity strengthening. Latino population does not equate to a homogeneous population with similar political interests, as there is diversity within. The question remains: Can there be a strong Latino political identity that spans regions and demographic categories?
Web 2.0 & Politics
In the francophone Québec blogosphere, the following catchy Bloc video went somewhat viral in 2004 in the pre-YouTube era, as part of the “un parti propre au Québec/a party proper to Québec” campaign.
Videos like this show how parties can energize voters and generate buzz for a campaign. Given how 41% of younger voters under 25 support the Bloc {see above table on federal vote intention in Québec} and how Bloc support skews younger, I expect to see more Bloc use of Web 2.0 in the future, i.e., more use of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and possibly MySpace.
What about Web 2.0 and Latino voters in the US? Pew Internet research does show that in the US, Hispanics tend to be younger and online less than other ethnicities. Nevertheless, Hispanics 18-29 are online the most for the ethnicity at over 60%, although this percentage is lower than black or white counterparts. Latino cell phone owners are more likely than their white counterparts to send/receive text messages, at 49% vs. 31%, respectively. Given that Latinos trend younger and the younger Latinos are online the most, I expect to see greater usage of social media targeting them, using online and SMS {texting} media. Brandweek is citing 65% use of social media by Latinos, particularly with MySpace and MySpace Latino. The challenge will be politically engaging Latinos in a way that’s relevant to them.
While many of the following issues may be unpopular due to their divisive nature, is this the globalized political reality we’re in?
How will globalization shape California identity politics?
Will culture serve as a political rallying point?
Strengthening of identity politics caucus/coalition powerbase{s}
Use of cultural distinction socially & politically
Strategies of mainstream politicians/parties to negotiate with or combat a caucus/coalition
Use of Web 2.0 & SMS technologies & social media to politically engage electorate in a culturally-relevant fashion
Twitterversion:: As California grapples with identity politics, what can be learned from #Canada, #Québec, & Bloc Québécois? http://url.ie/24zz #ThickCulture @Prof_K
A few posts back, I talked about Charles Taylor’s view of multiculturalism as a proposed remedy to the ill of mis-recognition — being looked down upon by the majority in society because of your group status. While we can arrive at a general consensus on the problem of mis-recognition, there is some debate on how you resolve it. For my own benefit, I’m interested in thinking about whether the university as an institutional actor has the wherewithal to address misrecognition.
Nancy Fraser has an interesting article in New Left Review where she addresses this question of mis-recognition. Her main thesis is that identity politics as currently practiced creates a “problem of displacement” by elevating cultural claims of mis-recognition (negative portrayals of Latinos in films as an example) over claims of material or resource inequality. This problem of displacement is evident in the way universities do diversity, focusing mainly on addressing mis-recognition through the creating of cultural centers or by expanding course offerings to address cultural stigma. What receives less attention, Fraser (and I) would argue, is a discussion of how cultural mis-recognition is connected to material inequality.
Fraser’s solution is to rearticulate mis-recognition as an issue of status position. From this perspective, addressing misrecognition isn’t about whether or not a group’s culture is properly represented, but rather it becomes an issue of the relative status position of members of different groups within an institution’s interrelated set of power hierarchies. Viewing mis-recognition as reproduced through a lattice of socio-political institutions raises the bar for addressing mis-recognition. Succcessful diversity efforts is then about how much parity your institution has in terms of power and resource distribution, not simply about how many “awareness weeks” a campus has.
Yesterday, I blogged about intellectual property {IP} in a global context with pricing pressures towards the free. In an era of piracy and difficult enforcement of IP rights, what’s an IP producer to do? The “work” must be a part of a model that generates value. Today, in my inbox I received an announcement from the God Help the Girl project, a “story set to music” envisioned by Glasweigian Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian fame. There was an announcement about a BBC4 documentary on the band airing in the UK and a mention of how fans can “subscribe” to the music on their website::
God Help the Girl subscription page
Those familiar with B&S know of Stuart Murdoch’s entrepreneurial roots. The band starting off as a college course project and going viral in 1996-97 is a story that DIY indie rock legends are made of. So, it should come as no surprise that Murdoch is on top of the Web 2.0 concept of the “free.” Sure, you can hear the track “Funny Little Frog” on the site and see videos on YouTube for free, but the die hard fan can experience God Help the Girl directly in their mailboxes and inboxes for $47US in North America or £40.50 in the UK. The idea here is to go beyond the song as a digital commodity, but the creation of value and meaning to people that gets them to subscribe. The “free” stuff is the hook. The danger is offending fans with a seemingly-blatant cashgrab, territory in which The Pixies have ventured in.
Gov 2.0
While some corners of indie music are catching on to Web 2.0, what about government? Will the government see that they would serve the public good by creating value through the availability of free access to Federal databases? The Obama administration has promised openness and transparency, but what are the current realities? Unfortunately, the US agencies in question that Malamud is fighting aren’t always interested in free. There are prohibitive paywalls for annual subscriptions to the federal regulations and patent databases to the tune of $17,000US and $39,000US, respectively. The US government isn’t making a lot of money off of this, which begs the question why the high prices? It makes one suspect that the corporate interests have a vested interest in maintaining an information oligarchy with the government’s support. While this may be a case of negligent gatekeepers, I’ve heard anecdotal tales of US Department of Labor data being suppressed for political reasons and have seen access granted to “restricted” data based on social ties.
Opening up these databases will likely see a flurry of usage, usage of data that’s public. If Malamud gets his way, in the future if you need government data on such-and-such, there’d be an app for that. Ideally.
Canadian Example
Up here in Canada, I came across a data barrier with respect to Federal electoral ridings {districts} and postal codes. So, if a non-profit is interested in doing an advocacy campaign where voters can e-mail Federal candidates for Parliament, there’s a pricetag on that public data. The cost from Statistics Canada is $3,000 CAN, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s sufficient enough to be a barrier for many nonprofits and smaller colleges. A UK company, Advocacy Online, is utilized by some organizations needing this data, turning the cost barrier into a revenue stream for them. Should this data be free? Wouldn’t that serve the public good, as we would see more and more usage and possibly more civic engagement?
The handwriting is on the wall regarding the power of data access in Canada. In the last Canadian federal election, VoteforEnvironment created a mashup of election data, riding data, postal code data, and Google maps. This allowed users to make better, data-driven choices about strategic voting, where voters make their choices on the basis of how their vote affects Parliamentary makeup, not on the basis of party. The implications according to CBC are compelling::
“If every green voter followed the website’s suggestions (as of Saturday), it says that instead of electing a Conservative minority of 141 MPs to 73 Liberals, 57 Bloc, 35 NDP, and no Greens, the electoral result would shift to a Liberal minority with 109 MPs to 97 Conservatives, 53 Bloc, 46 NDP, and one Green.”
Here in Toronto Centre, when you punch in the postal code on the VfE, voters get a summary and their anti-Tory recommendation. Ex-Dipper Bob Rae has a safe seat as a Liberal candidate, so the recommendation is to vote your conscience.
Toronto Centre federal riding
Tim O’Reilly has a few interesting ideas on Gov 2.0. It’s a time for fewer barriers, including those of cost. If any data should be free, shouldn’t it be public data?
Twitterversion:: Will free access to Federal data enable #Gov2.0, increase transparency, & civic engagement?Implications for US & #Canpoli http://url.ie/23qx @Prof_K
I’m currently working on an ethnographic paper examining innovation in a global context. The above map is a depiction of innovation clusters throughout the world, on the dimensions of patent growth and firm diversity. As it turns out, the area I’m looking at is off the chart with very high growth and few firms. The area is also one where western notions of property rights are out the window. The main question we are addressing is how should firms innovate globally when their intellectual property {IP} rights are tenuous or uncertain? The economic argument for granting exclusive property rights is to ensure an entrepreneurial entity has the incentives to commercialize an idea. So, an innovator is allowed a monopolist position for a period of time, allowing for a path to cash and attracting investors, in order to ensure there is grist for the innovative mill. In our research, exclusive property rights may exist, but aren’t enforced. This begs the question, why is there growth? Why would anyone invest in such a chaotic environment? There must be some value in doing so. Finally, I think it would be interesting to re-examine the above map with cultural dimensions, not in terms of sweeping generalizations, but nuanced, regional differences like the ones AnnaLee Saxenian found between Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Massachusetts.
Let’s assume that we’re in an economic reality where intellectual “work” can often be readily digitized and reproduced infinitely. We’re talking creative content, educational resources, biotechnology/genetic information, etc., so it would seem that the producers of music, film, news journalism, the university lecture, and the sequenced genome all have a dog in this fight. Producers of valuable things want to profit from their efforts. Their investors demand it. Here comes Chris Anderson saying that the new economic model is to offer things for free.
Enter Malcolm Gladwell and other naysayers. Gladwell asserts that Anderson is wrong on several counts. The YouTube business model has failed to make money for Google, hence the “free” business model is untenable. The logic of “free” is flawed, as capital-intensive infrastructures, costly complementary goods and services, and downstream costs often mean that goods simply cannot be free. One can nitpick the flaws in Gladwell’s arguments. He cites that the costs of clinical trials is what drives up pharmaceutical prices, which is true today, but the objective with biotech. is to use genomics to better target the use of molecules for specific therapies geared towards specific diseases and specific people, based on genetic profiling. To use an “Obamaism,” the idea is to bend the innovation curve.
When IP faces rampant piracy or when property rights are not or cannot be enforced, globally, the potential of infinite reproduction puts pricing pressures towards the free, whether the producer likes it or not. This is what’s happening to the firms in our research. The successful global firms we studied are the ones that are embracing cultural particulars and negotiating as best they can their claims to IP revenue streams.
Interestingly, Chris Anderson has been accused of cribbing IP from sources like Wikipedia, acting like a veritable Web 2.0 Jack Sparrow. The question I have is does this or should this diminish the value of his book by readers? Is this a violation of some “authorly” ethics or is this just the new IP where everything is up for grabs and the key is deliver value. Anderson even stated that one could get the information in Free by compiling blog posts and articles, but that the book adds value by synthesizing it. He also practices what he preaches. One can read Free for free, but just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it will be easy. The free versions of the book text are limited by format or are DRM-protected. Some consumers are complaining because of different expectations of what “free” means, but this approach is consistent to Anderson’s core ideas. Being in Canada, I’ll have to jump through more hoops to read this for free, due to publishing restrictions, but I’ll figure it out and I’m actually looking forward to reading it.
Is this commerce or is this anarchy? The lessons being learned are similar to those in the second Macleans article. The focus needs to be on the delivery of value, rather than the protection of rights. Globalization is achieving what a thousand socialist mandates could not. The erosion of property rights is forcing firms to figure out how to deliver value when an innovation is free. Web 2.o has offered firms the ability to do what I have called “stagesetting” in several research projects and a case on Pixar. Stagesetting is where a firm has a sequential approach to its ultimate strategic objectives. We see firms trying to leverage network effects to create value for users through sites and technologies using social media. Flickr has no value with hundreds of users, but has tremendous value with millions. One can talk about MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook revenues in terms of advertising, but the holy grail is the data mining and finding what the exact value proposition is to generate revenues from business and institutional clients. The “freemium” model of the basics for free, but added features are extra, is based upon stagesetting, where value is created. What Anderson offers is a glimpse into a global economic reality and gives firms the incentives to rethink the nature of value…or they can try their luck in the courts, like the RIAA did with prosecutions of a Minnesota mom and college kids.
Twitterversion:: Will IP matter in global contxt?ChrisAnderson=Web2.0 JackSparrow decentrng IP auth,making value-creation salient. http://url.ie/23kj @chr1sa @Prof_K
I’ve been doing some reading on the Left critique of multiculturalism. Scholars like Stanley Fish and Slavoj Zizek have taken multiculturalism to task for its denial of universality. In this essay, Fish sees multiculturalism as a logical impossibility. One cannot both embrace universal principles and be geniunely tolerant, he argues, because once an external cultural system violates one of your core tenets, your tolerance becomes a defacto acceptance of that external cultural system. Put simply, if you tolerate female genital mutilation, you accept that culture’s view of the practice and have thus become a universalist.
Zizek makes a different argument, suggesting that the claim to universality has an intrinsic political power. Universality is a precondition of politics proper which he defines as:
a phenomenon that appeared for the first time in ancient Greece when the members of the demos (those with no firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice) presented themselves as the representatives, the stand-ins, for the whole of society, for the true universality (“we — the ‘nothing,’ not counted in the order — are the people, we are all, against others who stand only for their particular privilieged interest”).
The ability of those not included in the polity to appeal to “politics proper” is the the halmark of liberal progress. We see this in the civil rights movement’s appeal to universal principles of equal rights and justice. Multiculturalism mutes the ability to use the universal in politics proper. When nobody is able to claim the universal, we enter into a post-political moment.
Timothy Powell does an interesting job of challenging thse critiques from the left by highlighting multiculturalism’s two great strengths. First, the late 1960’s activist phase was central in the forwarding of recognition claims to a variety of groups including American Indians and gays and lesbians. Second, the era of “multicultural critique” of American exceptionalism and Eurocentric hegemony in academia has produced a more acccurate and blended view of American and Eurpoean cultural history. Wht Takaki calls a “shared retelling of history.”
He criticizes Fish and Zizek for engaging in what Kosofsky Sedgewick calls a (I love this phrase BTW) “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which any project must be deconstructed regardless of their utility. Powell contends that this “hermeneutics of suspicion” describes the current phase of academic multiculturalism. His article in Critical Inquiry asks how we pull ourselves out of this spiral of endless critique.
In my work, I’m using Aristotle’s concept of phronesis as a potential way forward. Phronesis, put simply is the mode of knowledge concerned with wisdom. This form of knowledge is opposed to epistemological or technical knowledge which is equated with universal knowledge. Phronesis, instead emphasizes particularity. Take this passage from Nicomachean Ethics:
Whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics, and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it (Nichomachean Ethics 1142 a).
rather that viewing multiculturalism in terms of the universal vs. the particular, I argue is should be seen as a complement to it…as the development of wisdom through a diversity of experience, separate from a pursuit of universal truths. Put another way, one can hold whatever ethical system one chooses (universal), but one needs to understand how to simultaneously stand for what one believes but at the same time be able to exist with difference. A synchronous toggling between one’s sense of the universal and one’s ability to engage with particularity.
One of the things I struggle most with in examining diversity and it’s benefit to universities is the the question of ethnicity. Namely, of what specific value is an individual ethnicity to a learning environment? As an example, do we want more Latino on our campus because individuals from that pan-ethnic group possess cultural attributes that are distinct from a majority culture? In other words, do we have expectations that Latino students must “do ethnicity” when they arrive, otherwise their value is limited?
As Erik Kaufmann points out in a very interesting piece in Ethnic and Racial Studies, culture is an analytically distinct concept from ethnicity. In previous times, most people acted out the culture attached to their ethnicity pre-ontologically, in that they had no communal identity relative to other groups. But our global, networked society, suggests that cultural markers do not automatically become part of a meaning system. I’m Cuban-American, but I live among no-one from my distinct ethnic group. Kaufmann suggests that community is what transmits culture to members of ethnic groups.
So perhaps our role in the university is to provide these spaces for ethnic communities to transmit culture to ethnic groups via organizations like MeCHA or Black Student Union. In the research I’m doing, I find that institutions are moving away from this type of boundary maintenance, instead seeking to make all clubs open to all students. An there’s a good argument for it. When you create a Chicano resource center or a Black student union on a campus, you are making the presumption that for students, culture and ethnicity are one in the same. There seems to be a fundamental illiberalism present in enforcing boundaries or encouraging boundary formation. Cosmopolitanists would say that our job should be to break up boundaries and make students global citizens.
Ok, fine. But if there are no boundaries, then is there little purpose to ethnicity as a “value added” in the university learning experience? As Michael Waltzer points out:
‘the distinctiveness of cultures and groups depends upon closure and, without it, cannot be conceived as a stable feature of human life. If this distinctiveness is a value, as most people . . . seem to believe, then closure must be permitted somewhere’ (Walzer 1983, p. 39).
Without boundary maintenance via a community in the larger project of transmitting values, what’s the point of ethnicity in the university? Social justice? Maybe. But if we’re going to make the case that ethnic diversity enriches the campus learning environment, we have to take the importance of boundaries more seriously.
More later 🙂
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A multi-disciplinary blog about what makes cultures "thick": public discourse, multiculturalism, technology, and civic engagement. Read more…
Macleans had two articles on the buzz generated by 
