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)

So, as we become “scanners” of content in this Web 2.0 world, what will happen to language?  As we use SMS and Twitter, bound by 140 characters, will the use of h@x0r and L33t-style words go beyond these contexts and into other modes of communications {such as e-mails and reports}?  

Already, there’s a shorthand one needs to “decode” on the TV tickers for news, finance {above}, weather, and sports.  Will technology reduce our written language to a lowest-common denominator?  Will a linguistic Idiocracy set in, where those with good written communication skills die off, leaving the rest of us thumbing abbreviations and smileys on handhelds :-P?

Additionally, are we losing our capacity to read, in an “educated” citizen of society sense?  Linguist, Naomi Baron studies technology as it relates to the evolution of language.  She warns of the implications of this and offered this observation in a 2005 LA Times article::

“Has written culture recently taken a nose drive? These are the students who grew up on Spark Notes, the popular study guides. Many of this generation are aliterate — they know how to read but don’t choose to. And abridgment of texts is now taken to extremes, with episodes from micro-novels being sent as text messages on cell phones…

Will effortless random access erode our collective respect for writing as a logical, linear process? Such respect matters because it undergirds modern education, which is premised on thought, evidence and analysis rather than memorization and dogma. Reading successive pages and chapters teaches us how to follow a sustained line of reasoning.

If we approach the written word primarily through search-and-seizure rather than sustained encounter-and-contemplation, we risk losing a critical element of what it means to be an educated, literate society. “–“Killing the written word by snippets” (11/28/05) {Emphasis added}

What about those emoticons?  Used to clarify meanings in text-based environments, are these shorthand shortcuts impoverishing our language?  

Or, are they just transforming how we communicate?  For example, you can be as blunt or brutal as possible, but if you follow it with a wink or a “smiley,” it plants tongue firmly in cheek.  You get your digs in, but soften the blow.  Is this playing in to the development of a passive-aggressive culture or at least a passive-aggressive written culture?  F*** you! 😉

So, in order to be understood, will be be relying more and more on communication shortcuts {text shorthand, graphics, and/or even sound} not just in SMS texting and microblogging Tweets, but in other forms of everyday communication?  I’ve seen people get frustrated with others because their irony or sarcasm wasn’t coming through.  Allow me to reintroduce the irony mark, which has been around since the late 1800s::

Just in case someone might be overly-literal and might not get the fact that you’re being snarky, your bases are covered.  Looking back on Baron’s quote, the big question for me has to do with the thinking process.  I linger on terms like “logical” and “linear,” as I wonder how much of our communications are moving towards the “emotional” and “hypertextual.”  The emoticon {or other shorthand symbol} and a jumbled mass of linked stream-of-consciousness utterances may be where we’re heading.  I think the thought processes may be increasingly non-linear for more and more people and logic is taking a back seat to perlocutionary acts that try to elicit a response or some kind of action/reaction from others.  This sounds a lot like advertising.  

I offer this.  Will everyday communication be a pastiche of a myriad of verbal/visual snippets?  We scan through incredible amounts of information and gain meaning from “decoding” communications and constructing gestalts.    The linear thought process of decoding and encoding meanings is subsumed by thought processes that cut and mix ideas. 

Using Twitter as an example, take this Tweet by Clay Shirky.  

In under 140 characters he communicates several key points and offers a hyperlink to the source, but without proper sentence structure.  Nevertheless, we can get meaning from his Tweet::  (1) 3% of newspaper reading is done online, (2) cite of blog post on newspaper impressions for print/online, (3) assumption is that readers see 1/2 of the pages, (4) another assumption is that they read all articles, & (5) Clay’s quick analysis.  We combine this information with other information {bricolage} for whatever purpose at hand.  We can use web searches to get this information,  On Twitter, we can look for other information on “newspapers,” using the hashtag:: #newspapers.

Walter Ong in his Orality & Literacy (1982) makes the distinctions between orality {spoken word} and literacy {print}.  Part of me feels that SMS/texting and microblogging {Facebook “graffiti” & Tweeting} represent a hybrid mode, betwixt and between both orality and literacy.  Literacy is assumed, but communications are taking on more of the characteristics of the spoken word.  So, where is all of this heading?  We will communicate in ways where we try to be understood, given the technological and temporal parameters.  I think this will be increasingly distilled.  The technology will evolve towards allowing people to cut and mix text, images, multimedia, sound, etc.  Our use of language and how language enters our consciousness will evolve into new patterns.

These are musings and I welcome rebuttals.  If you use harsh language, I’d prefer you soften the blow with an emoticon or two.  😉 🙂

Image Credit: Bill Thompson

This blog is cross-posted here.

This is the second installment of a series on business schools.  The first was Are Business Schools to Blame (4/7)?

Does the business school need saving?  Its “soul”?  Is there a crisis brewing where there is no faith in business knowledge or are the current economic times the result of periodic blips or a few rogue players who aren’t following the “rules”?  It depends on who you talk to.  I believe the business school is here to stay, but the challenges for competing business schools will be ones of legitimacy in the eyes of the public and relevance in an increasingly global higher education market.  

In January, Tom Ehrlich offered a commentary on business education entitled The Business of Business Education is More than Business.  Ehrlich makes this keen observation::

“The application of critical analysis and good judgment to economic issues is important for all students, but surely it is essential for students majoring in business. Business leaders need to understand the historical, cultural, scientific, organizational, and political contexts of their domain, and these are best gained through liberal education. This need raises for us a question: to what extent are undergraduates majoring in business on campuses across the country gaining these and the other attributes of a strong liberal education?”

I’m all for liberal education infused in the business curriculum, but my vision is less about checkboxes of general education requirements and more about integrating or bridging the liberal arts into the curriculum.  

“One point to consider is that, for the most part, business curricula have not ’embedded’ liberal arts into the student’s program of study, but rather have isolated it, by separating it from the business education process.”

–Chew & McInnis-Bowers (2004), “Blending liberal arts & business education”

I think one of the ways that higher education provides value is helping students connect concepts and synthesize knowledge, but my experience is that it takes quite a bit of work to truly incorporate the liberal arts and social sciences into syllabi, let alone curriculae.  I’m talking about the epistemology of business.  Countering the received-view is no mean feat.  Given my own liberal education {along with 3 business degrees}, I can draw upon Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Some may argue that the received views of business and business education are fine.  There is no crisis at hand, in Kuhnian terms, leading to “revolutionary science”.*  Why fix what ain’t broke?  Well, that’s one way to go.

The fact of the matter is that the problems/issues of the financial sector have been in the news for a decade in mainstream sources like PBS Frontline.

• Betting on the Market (1997) {see clips here}
• Dot Con (2002)
• Bigger than Enron (2002)
• The Wall Street Fix (2003)
• The Secret History of the Credit Card (2004)

These stories can help all students to think critically about the business of business.  {I tell mine to even have a healthy skepticism of the Frontline videos.}  These videos are excellent points of departure for the interdisciplinary integration of liberal learning and business.  One common thread of most of these Frontline stories is an emphasis on the social relations of markets.  Enter Stanford Sociologist, Mark Granovetter, who published a very influential sociology paper on “embeddedness” in 1985.  Embeddedness denotes a situation where economic relations between individuals and/or firms are couched in actual social networks, as opposed to an idealized market of rational behaviors.  Granovetter cites a study of the business practice of auditing that illuminated unpredicted results::

“Audits of parts by the central office were supposed to be conducted on a surprise basis, but warning was typically surreptitiously given. The high level of cooperation shown in these internal audits is suggested by the following account: ‘Notice that a count of parts was to begin provoked a flurry among the executives to hide certain parts and equipment . . . materials not to be counted were moved to: 1) little-known and inaccessible spots; 2) basements and pits that were dirty and therefore unlikely to be examined; 3) departments that had already been inspected and that could be approached circuitously while the counters were en route between official storage areas and 4) places where materials and supplies might be used as a camouflage for parts. . . . As the practice developed, cooperation among the [department] chiefs to use each other’s storage areas and available pits became well organized and smoothly functioning’ (Dalton 1959, pp. 48-49).

Dalton’s work shows brilliantly that cost accounting of all kinds is a highly arbitrary and therefore easily politicized process rather than a technical procedure decided on grounds of efficiency.”  

–Mark Granovetter (1985), “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness”

A-ha!  While auditing may serve a rational economic function to increase efficiencies or ensure compliance, the reality is that managers were circumventing this using their social networks.  The same holds true for malfeasance on a larger scale, evident in many of the Frontline videos.

The interfaces of science, the fine arts, architecture, communications, the humanities, and the social sciences with business can provide a “two-way learning street” to use Ehrlich’s term.  Giving students liberal education knowledge truly integrated with applied professional knowledge should encourage more systems thinking.  Students will be familiar with complexity and have a wide array of concepts to draw from to analyze problems.

Moving towards the integration of liberal knowledge with professional education may not change the world, but in my opinion, as business educators, it’s doing our job.

This story on how the award winning Daily Bruin sold a “wrapper ad” made me think about the singularity of media and the future of print.  The PBS Frontline of The Persuaders shows how JetBlue used a similar wrapper ad in Boston to bump “real” content off of the visible front page and make JetBlue look like a front page story with a faux front page that was an ad.  Was it The Boston Globe?  Nah, it was a Boston-area tabloid, the Herald. 

I’ve been following The Daily Bruin story and saw the LA Weekly Tweet about it.  I saw the Innovation in College Media post on the issue, which had a good comparison of the real {right} versus faux {left} front pages.

Well, why would an award-winning student-run paper risk their reputation to sell ice cream?  On the other hand, is this even a big deal?  The editor of UC Berkeley’s Daily Cal up the road {down the street for me, this week} offered this::

“We were approached about the same ad, and we firmly decided against it. I really recognize the problems the Bruin are facing. We have them too, and considering we are one of the few papers that actually scaled back publication, we’re probably feeling the pain a lot worse.

We actually did end up running a similar ad, but inside (pp. 5-6) and more clearly labeled as Paid Advertising. Still not something I’m entirely comfortable with, but definitely something I can live with, considering we held on to the revenue. Would welcome your thoughts on it. Available at: http://www.dailycal.org/data/pdf/2249.pdf“

The economics of print media make advertising necessary.  This post on Poynter shows that print isn’t dead in light of online media, which {to me} highlights relevance.  Readers will seek relevant content regardless of the medium, up to a point.  

Many on staff at The Daily Bruin weren’t on board with the decision to run this ad and as it turns out, the editor of The Daily Bruin announced that there would be no more ads of this sort.  Those who have seen The Corporation have seen examples of media exerting great influence over content (Jane Akre & Steve Wilson), so we have a situation where the fourth estate has revenue imperatives at the school paper level and above.

I think it’s a bad idea to mess with reputation or audience perceptions.  If you’re a tabloid or crappy paper {or crappy blog for that matter}, it probably doesn’t matter that much.  Audience expectations factor in that constrain what one does.  The ad execution wasn’t that creative and there was no great payoff, so in my opinion, it wasn’t worth the stretch for The Daily Bruin.  If I were Haagen-Dazs and its ad agency {I do believe it still is Goodby, Silverstein & Partners}, I’d wonder if this press is a plus or minus.  At best, I think it’s a wash.  The ad execution was meh & I never felt the “honeybees” campaign was “on code”.  Nevertheless, there are economic imperatives for print journalism.  It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback the situation, but this situation isn’t going away any time soon.  Advertising content is becoming so pervasive, it’s in TV shows, movies, video games, etc.  Should a line be drawn at ads that look like news?

• Should journalistic news content and advertising be strongly delineated?
• Does it really matter to readers if it’s not?

I had dinner with some colleagues last night and we had a great conversation over beer/wine and bar-b-que over whether Weber’s Iron Cage critique of modernity ignores the various ways in which belief is practiced in modern society (actually it was something about IPods and authenticity, but I digress).

Paul Krugman’s latest column in the Times nicely complements this critique of Weber’s Iron Cage. Krugman argues that the banking industry has gone through distinct phases of “exciting” banking where regulation was lax and great profits and profligate risk taking were rewarded and “boring” banking where the sector was heavily regulated and profits/risk taking were minimized. He concludes by taking the Obama economic team to task for their reticence in returning us to a “boring” banking era (You’d think Krugman taught at Harvard instead of Princeton they way he goes after Larry Summers)!

To me, the scaffolding underlying “exciting” baking is a very un-rational, un-iron cage-like “enchantment” with capital accumulation and profit making. Matt Yglesias makes the point in reference to the Krugman article that our era of “exciting banking” reflects a larger inability in our culture to assert that greed is a vice and not a virtue. Yglesias characterizes reckless investment bakers as:

people primarily motivated in life by greed. Not just by a desire to make some scratch, mind you. These aren’t immigrants who walked through the desert from Mexico in order to earn more money by washing dishes in a San Diego hotel. They’re not 24 year-olds looking for a hefty salary in order to pay off student loans. They’re multi-millionaires who want to earn millions more.

This may be part of  Weber’s larger critique of modernity — means/end rationality replaces other more intrinsic and spiritual forms of rationality.  But the Krugman piece and Ygelsias’ response seems to blur the line between the rational and the emotional. It is possible to be enchanted by money, not for what it can provide, but as an icon in and of itself.   I think Ken gets at some of this in his post on what’s being taught in business schools.

It think it would benefit us to study the banking system as if it were a religious devotion. What are it’s creation myths? It’s rituals? It’s core texts? It’s iconography?  Are there any good anthropoligical works on the banking industry?

Can/should the crowd help determine historic places in a city? The City of Los Angeles’ Office of Historic Resources is embarking on a Getty funded project called Survey LA:

a citywide survey to identify and document historic resources representing significant themes in the city’s history. While Los Angeles has over 900 Historic-Cultural Monuments (local landmarks) and 24 Historic Preservation Overlay Zones (Historic Districts), to date only 15% of the city has been surveyed.

The initiative claims to be including broad community input. But the actual mechanisim for getting involved seems unnecessarily hazy. They are asking the community to participate in a pilot survey, but wouldn’t it make more sense to encourage citizens to create Google Map mashups where “the crowd” can submit candidates for “historic place” designation?

I wonder if any other cities have tried this approach?

Very cool for those of us who remember Blondie and the Talking Heads.

Insert pedagogical justification here.

HT: Open Culture