New Year, New Feature 🙂  An assortment of things that pop up on my Google Reader feeds that I’d like to read or listen to or would like people to think I’d like to read or listen to (my new year’s resolution is to appear more learned than I actually am).

From Flowing Data: Nine Ways to Visualize Consumer Spending

From KCRW To The Point: Is the Internet Speeding us Up by Slowing us Down?

From Slate: Can cities save the planet?

From IT Conversations: A Talk on Human Centered Design

From Psychology Today via Bookforum — Men do everything they do in order to get laid

I just finished watching the Frontline documentary “Growing Up Online”—a fairly ominous portrayal of social networking sites, online identity, and current intergenerational tussles between parents and youth over the public and private dimensions of cyberspace (the full episode is at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/).

 The program draws its evidence from various parents, teachers, scholars, and young people who hold different views about the harms and benefits of online engagement among contemporary American youth. There are several vivid examples of how many young people are using the net as a place to create a postmodern pastiche of identities not afforded to them in their everyday lives (and that in turn, often change their identities in offline settings). At the same time, the producers explore the dark side of online communication through cases of cyberbullying, and some tragic stories about websites offering young people advice on how to become anorexic or even commit suicide. At the end of the program, viewers are urged to counteract these negative trends by finding ways to teach cyber-citizenship to students. One thing I noticed in the show is that, while the concept of “identity” is raised, it is both left a) critically unexplored, and b) disconnected from notions of citizenship. I would argue that productive discussions of cyber-citizenship presuppose two important considerations left unacknowledged in this and many media accounts of these issues.

 My first concern is that (if my assumption is correct) there is far too little instruction or discussion of “identity construction” below the college level in American education. The teaching of cyber-citizenship in this program is reduced largely to citing mantras about the dangers of online communication to young people—a worthwhile endeavor, but too minimalist an approach for understanding the totalizing online environments which now envelop our lives. If Web 2.0 has pushed us into a new era of “mass interpersonal persuasion” (see BJ Fogg), where one can assert themselves in the public sphere in a way that is rapid, morphous, and amplified to an extent unprecedented in history, there are ethical and consequential stakes in doing all we can to help young people understand the force that the symbolic construction of identity plays on this massified scale. It seems to me that the tragedies resulting from cyberbullying partly follow from a failure to understand the role language and images play in identity construction—in how we can ingest and reify social symbols in self-fulfilling ways that tend to resist alternatives. Folks such as George Herbert Mead can help lead the way here. There are also discussions in the field of argumentation studies about how “one’s self is an argument” (see RL Lake) that may be helpful in understanding the self as a deliberation that is neither purely essentialized nor some kind of fraudulent multiformity. Many young people swing between these two extremes in their understandings of online identity—with devastating consequences…

 This underscores my second point—the importance of understanding the relative fixity or fluidity of the concept of “identity” itself. The most democratic forms of communication on the Internet are likely to occur somewhere between the extremes of a completely fixed or fluid identity. In order to meet the demands of trust that community requires, it is helpful to have an anchored identity that locates one’s unique voice within a public sphere, while remaining accountable and responsive to the needs and concerns of others. On the other hand, healthy human communication is also founded on having a flexible identity, which is needed to adapt to others and meet the unique demands of ever-changing situations. As Neil Postman once remarked—have you ever met a “professor” who acts like a professor in every situation? A moralist who can’t stop being serious? Or a comic who is always “on”? We should introduce our students to the idea that polar understandings of identity often veer toward solipsism, and social identity is best promoted when paradoxically both fixed and fluid. Of course, this lesson is not unique to online communication. Yet given how selves are now being projected exponentially via the Internet, this would appear to be a matter with stakes that no modern curriculum or understanding of cyber-citizenship can leave behind. – Don Waisanen

Street Art via Google Maps Street View. Some of it is sweet, some is voyeuristic. Not sure why, but here’s my favorite:

HT: Jonathan Pfieffer

I’m not sure what this says about me, but I’m addicted to the Lifehacker blog.  The site provides links to resources intended to simplify (hack) aspects of your life.  While most of the posts consist of tech stuff, there are also posts on finding holiday bargains or inexpensive things to do with your kids, etc.  The blog is one of many that feed a growing culture of “Life Hackers.”  Other blogs include Lifehack, Zen Habits, and 43 Folders.

The subculture is complete with its own bible.  Getting Things Done (GTD) a 2002 book written by David Allen, a California-based productivity consultant created a buzz among “life hackers.”  The organizational system detailed in the book (which I try to use myself) tries to help people organize their lives through an elaborate system of recording and lists.  The system has spawned a wave of practitioners providing their own variations on the system in the effort to create the perfect organizational system.

I’ve always thought this would be a great subculture for a sociologist to study (we political scientists don’t get to look at fun stuff like that, at least not pre-tenure).   What interests me is whether you could create similar subculture of “poli-hackers” or “power-hackers” people who share tips about how to more effecively access the political process.  It would be interesting to create a site where activists or lobbyists share what’s worked for them in the past.   It seems to me that if you can “geekify” the political process, the results would be interesting.

Chip Saltsman, a candidate to head the Republican National Committee (RNC), decided to spread holiday cheer by sending an audio CD to members of the RNC that included a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro.” The song a mocks Obama’s appeal to whites in the voice of an Al Sharpton sound-a-like.

As someone who worked in politics (briefly) before going into academia, I find it difficult to wrap my head around boneheaded decisions like this. Why would anyone, no less a candidate for RNC Chairman, think this was a good idea. It isn’t like this is a Congressman without greater ambitions catering to a constituency that might find this amusing (Saltzman was Mike Huckabee’s campaign manager). If that were the case, I could understand using out-group racial mockery to strengthen ties among your brethren. But this guy is running for a national party. Unfortunately for him, he’s running the be operational head of a party in an increasingly diverse country. Tough break, that.

Maybe it because I’m getting older, but I find myself shaking my head at incidents like this rather than indulging in righteous anger. The act seems petty, the behavior of a flailing wing of a political party that would just as soon cast explicit racists out (See current RNC chair Mike Duncan’s response).

For a party that needs to get its bearings quickly if it wants to serve as a useful push back to the majority party, these types of stunts renders it impotent. Those of us who are more left of center can hold this incident up as an example of a backwards, bigoted party. In reality, most of the ideas of the Republican party have a place in American political discourse but this stuff doesn’t help.

You live by the Southern strategy, you die by the Southern strategy… I guess. My New Years hope for my Republican friends is that they have the good sense to elect Michael Steele, the sensible, African-American, former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, for RNC chair. A two party system works better with two viable parties, and it would be nice to drown the Southern strategy in the bathtub (not the federal government… Grover Norquist).

I know lots of people are on the Brand Obama bandwaggon, but I haven’t seen much discussion of the implications of Obama’s brand for governing. There is already a book out by Barry Liebert and Rick Faulk called Barack Inc. that promises to share with you the winning business lessons from the Obama campaign. The idea that a political campaign could have any insights for the private sector is pretty paradigm shaking. It’s hard for me to fathom a book detailing the marketing secrets for business from the Kerry campaign or even the Bush campaign.

As any popular book would do, they’ve broken the more complex reality of Obama’s branding success into a pithy sondbyte:

Be Cool, Be Social, Be the Change

I’m not sure what to make of the the “Be cool” or “Be the Change” stuff yet….it doesn’t seem too earthshaking, but I haven’t read the book. But what I am interested in seeing and thinking about for the next few years is how/whether the “be social” parts can translate into political capital. The “be social” part deals with the penetration of the campaign into multiple corners of the on-line social networking world.

What will it take to translate these micro-communities the Obama campaign built on various platforms into leverage that can be used to pressure congress into effecting policy change? Will the Obama campaign get out in front of developments in the Semantic web to create even more narrowly tailored communities? In the public policy literature we talk about epistemic communities of experts and interest groups that produce the ideas that shape policy debates. Will the Obama campaign try to create “super-epistemic” communitiies that can shape policy agendas? can they create targeted “flash” epistiemic communities to deal with pressing crises? We’ll know soon.

Here is our holiday edition (number three) of ThickPod, just in time for the holidays. In this episode, Russell explains the difference between translucent and transparent, Jose blanks out on Jam on It by Newcleus at a critical point in the podcast (wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki), Don discuses ObamaGirl, Ken manages to throw in a Judith Butler reference, and PanoptiCat watches over all.

The posts referenced in this podcast are as follows:

Giving Thanks 2008 by Russell Stockard
Early Exploration of Political Communication in the Election by Don Waisenan
Wiki Transparency by Ken Kambara
Change we can Comment On, by Jose Marichal

This has been an interesting experiment for us, but we’d love to hear what you think. Drop me a line at marichal@callutheran.edu with coments, suggestions, rants or other forms of communication.

Happy holidays!

There is a lot of buzz today about the Obama campaign’s use of the internet in his administration. Even public radio has skin in the game. The New York Times editorial board is urging the Obama campaign to make good on his promise to propose a stimulus package that includes expanding the nation’s internet infrastructure.

But to keep my “webphoria” at bay, I need to remind myself that the most popular politically related use of the web in the last 48 hours has nothing to do with the transition. It’s this:

This video has received 5.5 million web views. So I can’t get too carried away about participatory culture just yet 🙂

Give the current POTUS credit. He might not have been all that as a president, but his reflexes are pretty sharp.

As I try to get out from under the mass of “green books” (the blue book is a casualty of campus greening efforts), I thought I’d give a shout to my Race, Multiculturalism and Politics students at California Lutheran University. I’m a pretty mild mannered person in general, but for some reason, I often perform “high wire acts” with untested assignments.

This semester, I asked my Race classes (mostly first-semester freshmen) to create Wikipedia entries for books from the suggested readings section of my syllabus. I was a bit nervous about this assignment. Particularly as students began coming to me reporting that the “the crowd” on Wikipedia had decided to delete their blog entries.

Today, some of my students presented their Wikipedia pages, and I was blown away. Other than the occasional typo here or akward sentence structure there, they exceeded my wildest expectations. Here are two examples:

Wikipedia page for Multiculturalism Without Culture, by Anne Phillips
Wikipedia page for Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau

I was impressed with my students ability to synthesize pretty heady stuff. I wonder how presenting material in such a public forum changed the work product. Has anyone given a similar assignment? How did it work out? I was stunned by the zeal with which many of the students approached this project. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

In 1997, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article called “The Coolhunt” that has become something of a cult classic. In the article, he follows an employee of Converse whose sole (no pun intended) responsibility was to find “cool” people and note their style trends so that Converse could co-opt them. Gladwell argued that, in a reversal of the “trickle down” model of cultural diffusion (in which elite fashion designers ultimately decide what’s cool), we were now witnessing an era of bottom up culture.

Perhaps it’s a poor parallel, but I notice that the Blueray version of the new Dark Knight DVD allows people to “record and post user-generated commentaries over the film using My WB Commentary.” That is to say, in addition to listening to Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale discuss the movie, listeners can create their own audio commentaries over the Internet. This new capacity seems like a natural development in the people-powered media era of YouTube, but is one with real possibilities for both art and politics (as it becomes more widely disseminated). How about a Ralph Nader commentary on Wall-E? Or Bob Woodward on Frost/Nixon? Or forget that … what about normal people having the ability to provide rich in-depth, long-form commentary on films? It seems to me to be an example of bottom-up culture that allows more meaningful discourse than most of what’s on YouTube.

Is anybody else excited about this technology? Am I over-estimating its potential? Is it inherently too closely controlled by corporate hands to allow for meaningful citizen commentary? Other thoughts?