140 characters is about all I manage these days.

This is the context in which I gravitated to the poem “Romantic” by Armand Garnet Ruffo. Though it deals with the question of “Indian-ness” in a completely different sense, the issues of performativeness versus authenticity are similar. Ruffo’s poem asks the question: is romanticization okay?

The poem answers its own question indirectly. It describes romanticization as “part of the game”, “giv[ing] the public what it wants, it expects” “spread[ing] it on thick.” Romanticization is playing into the dominant culture’s expectations of what Native identity means, a kind of gaming or lying (“spreading it on thick”) that is clearly not okay. Though the poem concludes with the line “The point is/to get the message/across,/isn’t it?” we sense the irony behind this statement, not simply because of the “isn’t it?” question, but also because even at the end of the poem we don’t know for certain what “the message” is. The most likely possibility for the message of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel Last of the Mohicans is that the Mohican (or perhaps Mohegan, since Cooper confused the two) people are an extinct race. So if the purpose of romanticization is to get a message across, and the message is either lost or constitutes the premature acceptance of cultural eradication, then an “ends justify the means” argument fails here.

Romanticization is not okay because it reduces ethnicity to its most superficial aspects – “beads and braids” – and makes those aspects simply performative rather than ritualistic or spiritual or anything else. We feel that culture is more than performance and should not be reduced to that. But romanticization leaves us wondering what that deeper reality of culture is or, worse, tricks us into believing that we already understand it.

This raises the question of what culture is then – or, who is entitled to the rituals and signs, who makes them more than performances? Ruffo’s ambiguous reclamation of Archibald Belaney, the white man pretending to be part-Apache who is the speaker of the poem, as something more than an imposter problematizes the easiest answer – one’s family of origin – just as Aris’ existence has for Tanya’s mother. But Ruffo doesn’t suggest another easy answer in its place, as ultimately Belaney, bearing the message of cultural and environmental preservation, is both parable of the ills of romanticization, (the message is lost) and demonstration of the possibility of constructing a cultural identity (the message, perhaps, entitles?)

~ Kelefa Sanneh “Fast bikes, slow food, and the workplace wars“

Right now, technology is changing the game for traditional media in the same way that it is for governments and businesses – the internet has reshaped our expectations about convenience, immediacy, interactivity, responsiveness, “interestingness,” cost, etc. In some ways this is a problem (are our expectations unreasonable?) but in other ways, it’s potentially quite beneficial (we should have much higher expectations for our media – and our democracy – and we can collaborate together to realize those expectations in ways that weren’t possible before).

It’s not simply that the mail is being “replaced” by the internet – it’s that our understanding of communication is so different that mail doesn’t even make sense to many of us anymore. But it takes time for even the most savvy of online service providers to adjust to these shifts and capitalize on them.

Google took some strides to seize the potential of email with Gmail – which classifies email threads as “conversations,” moving away from the outdated metaphor of letters – but it will only be with the launch of Google Wave that we’ll really see email become a conversation by taking advantage of the potential for real-time interaction that the internet allows (complete with the ability to interrupt each other).

Adapting successfully to the new paradigm will require a great degree of abstract thinking, an ability to understand your business as fulfilling needs rather than creating a product, and a willingness to meet those needs in whatever way makes the most sense given the current state of technology and society. If media outlets had been more savvy, there never would have been a Google – newspapers would have realized more quickly that their role as arbiters and classifiers of information required them to be the earliest and best adopters of the internet. That wasn’t what happened, obviously.

But just because big institutions have always been terrible at this kind of innovation is no reason to assume they can’t pull it off. The good news for traditional media providers is that, if they can find a way to become more nimble, there are still lots of opportunities to get in on the shift while it’s still happening and to offer something new that capitalizes on these changes in a way nothing else has yet. For many consumers, online media is just like real-life media with the addition of flashing happy faces and dancing monkeys. There’s still plenty of opportunity to show these people that the online world has new, different, and desirable things to offer. But what?

Google and millions of individual content creators have mostly usurped the role of providing information – but of course, that’s never been what media really did anyway. Nor does media just arbitrate or comment on the information. At its best, media helps meet the need that many people have to feel like they are part of one meaningful conversation, that they inhabit a common space with other humans that is shaped by common events, that we can all discuss and interpret together.

Media now has the amazing potential to be both the inspiration for that conversation and a forum for it, with much more speed and volume than the Letters to the Editor page could ever allow. A former online editor at globeandmail.com told me they get over 5,000 comments per day. This is both an opportunity and a very daunting challenge: from the Globe’s perspective, they’re cursed with abundance, as it would be next-to-impossible to facilitate all those comments and turn them into a conversation – particularly when you consider the absolute dearth of meaning and sense in 90 per cent of them.

But in my work with Canada’s World, I’ve travelled across the country engaging Canadians in dialogue, and there are many who are thirsty for the chance to meaningfully grapple with public issues in collaboration with their fellow citizens. The wing-nuts and rageaholics that you currently find in the Comments section of most online newspapers aren’t, in my experience, representative of most Canadians. Many are turned off by what they see online right now, because it’s shallow and divisive and often confusing. But if the online world offered them something like what newspapers and radio programs used to offer, many would come and soon learn how to interact in new ways.

We’re far from having fully tapped the potential the online world has to enable new ways of connecting. Most Canadians are still, for all intents and purposes, on the wrong side of the digital divide, not because they don’t have access to technology but because they have no idea what they can really use it for.

If big media wants to survive, it must innovate, and the niche still crying out to be filled is for meaningful interaction. The metaphors we use to understand the internet need to become more appropriate, more sophisticated. Email doesn’t have to be like mail, and it likely won’t be for much longer. An online forum doesn’t need to be like an in-person forum.

Despite dwindling finances, big media organizations still have the resources of their names and visibility. If they were to devote themselves to exploring the ways the internet can help us combat the increasing fragmentation and polarization of public life, they could win back their vaunted place in our society. And maybe – just maybe – people might be willing to pay for their services again.

This will be easier to understand if you’ve actually seen Twitter, so check out the stream of Twitter messages on Iran (often called a feed) on Twitter right now.

This is how Twitter mattered for those in Iran and outside – even if I’ve never met you, and I’m in Vancouver and you’re in Tehran, or we’re both in Tehran but a few kilometres apart, you can send me a 140 character message. How? By putting what’s called a hashtag (simply a few words with the pound sign in front of it) into your message (called a “tweet”) using Twitter on your cell phone. So, if I’m on Twitter I can watch every single message being sent using the #iranelection hashtag, and get some idea of what’s going on (if I’m good at filtering things – when I checked yesterday there were more than a thousand messages, some only tangentially related, every few minutes). Or I might want to send a message that says “Riot police approaching Tehran university. Stay away #iranelection” or “Riot police approaching Tehran university. Send reinforcements. #iranelection.”

There really is no other way to enable a vast number of people who don’t know each other (or even those who do) to communicate in this immediate fashion, simply based on a common concern.The potential this creates to organize is wholly new.

Twitter is also important because it’s mobile – because you can use it on your cell phone it’s more difficult for government to shut down or control.

Beyond the immediate benefits of the technology for people on the ground in Tehran, here’s how I see the use of Twitter having been important during this time:

1. Getting messages outside the borders of Iran, allowing people in other countries to have some sense of what was going on in real time. HOWEVER – it’s definitely important to question the representativeness of what you read on Twitter. Remember: your average Iranian Twitter user probably belongs to a very particular demographic. Twitter likely won’t tell you what the urban poor, or people in the countryside (still about a third of the population), are saying about Ahmadinejad. Not having much clue what these people thought contributed greatly to the failure of most Western commentators to predict the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.

2. The shaming of the worst of the mainstream media, and another great leap for social media in altering the role of the mainstream media. Another very popular topic on Twitter during the last few days has been the failure of CNN to cover the situation in Iran, using the hashtag #CNNfail. You can see the spike in the use of the #CNNfail hashtag by following it on hashtags.org. Twitter had more up-to-date information than most mainstream media outlets. And Twitter wasn’t the only tool being used – if you’re unclear on how social media was providing a lot more information than the (and to the) MSM, check out mashable.com’s guide to following the Iranian election.

3. A very strong argument for the importance of net neutrality. Every service provided on the Internet, even those that don’t make money (like Twitter) needs equal opportunity to reach users. If Twitter had been slowed down (throttled) its effectiveness would be greatly diminished.

4. Sending a message to a broader audience (delivered, ironically, through the MSM, showing their continued importance) that Twitter isn’t just a place to talk about what you ate for breakfast or how cute your cat is. Social media isn’t just about narcissism – it’s also occasionally about giving more people more ways to share what they (and often only they) know, outside of the control of government. HOWEVER – it’s also sometimes about empowering those who don’t know. So be savvy in deciding what you believe, and don’t trust instant experts on Iran (including me – go find out more for yourself!)

Finally, the big message for me is that citizen organization using these new tools — making governing in the traditional manner increasingly difficult — is happening everywhere. We in the west are just fortunate enough to be able to deal with it through sitting in a circle and talking, rather than taking to the street and being greeted by riot police. But it’s a similar confrontation between self-organized citizens with new tools, and institutions that feel their power being threatened. The big question is: how will institutions respond?

(cross-posted on The Mark)

When I first started my current job as an Online Community Facilitator, someone in his 60s said to me, “I understand why op-eds matter; I just don’t think that a blog matters.”

This shocked me. I thought it was obvious to everyone that traditional media was rapidly losing the competition with online media. If an op-ed matters, then a well-written blog matters (though on any given day I might argue that neither of them matters).

But the shift to digital culture has been so huge that it has opened up a massive generation gap – a point brought home to me again by the reaction of most of my over-40 colleagues and friends to the imminent demise of CanWest. The shock and anxiety they feel – even those who despise media concentration and everything CanWest stands for – puzzles me.

I guess this is because I can’t remember those halcyon days when newspapers were honest and true and exposed the corruption at the root of our society, creating a modern acropolis. I assume that those days existed, because lots of people (philosopher Jurgen Habermas, for instance) say they did. But for all of my adult life I’ve taken it for granted that if I wanted to know the “real story” about something, I would have to be savvy about cobbling it together myself from different sources. And if I was going to get part of it through a newspaper, I would have to wade through a lot more populist trash and partisan hackery than was often worth my time.

I haven’t touched a print newspaper in several years – and I’ve never, in my memory, touched a CanWest one. I also can’t remember the last time I saw a CanWest channel on TV, unless I was on the plane. I’m mostly outside the reach of that octopus, though there are two regular exceptions: local papers staring mockingly out of newspaper boxes in Vancouver; and the Full Comment section of The National Post online.

Why the National Post online? First, because it’s well-adapted to the online environment – it’s frequently updated with good use of RSS feeds and, most importantly, a total unleashing of the ego. Second, because I think it’s important to read things I (mostly) disagree with.

Where I do sympathize with anxiety about the end of traditional media is with the concern that, in the online environment, most people don’t read things that they disagree with. Or if they do, it’s so they can write angry, idiotic 140-character rants in reply. This is definitely a problem, but it’s not a problem traditional media somehow had under control before the Interweb came along and screwed everything up.

Traditional media has to experiment within the online environment. This is indisputable. CanWest will fail (sooner or later) not just because they placed profits before people, but because the new media environment demands innovation, and that’s something big institutions are really terrible at. Experiments like The REAL News, The Tyee, ProPublica and The Mark itself are promising. But if what we really want is media that improves the health of our society, the first question we need to answer isn’t “How do we get paid to do online what we were doing in print?” but rather “How do we use these new tools to convene diverse groups of people for meaningful conversations online?”
]]> http://reillyreads.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/the-demise-of-traditional-media-causes-anxiety-maybe-it-shouldnt/feed/ 0 reillyreads http://reillyreads.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/why-parents-shouldnt-pay-for-their-childrens-post-secondary-education/ http://reillyreads.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/why-parents-shouldnt-pay-for-their-childrens-post-secondary-education/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:35:47 +0000 reillyreads http://reillyreads.wordpress.com/?p=25 ]]> I’ve talked to a couple parents lately who are either feeling intense anxiety about ensuring they can pay for their children’s post-secondary education, or intense guilt about the fact that that’s not going to be possible for them. I really feel badly for these people, and wish they would stop making themselves crazy, for two reasons:

1) You’re a great parent whether or not you pay for your child’s education.

2) You might be an even better parent if you don’t. Because a) you’ve already been able to give your child many advantages – paying for their post-secondary just creates even greater inequality; b) not having your post-secondary education paid for can teach you a lot of really valuable life skills.

I think the ideal situation for parents and children is to allow your child to keep living at home during post-secondary or, if that doesn’t work for them, billet someone in their room and give them the money (or most of it). This is a very fair and generous arrangement.

But – then won’t your child wind up in tons of debt after graduation? How will he or she pay for tuition and living expenses? Well, by working part-time and during summers. The secret no-one wants to tell you is that it is totally possible to do some extracurriculars, do well in school and work part-time (10 to 15 hours per week) without killing yourself, if you know how to manage your time.

Learning how to not let schoolwork take over your life is really important, both for figuring out time management skills and for your sanity while you’re in school. It’s definitely not easy at all, but it’s do-able and worth doing.

Parents who give their kids a basic living allowance or a place to live and encourage them to work are (I swear) doing their kids a favour. And probably making themselves a lot more sane – something kids should support. But aside from the parental sanity and character-building arguments, I actually think the best reason to do this is the fairness argument – if you care about a more economically equal world, you have to be willing to forego giving your child some of the monetary advantages you might be able to give them.

This completely goes out the window for people who have any kind of serious emotional challenges or learning disabilities. Or Americans – who should consider sending their children to school in Canada anyways.

To ‘become who you are,’ as Heidegger sees it, is to identify what really matters in the historical situation in which you find yourself and to take a resolute stand on pursuing those ends. Through resoluteness and commitment, life comes to have a cumulativeness and directedness, and it thereby achieves a kind of lived temporal continuity Heidegger calls ‘constancy’ and ‘steadfastness.’ Moreoever, since the projects you can take over are all inherited from the historical culture into which you are thrown, to take a stand on what matters is always at the same time to be engaged in the shared undertaking (Heidegger calls it the destiny) of a larger community. For Heidegger, then, authenticity is found to have [a] sort of irreducible social dimension …(On Being Authentic, p. 134)

Of all the different conceptions of authenticity, I find the narrative one the most compelling: that creating your life is much like creating a story, with different components that may seem fragmented but are related to one another by common themes and causal explanation. (This is in contrast to the postmodern account, which sees our different identities and roles as an unorderable flux.) And of all the narrative conceptions of authenticity — Guignon mentions Nietzsche, Heidegger, Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre — I find Heidegger’s the most persuasive. Much more persuasive than Nietzsche’s, which focuses on the artistry of creating a narrative self and imparting “style” to your life. I know that in my own personal experience the more I try to focus on the “style” of my life, the easier it is for me to get lost in others’ notions of what’s aesthetically pleasing, modern, avant-garde, sophisticated, even “cool.” But those times when I try to focus my thought and action on what’s truly important do feel like a rising above, or a deepening, of my own personal experience. Though I suppose some marriage of the two conceptions might also work (or I [and Guignon] might be giving Nietzsche really short shrift here).

I really like the way the social aspect plays out in Heidegger’s conception – I had already been dwelling on it a lot when Stephen Epperson, Unitarian Church guru, spoke last Sunday about the “thread of self, and the fabric of community into which it is woven.” Sharing a commitment to what’s most important seems the best way to weave a strong self into a strong community.

But then, this brings up the question of how to decide what that most important thing actually is…