Lewis Gordon at Truthout argues that the market model of academia has killed the public intellectual. He argues that market pressures, including heavy competition for limited jobs, and the focus on professional academics as masters of technical and textual knowledge has forced public intellectuals into creating the equivalent of academic literature reviews every time they want to talk about major issues of public interest. He contrasts this market-driven logic with some of the public intellectuals of the past, who rejected the spoils of faculty positions and prestigious prizes. He writes:
For many, it’s impossible to imagine intellectuals like Fanon and Sartre as anything short of holier than thou, even though neither of them argued that academics should not have academic pursuits and seek academic rewards. They simply asked for the rest of us not to pretend that the world is somehow better off by our being rewarded for such pursuits and especially so in the most prestigious representations of establishment.
A key pillar of this argument is a critique of fame – or, at the very least, the commoditization of academic fame. In my office today there was much discussion of how we young academics are expected to maintain a personal brand. Every tweet, every blog post could be read by future employers or future students, and all must be kept consistent, in content and style, with what we are expected to produce as knowledge workers. And as social media is time-sensitive, the brand must be maintained at all times. The reward for maintaining this image is an academic job, as Gordon points out, but it is also fame within the social media sphere.
This is a double-edged sword for anyone who (like me) has aspirations as a public intellectual. On the one hand, as the Chronicle of Higher Education has pointed out, many factors combine to limit the number of academic posts. With more competition, productivity becomes important. So turn off Twitter and stop reading blogs. Write that article, and ignore the Party on the Internet. But leaving aside the perilous labour conditions and the market-driven environment that might await once one gets the academic post, there’s also the immediate question of how much to engage with the flow of debate rushing through the social media sphere. To catch the stream, one must maintain a different sort of personal brand – one that depends on constant and high quality participation.
I disagree with Gordon’s claim that it’s essentially impossible to be a true public intellectual under current market conditions. I think it is possible, but it comes with a heavy pressure of time and participation that doesn’t seem to be well understood or supported by the academy. How do others negotiate the different demands of academic and advocacy social media worlds? What goes on the Twitter stream, and what stays off?
Wolfram Alpha is pretty great: you type in a problem and it finds a solution. It does this by transforming the natural language problem into computational elements and entries in its curated data set, and then running the computations. Ta-Daa! The solution appears, provided that the problem includes elements that are 1. reducible to computation and 2. include elements that are in the database. Improving on 2. is easy enough, the argument goes: simply add more things into the database. If you want to calculate the likelihood that a word will occur in a Yeats poem, simply add more Yeats poems to the database and eventually you’ll get a meaningful result.
It’s principle 1. that’s potentially more problematic. It raises the question about the extent to which all knowledge can be quantified. In other words, it doesn’t explain why the repetition of words in a Yeats poem might be important.
Ahh, you say. But that’s not science! True, science is about quantifiablity. But it is also about inquiry, about determining how to ask questions that are verifiable. And it is about applying those questions generatively in order to develop new knowledge. Wolfram Alpha’s founder has written about a new kind of science, which is based on simple rules that can be embodied in computer programs. I’m ready to be convinced, but I’m concerned that the Age of the Algorithm could mean the end of the Age of Inquiry.
My most memorable university exam included a question which asked me to differentiate special relativity from general relativity, and to explain how Einstein developed one from another. I attempted to get Wolfram Alpha to compute this, but the closest result I got was this. So far, inquiry is safe.
In yesterday’s post I reflected on how battles for civil liberties were ways for people with less power to try and gain more power. This is a fairly mainstream sociological perspective on power and the reasons that people engage in collective action. Today I’m going to ask how this changes in a network society. The theorist of social movements Alberto Melucci writes in his book Challenging Codes that, “a social movement is an actor engaged in a conflict directly or indirectly affecting the distribution of power within a society.” But I’d like to know: is there some finite amount of power? If so, where are the places where it is most concentrated? What are today’s most significant struggles?
If we think of our society as being characterized by 1. relationships structured by/through networked forms and networked infrastructures and 2. the high value placed on information, then it is easier to see why today’s struggles over power involve things like media reform and privacy. Colin Bennett (among other privacy advocates) looks at how privacy is framed as a civil liberties issue. He writes in The Privacy Advocates that “the protection of privacy has always featured prominently within the agendas of civil liberties organizations, historically concerned with the legitimate boundaries between the individual and state and with the protection of citizens from abuses of power” (p. 35). One limitation of this perspective, as Bennet notes, is that it focuses on individual rights rather than collective (civil) rights. We could imagine this perspective as a shield preventing the powerful state from abusing the powerless individual.
Maybe its possible to think of the individual – or the collective – as having power that can be disruptive. Manuel Castells argues that any exercise of power also produces “counter-power.” Any oppression produces resistance. For example, the consolidation of global capital and information that the internet made possible was balanced out by the development of new social movements that opposed that power using the tools provided (the internet, global interaction). Now that more of society can be thought of as working like a network, this power/counterpower relationship is developing. Some of the important questions are: who figures out how networks of influence and networks of infrastructure are going to operate? Who makes the rules?
Developing counter-power that restructures how networks work is a good way of framing why media reform has become a big issue — and even why technical standards and protocols are becoming objects of political discussion. But one of the big challenges of understanding power – and civil liberties – in a network society is actually determining where counterpower or resistance should be directed. Castells claims that a pressing question is: “against whom do I revolt”?
This is exactly why issues of privacy and media reform are becoming more thorny. It’s not simply a question of shielding individuals from the burly oppression of the state. Many forms of power are ways of controlling our uncertainty about the world, and even a surveillance state can do that (the argument for surveillance cameras is often that they make people safer, as everyone is being watched). It’s a question of determining *where* abuses of power come from -in the multi-layered networks of infrastructure, content, finance, and politics – and *how* to use the same networks to disconnect or route around those abuses.
I went to the British Library on Saturday to see the exhibit “Taking Liberties: The struggle for Britain’s freedom and rights.” Beginning with the Magna Carta (on display!) it showed how unstable British politics have been, and for how long.
I was fascinated by the section on the long struggle to give women the vote. The movement started in the 1860s, but the exhibit claimed that it didn’t have much success until after the First World War – women over 30 got the vote 1920, and women over 21 in 1928. The Suffragettes were more organized, and more radical than I thought. They blew up post boxes, stages rallies in the street, and accumulated criminal records. In fact, so many of them went to jail in the 1890s and 1900s, and then went on hunger strikes in order to be released, that the government passed a new law. The “Cat and Mouse” law permitted the government to release a woman after a hunger strike and then rearrest her as soon as she had gained enough weight not to die in jail.
It seems unimaginable now that the suffrage activists would have to go to such lengths to prove that women should be allowed the same democratic rights as men. But female suffrage was very threatening to the moral and social order of the times. If women were willing to blow up mailboxes in order to get the right to vote, who knows who they might vote for if they got the chance?
The exhibit was a good reminder that freedoms and rights are often grudgingly given by those with more power to those with less. Those with less are often called to put their beliefs on the line. I started to ask myself, “would I be willing to go to jail for my rights?” If ever my right to vote were revoked, I would like to belive I would.
Democracy (especially in Britain) sometimes seems wounded and tepid – with too much balancing to truly bring change. But another amazing event of this week proves that it can still work. Obama’s inauguration, and the vision of millions of people on Washington’s mall, suggest that people with less power, working together, can still shift the heavy machinery of government. But we all need to be willing to push.
Michael Pollan’s open letter to the next American president suggests that the North American industrial food production system should return to regionalism, year-round planting, and small farms.
Pollan has created a framework for local farming and food distribution that advocates for “small is beautiful” local agriculture (including a proposed White House Victory Garden) that avoids simply assuming that local food or small scale distribution is inherently better. There is no use, he argues, for calling for local distribution of more diverse crops if grain elevators will only accept corn and soy. A return to localism should happen because it is economically and socially viable, and would help the US disconnect food production from a dependence on foreign oil.
Many people I know from CWN and media reform advocacy would make a similar argument about the necessity for a return to localism in communications ownership. There are some parallels between the two areas: local media can nourish geographically close areas by presenting local stories, distributing local information, and creating opportunities for people living close to each other to learn about one another. Local evening newscasts on a broadcast television channel provided skilled employment as well as local information: but as media ownership consolidated, many local newscasts have been eliminated. Local radio funding has been cut too, as North American stations invest in satellite radio
So should we have a local internet? In the 1990s the answer to this question would have been yes, and the strategy the creation of community networks, which were the first ways for people without university affiliations to get online. These FreeNets, including the National Capital FreeNet in Ottawa, loaded up the front ends of their systems with local information, but what they did best was get people to go online . . .where . . . they met a lot of people who didn’t live in their local areas.
Then researchers started talking about the internet as a global utopia – Manuel Castells famously claimed that we were leaving behind a “space of places” and moving into a “space of flows.” Research in “virtual communities” blossomed. It seemed that a local internet was mostly a portal to a global world, and that communities and social networks would become dis-integrated from the local. The emotional argument might go this way: as we eat delicious berries out of season, trucked across the country, we watch YouTube videos instead of the local news.
But the internet is a local infrastructure: the local loop controls the speed of access to broadband. Someone must invest in this, and here is where community networking (reinvented as community wireless networking) comes in: WiFi is cheap, and local people can thus own the last mile, whether through their governments or through other non-profit or community organizations. The question is, should they? Unlike food, digital communications don’t absorb energy as they travel between places, and people maintain relationships with people from all over the world, as well as getting access to media from all over the world.
But people still live in places, and their lives are influenced by local policies, cultures, and contexts – not to mention media habits. My thesis case studies suggest that people most often use local WiFi networks to get their e-mail and to check the weather or the local news. It is impossible to return to a media world in which each small town has no idea of the big world issues. Finance, culture, and information flow too smoothly for this, and the disadvantages of being disconnected from this flow are still too great. Still, I believe that it is very likely that the next ten years will see us travel less, get our food from closer to where we live, and spend more time in local areas. If anything, this supports local investment in both communication infrastructure and in local media.
Local ownership and control of communications infrastructure can ensure that towns, cities, or neighbourhoods are not left out of the continuing global exchange of information. However, using community networks just to get people online is not the whole story – it is like investing in grain elevators for only one type of crop. If a more local world is coming (and it is, based on previous economic downturns), governments and organizations also need to invest in community media that will inspire local talent, provide employment, and help culture, creativity and innovation to strengthen.
I’ve been reading Bowker and Star’s excellent book Sorting Things Out today. They write a history of various types of classificiation systems to make an argument that informational infrastructure has a social, political, and economic history. They call this approach infrastructural inversion.
While running in the park in the curiously golden English sunshine, I began to think about how infrastructures (especially the way Bowker and Star describe them) and protocols (especially the way Alexander Galloway describes them in Protocol) work together to define spaces of openness and enclosure. The infrastructures of the park, especially the fences and paths, physically define spaces for specific purposes (dogs here, but not there; children under 5 on these jungle gyms, not those ones; sand in the sandbox but not in the wading pool). But so too do the protocols that have shaped these infrastructures and make them meaningful. They are invisible, and perhaps more subtle, and as a foreigner I am unaware of some of them (pass on the left, not on the right, unless you want to be smushed by cars or step on a small child). Others are more obvious: (don’t talk to strangers) or insidious (language and accent place the park visitors clearly on a defined social ladder).
But still, a curious social scientist out jogging can draw some conclusions about how protocol and infrastructure can define some spaces as public or open (like the park) while still maintaining strict forms of control or enclosure over them. The argument becomes more difficult when we consider the mediated public spaces we build through mediated communication.
On the lunch table below are the physical traces of any number of infrastructures and protocols that regulate communications (among other human endeavors). A thorough enumeration of them (which I will spare you) would have to include the infrastructures of book distribution, electricity, cellular telephone communication, computer operating systems both open-source and proprietary, and innumerable protocols ranging from the arcane (integration of sensors into ad-hoc networks) to the banal (creation of legible cursive writing using a pen).
If as Bowker and Star point out, infrastructures have their histories and futures built into them, and if cultures are necessarily built upon protocol, how can we manage this bewildering jumble of infrastructures and protocols to create some public space for communication? Is it possible to use the terms of openness and enclosure when both of them are necessary?
I am at McGill again today, to hear Patricia Aufderheide speak about the development of the internet, network neutrality, and the role of copyright in creating public media. The rest of the week I have been home, sitting in my office from day, to dusk, to night, writing my thesis proposal. Coming here is often a shock: the university has a quiet, removed aura (and an ivory tower – on a hill) that reminds me of my undergrad days. It’s a privileged space, and one that contrasts with other places I have been visiting in the last months and years: street fairs, community colleges, government offices, cafes, bars, technical schools and my own home office. Last week I was also here, at the Converging in Parallel policy workshop, to give a talk on the importance of understanding the metaphors used in broadcasting and telecommunications policy and research. I was on a telecom policy panel, a young woman sitting among men, a critical “sociologist” among economists and policy wonks. I talked about translation: one of the things I am learning as I start my “career” is about the importance of translation. Not just between languages (and between the ways of thinking that each different language permits), but also between different cultures: activist and policy-making cultures, government and university cultures. At the end of the Converging in Parallel conference, Sandra Braman pointed out the great advantages of doing progressive research in a “post-scientific” context, but also illuminated how this same context can be mobilized to silence debate or marginalize critical voices.
Critical social research is about engaging in different spaces, and creating the conditions for translation. But it’s a hard thing to do. What is an academic’s job? Is it to understand the many complex faces of reality, moving through different spaces, meeting and understanding actors, and balancing all of their perceptions? Is it to act as a translator – a mediator – between all of these actors? Or is it to reflect and write, to provide a critical perspective on the world, from a place just outside of it?
As I move from the monasticism of my writing process to the whirlpool of engagement and activism, I ask myself these questions. Which are the spaces where I can most engage? And where is my starting place, my “home turf”?
Pat says, “we create the discourses, and the frames for educating.” So perhaps that’s a place to start.