Science, Learning to be Human(ities)

The cover story of the most recent issue of Wired Magazine is dedicated to failure, and why failing can actually be a good thing. The prooftext (and cover model) is Alec Baldwin, whose career has been riddled with failures from which he learned and grew and so on.

But the accompanying story, “The Neuroscience of Screwing Up” is much more impressive, even than Baldwin’s rise to 30 Rock. And it is impressive for the ways it “scientifically” discovers what we humanists have understood about intellectual growth and… well… learning for a long long time.

The essay tells the story of Kevin Dunbar, who conducted an ethnography of bioscience labs at Stanford University, only to reach

an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.)

For most humanists and social scientists, this phenomenon is anything but frustrating. This is what most of us call “discovery” or “learning.” It happens when what we expect to happen doesn’t happen. It’s what happens when what we think we know turns out not to be so. It is what happens when we proceed, methodologically, with real questions we want to understand as opposed to hypotheses we set out to prove.

Finding what you don’t expect to find is a success, not a failure. And perhaps some of the apparent “hard times” of the humanities are not “failures” at all, but the result of stilted and stunted ways of looking at the very processes of research, and not only focusing on the findings.

Our Obsession With Teens and Technology

The New York Times recently published an article on teenagers who have decided to reduce or eliminate the time they spend on Facebook in order to bolster their grades, their offline social lives, and their self-esteem (“To Deal With Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook,” December 21, 2009, A16).  I found the article especially interesting for the way it depicted teenagers and their relationship to technology.  The story reinforces one of our dominant, culturally constructed beliefs about adolescence: namely, the notion that technology poses a particular threat to teens because they lack the maturity and willpower to use it in a responsible, temperate manner.

First consider how technology is represented.  Throughout the article, Facebook is described as an addiction.  Words like “habit,” “obsession,” and “temptation” appear, as do phrases such as “like an eating disorder,” the “lure of the login,” and “time consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling.”  One teenager mentioned by the piece even went on a “Facebook fast” for Lent.  Here, technology is depicted as a drug that can be especially dangerous and abused in the hands of teens.

Next consider the representation of adolescents.  The teenagers who have weaned themselves off of Facebook come across as having accomplished a remarkable victory.  They had to undergo a fierce struggle, one that required them to fight against their inherent adolescent traits and tendencies.  These exceptional teens exhibited “self-control,” “willpower,” and the ability to “delay gratification.”  The presumption here is that teens fundamentally lack these qualities… and they do not acquire them until they become adults.

Indeed, an unstated assumption of this New York Times story is that adults can use technology like Facebook more responsibly because adults have self-control.  However, many of my adult friends, myself included, are regular if not obsessive users of Facebook.  I even tried to “quit” Facebook back in April, posting a status update that read, “Leaving Facebook in 10 days.  I am both addicted and over it.”  In ten days I stopped looking at my account, but did not deactivate it.  Then two weeks later I was back on, and have basically logged in daily since then.  The teens profiled in this article are made of stronger stuff than I. 

One of the consequences of recirculating these assumptions about teens and technology in our mass news media is that it makes it easier for adults to claim the need to restrict or monitor teens’ use of technology.  The passing of laws targeting teens and technology comes to be seen as normal and even necessary for their safety.  For example, California recently passed a law prohibiting drivers under the age of 18 from using their cell phones; drivers over the age of 18, however, may use hands-free devices to talk on their phones.  Video games are assigned ratings (not by law, but by voluntary industry self-regulation) and people under the age of 18 cannot purchase certain games. 

I am interested in the larger questions raised by this story, questions about the role of technology in all of our lives, questions about the meaning of “maturity” and “immaturity” in our society, and questions about our cultural attitudes—and selective stigmas—regarding various “addictions” and “obsessions.”

The Sustainable Pen

The UCD Sustainable Pen

There’s something troubling about this artifact.  What appears at first to be another of the hundreds of variations on “spirit pens,” this UC Davis implement is something else entirely.  It is actually a plastic pen–perhaps of the bic variety?–wrapped with a thin layer of cardboard onto which the UCD logo is affixed (and a note indicating that it is “recycled material” is added).  Topping off this creation is a popsicle-stick like clip that is attached directly to the plastic pen top and can, one assumes, enable the user to affix the pen to the interior of a pocket–a scenario in which only the popsicle stick would protrude.

I don’t believe the UC Davis gurus of promotional products mean this to be funny.  Jokes that pass plastics off as good for the environment products don’t tend to get a laugh these days.  It’s possible that this is a sign that our sales and marketing team is losing their edge–certainly this is not a great product on several levels.  Green washing has to go right alongside peeling cardboard, cracking popsicle sticks, and depleted ink on the list of “poor design qualities.”

Yet let’s imagine just for a moment that we might need to take this pen seriously as what it claims to be: a symbol of our university.  That’s when things get scary.

In the day of business plans and bottom lines, is it too much of a stretch to imagine that this pen symbolizes the precarious nature of knowledge itself in the modern research university?  With class sizes growing and the pressure to “make something” and “bring in funding” (even in the humanities) we may find ourselves teaching students who never get deeper than superficial concepts and producing work that looks neat but has little there there, ultimately.  Maybe we are becoming the professorial equivalent of cardboard plastic pens stating our “recycled material.”

and that is definitely not funny.

I Don’t Watch TV. Or Do I?

For three years now I have not had a television.  I enjoy telling people this, as friends and family (as well as strangers I’ve met at parties) will readily testify.  Whenever they talk about some commercial or new show, I always say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I don’t watch TV.”  The pleasure I get from this disclosure comes in equal measure from witnessing their disbelief and from tingling with my own self-righteousness.  (As someone who teaches the history of popular culture, the fact that I don’t watch TV is ironic if not problematic, but that’s probably the subject of another post).  Recently, however, several of my close friends have begun to call me out on my smug pronouncement.

Them: “So you don’t have a television in your apartment?”
Me: “Well, I have a monitor that includes a built-in DVD player that I watch movies on.”
Them: “But it is technically a television set.”
Me: “Yes, technically, but I don’t have cable.”
Them: “Do you watch television shows on DVD?”
Me: “Well, sure.  I rent seasons of Arrested Development, Californication, Six Feet Under, and so on.”
Them: “Do you watch television shows on your computer?”
Me: “Well, once in a while I’ll watch clips of Jon Stewart online, or I’ll watch episodes of old TV shows on YouTube.”
Them: “So you watch TV shows online and on DVD?”
Me: “Yes.”
Them: “Then I hate to break it to you, but you still watch TV.”

Hence these friends of mine, these masters of logic and forensics, believe they have put me in my place.  And perhaps they have.  Two cultural questions emerge here.  First, what does it mean to “watch TV” today?  And second, what does it mean to say, “I don’t watch TV”?  American Studies practitioners (as well as psychologists) would probably be less interested in debating whether or not I technically “watch” television (technically I suppose I do), and more interested in analyzing why I feel the need to tell people, “I don’t watch TV.”  What does it mean that I say this?  What does it reveal about my sense of identity?  What does it say about how I perceive my relationship to modern technology, to mass culture, to social conventions?  Why is not watching TV an essential component to my vision of who I am—to my vision of self—living in the United States in the year 2009?

As an American Studies practitioner, I’ll try to answer my own questions.  Here are four possible ways to interpret my TV boast, though this list is by no means inclusive.  1) It is my way of asserting control over technology.  When I say, “I don’t have TV,” maybe what I really mean is, “TV does not have me.”  I mean that I can watch TV shows however and whenever I want, on my own terms—on DVD, or online, or not at all.  I am not yoked to the technology, not beholden to the medium.  I am master of it.  2) It is my way of signaling that I can control the flow of information into my domestic space (I also don’t have internet access at home).  I can limit the intrusion of the outside world into my private sphere.  3) It’s my way of pushing back against information overload in this new digital millennium.  I am making a return to simple living in a complex age.  4) It is a way to express my individuality, to present myself as a nonconformist, and—let’s be honest—to use culture and taste to make me feel superior to others.

I can already hear my friends saying, “So why don’t you just get cable and a DVR and watch specific shows whenever you want and shut up already?”  Fair enough.  But if I had cable, I’d probably watch TV all day long.  And then TV would definitely have me.

Twitter is (kinda) the new Ham Radio

I frequently find myself caught somewhere between the criticism of twitter as full of mindless blather and the praise of it as a new venue for communication and information sharing (see: protests in Iran as examples of the latter and just about anywhere else as examples of the former). But as someone trained as an historian, I’m less interested in historical ruptures and things being created ex-nihilo than I am in the strange ebb and flow of historical tides, especially where technology is concerned.

So, I found myself thinking about Ham Radio because the thing about Ham Radio was that people mostly tinkered in their basements and sent out signals trying to get in touch with as many people as they could. When you tuned in another Ham operator, you usually acknowledged receipt of the signal by sending them a postcard in the mail, noting the time and day of the signal you tuned in. The postcards themselves are sometimes really beautiful, but that’s a different story.

See where this is going? On Ham Radio, people were communicating over long distances, with one another, but the impetus and conventions here had less to do with saying something in particular; the impulse here was to say anything at all. The goal was not the proverbial “deep and meaningful” conversation, but just the act of communication.

So, and I went ahead and bought a bunch of ham radio postcards on ebay (mostly because I could, but also because, it turns out, they’re fascinating). I bought a lot of 264 cards from the early 1950s, collected by a man named Dale Wolters of Zeeland, Michigan. Call Letters: W8GEH. All of these cards were sent to him from people who heard his signal — and they are from all over the world: South Africa, Spain, Germany, the Caribbean, Mexico. Ham Radio was global long before all this talk of “globalization.”

People were connecting just to connect long before twitter breathed its first tweet.

Follow-up on Uganda

Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family, and founder of The Revealer, has done new reporting on the connection between American religious conservatives and the proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda.  The connection comes through an organization called “The Family.”  As Sharlet’s book details, The Family is a secretive fundamentalist organization dating from the 1930s that seeks to cultivate political leaders with a combination of quirky theology and conservative policy.  Among other endeavors, they provide housing for senators and congressmen, run Bible studies, and host the annual National Prayer Breakfast.  On Fresh Air this week, Sharlet discussed the role of The Family in Uganda.  A nice summary of this matter can be found at Episcopal Cafe.  Take a look.  But be forewarned—it’s scary.

“The Craftiest Lampshade in Film” or “Even the Past has a Present.”

Last night I saw the Coen Brothers’ new film, A Serious Man. It’s quite brilliant and thoughtful in a whole slew of ways, from the fact that it opens with a quote from Rashi and 10 minutes of perfect Yiddish to its incessant interrogation of faith, human behavior and the indeterminacy of both.

But this post is about a lampshade. A strategically placed lampshade.

One of the most striking qualities of the film is its pitch-perfect reconstruction of Jewish material culture in the late 1960s-early 1970s. I recognized — viscerally recognized — so much of the film’s aesthetic from the rabbis’ tchochke-full offices to the vast modern terrain of the synagogue sanctuary to the awkward phrasing of a bar mitzvah boy’s Torah reading. Every element in this film was so well crafted, so thoughtful, so precise in its calibration, that this lampshade stood out.

The lampshade appears in a scene in which the main character goes to see his rabbi about his ongoing existential crisis, and has to see the junior rabbi, instead. On the wall of the junior rabbi’s office is a map of Israel. I grew up in synagogues and classrooms that had that pink-and-yellow Carta map of Israel on the wall. It — like so much else about this film — is unmistakable. But, the middle of this map, from about Haifa in the north to about Kibbutz Yotvata in the south, is obscured by a precisely well-placed lampshade.

The lampshade obscured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the whole of the geography that has been at the center of so much contention since Israel began its occupation in 1967. A pre-1967 map would have depicted the State of Israel with the Green Line as its boundary, and with Gaza as part of Egypt and the West Bank as part of Jordan. The scene, which cuts back and forth between the characters in conversation, shows the map a whole bunch of times, and each time, there is the lampshade.

The lampshade is the Coen Brothers’ version of the blurring technology that covers other, similarly contentious… umm… parts when they appear on television. In this case the issue isn’t modesty — it’s politics. It’s history. It’s memory. It’s the ongoing reluctance of much of American Jewry to acknowledge the complicated history of the State of Israel, and the realities of historically contingent and shifting borders. Frankly, it’s a cop out that reveals that even the most scrupulous attention to historical detail will always reveal its present-orientation.

Instead of holding fast to their delicate, exquisite reconstruction of 1960s Jewish life, the Coen Brothers cave in to the demands and fears of early 21st century.

Even the past still has a present.

No Time for the Flu

When I was a kid and I got the flu it meant days home in bed.  I’ll try not to glamorize this, but I do recall some fairly blissful mornings with a pile of Kleenex, cough drops (remember Ludens—they used to taste just like candy!), and the TV all to myself.  I’m sure this wasn’t convenient for my mom who was a single parent, but we didn’t have flu vaccine so there wasn’t any way else to manage.  We just did.

I just took the girls to get their vaccines, and while I was waiting in the long line of other similarly haggard looking parents doing the same I had to wonder—when did we get so desperate to keep our kids from getting sick, and why?  Is it that the flu is worse now than it was when I was a kid?  h1n1 aside, I don’t think so.  More likely, we just don’t have time these days for our kids to get the flu. It’s ok if we get the flu because we can straggle into work in various stages of consciousness and, if it gets that bad we can always stay home and check emails from bed.  But when the kids get sick you can’t work.  Well, you can, but it’s hard.  Plus you look like a really crappy parent when you’re over on the computer while your kid moans from the other room.  Perhaps this is what makes flu season so scary and the flu vaccine such a balm.  We live lives without any back up—a sick kid can’t go to school and there isn’t any other childcare available to many of us.  We can’t take the time off work because in the age of the iphone, work is everywhere all the time.   A sick kid equals workplace disaster.  Preventing illness allows us to keep living lives that have little room for error, man-made or biological.

When the nurse gave the girls their post-vaccine pep talk about how they wouldn’t get sick now and wasn’t that wonderful, I found I only half agreed.  Sure, I don’t want them to be sick.  But maybe they should be.

My mother had polio, so I have to be careful not to suggest that the good old days were when people got sick.  Still, I think there is a point to getting “everyday” sick; illness is part of the natural rhythm of things.  And again, I’m not talking about h1n1.   I wonder what’s in store for this generation of kids taught in classrooms with Costco sized hand sanitizer bottles who learn group songs about the virtues of hand washing.  Will they be susceptible to superillnesses because of limited immune experiences?  Will they be unempathetic to those who are ill or disabled?  Will they equate the good life with bodies and lives consistently under their control?

It all makes me long for that box of Ludens, and a day on the couch.

Post-Cold War Kids

November 9th marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a momentous event that signified the end of the Cold War.  I was a sophomore in college when the wall fell.  Today’s sophomores in college were not yet born.  I sometimes forget that a whole generation has now grown up in the United States with essentially no personal memory of the Cold War.  What they know of that forty-year geopolitical conflict they have learned in history class, or heard from parents and grandparents, or taken from popular culture.

When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the Cold War was a prominent backdrop to my life.  It was a continual presence in my pre-teen and teen imagination and in the broader culture of the time.  I worried about nuclear holocaust.  I was freaked out by the television movie The Day After.  The Soviet boxer Ivan Drago intimidated me in Rocky IV.  The opening scene in Red Dawn, in which invading Russians and Cubans parachute into a schoolyard and open fire on teachers and students, really unnerved me.  I ardently agreed with Sting when he sang, “I hope the Russians love their children, too.”  I wrote poems and songs about atomic war, radioactive fallout, and post-apocalyptic nuclear mutants.  I was actually very concerned about the mutants and what I would do about them if I survived an atomic attack.    

I wonder what the Cold War means today for Americans who did not grow up with it.  Our political discourse is rife with Cold War references, even if they are sometimes (okay, oftentimes) incorrectly used: President Obama is a communist, or a socialist, or a Manchurian candidate; health care reform will bring back gulags or make the U.S. like Cuba; communist symbols can supposedly be found on prominent Manhattan buildings (or so claimed Glenn Beck, telling FOX news viewers he found images of a hammer and sickle in Rockefeller Center).  Contemporary American culture is similarly throwing us back to the Cold War era: take for example the TV show Mad Men, the newest Indiana Jones movie, the documentary Virtual JFK (which imagines what might have happened in Vietnam if Kennedy had lived), and the recently published book The Hawk and the Dove, a dual biography of Paul Nitze and George Kennan.  There’s even a popular indie rock band from Fullerton called Cold War Kids.  And in 2010, Hollywood will release a remake of Red Dawn; in this version, teenagers will fight an invading force of Chinese and Russian soldiers.

So for the post-Cold War generation, that historical era lives on in partisan political name-calling and in popular culture.  Still, it’s strange for me to think that the Cold War is already becoming the stuff of popular memory.  For me, it will always be linked inextricably to my childhood, and especially to my childhood fears about how the world might end.  My college students today tell me that they don’t even worry about nuclear war.  Instead, they fear the world will end as a result of global warming or an infectious disease outbreak.  Or some believe that it won’t end at all. Perhaps that’s progress.

Reading the Twi-Hards

The other day when I was getting a haircut, my 30-something female stylist told me that she had been reading Twilight, the bestselling novel about teenage romance between Bella the human and Edward the vampire.  My hairstylist and I talked about the book for a while (which I have not read), and then she described the evening when she first watched the film version (which I have seen) at home on DVD.  She told me that at the end of the film she was in tears, and she inexplicably cried out to her husband, who was working on his computer in the next room, “Why can’t you love me like that?” 

Last spring, an undergraduate student in my popular culture class told a similar story.  A friend of hers had broken up with a boyfriend because the love she had with the boyfriend did not approximate the love that Bella and Edward shared.  And that was the kind of love that the young woman wanted. 

When I share these stories with friends, their responses always range from disbelief to disgust.  No one coos, “Ah, how sweet.”  Even the hairstylist told me she was embarrassed by her behavior.  Why do fan stories like these make us so uncomfortable?  I’ll offer two perspectives, one cultural and the other historical, that may help us think about this question.  

One of the negative stereotypes we have of fans of any cultural phenomenon is that their behavior potentially verges on fanaticism.  Being a fan is okay, but being a fanatic is not.  Showing loyalty to a professional football team by wearing a jersey on game day is a reasonable way to express fandom.  Maintaining a candlelit shrine to the quarterback in one’s living room is excessive.  Why?  As a culture, we feel the need to differentiate between acceptable and extreme fan behavior, even if we don’t necessarily agree on what exactly the demarcation is.  Moreover, we often believe that our own personal expressions of fandom are completely reasonable; it is always others who are fanatical.  As a 39-year-old fan of Star Wars, I have a Mr. Potato Head Darth Vader on my desk, and I talk like Yoda sometimes with my friends, but that’s normal.  Someone shouting out, “Why can’t you love me like Edward loves Bella?”—well, that’s downright bizarre.       

There is also a long history in the United States of women’s reading habits being subjected to public scrutiny and harsh judgment.  Over 200 years ago, for instance, (male) commentators warned about the impact of fiction reading on the female sensibility.  Consider this passage from “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity” (1797): “The poor deluded female imbibes erroneous principles [from novels], and from thence pursues a flagrantly vicious line of conduct.”  Or this admonition from a 1792 tract: “Novels not only pollute the imaginations of young women, but likewise give them false ideas of life, which too often make them act improperly.”  When we tut tut the Twilight fans, we actually evoke a long standing, biased discourse about gender, leisure, and the cultural construction of romance in America.     

I believe it’s important to take fandom seriously, even if it makes us uncomfortable.  Fandom is one way that everyday people express their sense of identity, community, and cultural participation.  Studying fandom can also reveal our societal biases about “good and bad” recreation, or “right and wrong” expressions of cultural enthusiasm.