Reflecting on articles from March 29th

Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem
An interesting diversion from a 1971 dissertation I am reading for research. Funny to see who is following who, but hard to take what they say with any degree of seriousness. When has Martha Stewart ever said anything without a high degree of self-awareness? Airing our thoughts with an added degree of “public permanence” produces a need I think, conscious or not, to plan what we say. I wonder how many “tweets” are totally spontaneous, as they might be if we were simply expressing them out loud.

Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City
First, I am conflicted about small town vs. city life and frankly, wouldn’t want to be without either. Occasionally, Noam Cohen seems to advocate the latter as a model for life as well as a metaphor for Wikipedia.

I find Wikipedia to be a great resource. What I particularly like is the way it can take one in so many different directions. For example, I looked up New York-based composer Nico Muhly and, depending on why I was looking at Nico Muhly, could move onto the film “The Reader”, Bjork, The Juilliard School, playwright Craig Lucas, the rock band “Grizzly Bear”, Philip Glass, Vermont, and links to articles touting him as a prodigy or not a prodigy. The links are in many ways the best part. One comes away with a much broader view of the subject than if you simply read the entry. One can see Nico through his publisher’s page, an official website, his myspace page, articles and reviews from “The New Yorker”, “The Guardian”, “Smithsonian Magazine”, and “The Advocate.”

I don’t advocate Wikipedia as a source for research any more than I would have advocated the Encyclopedia Britannica. I do however find it a great starting point and a much richer portal into a subject than any encyclopedia before, online or hard copy.


Feeling Too Down To Rise Up
I have often wondered over the lack of rage in the last five or so years, as in issue after issue, our government has not only failed us, but been seemingly criminal in doing so. Has technology contributed to this? You certainly see a high degree of anger in the blog world and in comments made to editorials and on news sites. Go to the Daily Kos and Rush Limbaugh’s site and you will see anger and rage in equal measure. Does the ability to unload online make it less imperative for one to take it to the streets? People certainly say some of the most “uncivil” things online and I am not at all sure they would say them publicly, without the shield of an alias.

Disconnectedness – I am concerned with the effect of people regularly “tuning out” to the environment around them. I remember John Cage’s experiments with recording ambient noise in neighborhoods and playing it back for audiences. Those who “got it” came to realize the richness of everyday sounds as well as the annoyances. Perhaps our need to escape has resulted in a need to be disconnected from the everyday. For our students, it may be a need to escape from school. Even while trapped inside from 8-3, they use their mp3 players and phones to take themselves momentarily away from the dullness of classroom routine. The closest equivalent from my time would be daydreaming. We had walkmans and boom boxes, though boom boxes were a much more public statement, something one doesn’t hear much of today.



Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?
Wow, much to cover here, but I’ll give some of it a shot. First to the specific points raised by Alyson in posting these articles.

I am flying south this afternoon, (I’m off school this week), so I won’t be able to be present for the April 7th online meeting, but I wanted to address the issue of the drama teacher. I am sure he thought, with limited understanding of what was available, that this was a good idea. From my perspective however, he had to feel at least some ethical discomfort in “friending” his students. One of the reasons I have been hesitant to use Facebook in a broader fashion, is that I don’t want to be able to access my students’ pages and I don’t want them seeing mine. I am in the 20% group that makes full use of privacy settings. The last thing I want are pockets of band kids asking to be my friend. I had one student, a senior, ask about it at school, and I replied, “Not until you are out of college”. I’m assuming he will forget by then. Whether as a parent or teacher, I don’t want to be “virtually” hanging around my students’ socializing outside of class. If information comes my way that involves the health and welfare of students, then I’ll report it, but they are entitled to socialize online and off with some degree of privacy. There is a fascinating Frontline documentary, “Growning Up Online”, that does a good job discussing what is public and private online between adults and young people.

My solution to the drama teacher, students, and their parents would be a Wikispace or some kind of classroom blog. As noted in my previous entry, our school’s website is equipped with blogging features within a class or activity. Contributions are limited to members who must log in to post, but posts are viewable by anyone visiting the site. Students are assigned an alias to protect privacy, though I can identify them by rolling the mouse over their alias. Parents are looking for safety, students for privacy, and teachers (at least this one) for a way to interact with students over class topics in a secure “online” educational environment. I want it to reflect features of social networking sites and blogs, to be user-friendly, but to be wholly separate from the social networking part of their lives that Facebook represents. Now if only my school would give students their login information!

Considering the report of the teacher and Danish Prime Minister, well, Denmark is pretty small compared to the US, so let’s take it to a smaller scale. Would it be possible for a teacher in NYC to get Mayor Mike, James Levine, Ethan Hawke, or Derek Jeeter to come and address a class? I wouldn’t rule it out, but we do have a number of barriers, virtual and real between celebrities/politicians and “regular folk”. Whether technology is something that can bridge the gap is still being tested. It is certainly easier to try and friend one of these people or respond to their blog, than to try to get into their apartment building or office and knock on the door.

I would like to address the privacy issue and Facebook’s terms of service. It was noted in the article that Facebook was changing these terms to protect themselves from lawsuits and that other sites had similar terms. Still, we need to continue the conversation of personal information being public or private, and who owns this information, particularly as we produce a generation that has a very different mindset with regard to making the private public. I know that were I to use Facebook more, I would be sensitive about what I put on my page, knowing Facebook may exert ownership rights somewhere down the road. As with anything that is still being hashed out, I do think the public will find a balance between the public and private. Some of this will come from the lessons learned from others, as with the gate chief who lost his job.

What becomes frustrating is that many of these emerging “service industries” are built on the backs of “free labor”, users who help make the decisions as to what works and what doesn’t. Then as the “service” becomes a “corporation”, users begin to feel they are losing their voice, representation if you will, and they may look to other venues. Several years ago, myspace was dominant among my students for social networking, based on an “unscientific” survey of my 120 band members. Now virtually all of them use Facebook. Facebook may have many years ahead of it, but keeping the customer happy is a tried and true maxim they should never get too big to ignore.