Polarization has eaten our brains.

That’s the thesis of the excellent first installment of Zeynep Tufekci’s projected three-part series called “The Misinformation Trifecta.” Here’s how part one begins:

“There’s been a lot of focus on misinformation over there—often focusing on the outright COVID denialism. Indeed some of that misinformation has been outright deliberate  falsehoods and lies. Some of it—the polarization around masks or the obsession with hydroxychloroquine—is complicated by events early in the pandemic. Some of it, like claims around vaccines changing your DNA or the wild rumors around 5G chips, are clearly outright false, though the former is also complicated (as it is related to the furor around genetically-modified foods as well).

“But then there is the misinformation over here which is also quite persistent and also wildly wrong. This misinformation has its own cast of characters, ranging from the outright grifters to the misleading alarmists to, yes, large swaths of respectable opinion leaders and even officials spreading falsehoods. A few days ago, I noticed an article that seemed to hit the trifecta, both content-wise and visually (a no less important form of misinformation).

“What’s the trifecta here? It’s polarization (eating our brains), bad science (causing terrible policies) and puritanism and moralizing (masquerading as public health).”

“Bad science (causing terrible policies) and puritanism and moralizing (masquerading as public health)” will be the next installments, Tufekci promises.  I eagerly look forward to those essays. And yes, Tufekci makes it clear that she’s not advocating any kind of “false equivalence”:

“some falsehoods are worse than others, and at least in the United States, the damage done by the political parties to fighting the pandemic is clearly not equal. But it also seems important to understand how, and why, misinformation, bad science and policy and terrible attitudes are not just a problem over there.”

The entire essay is essential reading, and I’m grateful for Dr. Tufekci’s work, here and elsewhere.

I wonder if Tufekci might also consider what I believe to be a potential fourth candidate for her list: Pundit-Trolls (masquerading as journalists). For example, look at this advice from “Sifted,” a technology “opinion site”‘ run by Financial Times:

Here’s what we’re looking for. A punchy opinion.

We like starting conversations. There’s nothing better than a somewhat controversial or unusual point of view to get people talking about a subject.

So, don’t pitch us an idea about why it’s a good idea to talk to your customers early on (everyone knows that!) Pitch us an idea about why customers are stupid and should be ignored at all costs. That sounds much more intriguing.

I’m not so sure. Hyperbole and hot takes may attract rubberneckers, motivate clicks, generate more hyperbole and more hot takes, and feed the hot spew that one encounters routinely via “social media” (a tag almost comically useless by now). But do they start conversations? Is the answer to banal pieties like “it’s a good idea to talk to your customers early on” only a “somewhat controversial or unusual point of view” like “customers are stupid and should be ignored at all costs”? Really?

I think about “interrogation” and “pushback” as metaphors that foreground combat and coercion, compared to metaphors like “give-and-take.” When I hear “punchy,” I think “duck” or “swing back” or “give as good as I get.” I do not find myself intrigued.

Just as with the virologist in the New Yorker article, and the “neglect of social promotion” the 2014 New York Times internal strategy report warned about, the idea seems to be “grab them by the amygdala.” Frontal lobe engagement is just too slow, and unpredictable.   In this respect, “Sifted” is a misnomer. “Punched” or “pinched” or “provoked” or “outraged” might be more apt. I sure don’t think conversations get started this way. More like the “conversations” in an episode of the old Jerry Springer show.

But this isn’t a problem with “Sifted” alone. They at least have the cover of punditry, the land of angles and takes and provocations. Take a look at the headlines and taglines in The New York Times or The Washington Post on any given day. (The mobile version of the Post has particularly “punchy” taglines.) Think about how they engage your attention. Make a list, and rate them on a “hot take” scale. (I didn’t even know what a hot take was until my students started a “hot take” thread in one of my class discussion forums. At least the definition here was honest and funny: “Hi, I need a place to let all of my really pretentious, unpopular, and insufferable opinions into the ether.”)

A misinformation trifecta is bad enough. A Four Horsefolk of the Misinformation Apocalypse is worse. I know that “if it bleeds, it leads.” But cortisone as a business strategy masquerading as “engagement” is no way to empower a democracy.

Michel de Montaigne’s Essais begin with an address to the reader:

Au Lecteur

C’est icy un livre de bonne foy, lecteur.

To the Reader

This is a good faith book, reader.

Many translators render “bonne foy” as “honest.” Florio’s 1603 translation into English, the version Shakespeare likely worked from, translates the opening this way:

EADER, loe here a well-meaning Booke.

Nothing wrong with these translations, of course, but for my purposes, “good faith” with its legal and ethical connotations gets closer to the heart of the matter. Honesty can often but not always be demonstrated. I say there are five dollars there, and you could count the dollars, and there are five. Honestly. But of course the currency is backed by the full faith and credit of the government issuing it, and “full faith and credit” isn’t very far from “good faith” in its reliance on a willingness to undertake a calculated risk.

In Montaigne’s words, “good faith” is both a promise on the part of the speaker and a working assumption on the part of the reader, a working assumption that the promise aims to encourage. Good faith, then, is not so much a judgment as an ongoing commitment to relationship that results from a working assumption and works toward maintaining trust on both sides. “Process” doesn’t really get at what I mean here. “Marriage” might, or hospitality, or a willingness to know and be known even if the objects of knowledge are sometimes difficult or elusive. Difficult and elusive are one thing, but deliberately concealed is something else, especially if one hopes to gain some advantage thereby.

When I last taught the Early Modern English Literature survey at school, I decided to look at some Montaigne with my students. We spent a good deal of time on this first section, “To The Reader,” so we could explore the question of what it might mean to say a book is a “good faith book,” and likewise, what it might mean to believe a book when it says to you, “this is a good faith book, reader.”

I asked my students which of the books they had read along the way they would call “good faith books.” The question sent us into a lovely period of silent meditation. I think Montaigne would have been pleased. Or was pleased. After a few moments, students offered names of books they remembered from childhood, or books they had felt especially close to in some way–some of them books they had read in their high school and college classes, thankfully. Later, one of the most delightful students in that class did some digging to find other translations of Montaigne’s address to the reader, and came up with this pithy statement on the difference between “well-meaning” and “honest”: “Montaigne’s essay on lying makes me think that an honest promise by Montaigne to be well-meaning may very well be more honest than a well-meaning promise to be honest.” That student’s work was inspired, and thus inspired further thought on my part–a good faith exchange that’s a great delight in a sometimes frustrating vocation.

To entertain the prospect of welcome, of hospitality; to open oneself to voices that are not familiar, voices that speak of things that may be puzzling or repellent or just strange; to say, I will be here for this book, because I believe it is a good faith book, or because people I trust have told me it is a good faith book: these are the adventures of an education, the ways in which teachers open doors.

Today it can be harder to earn that trust than it was when I first began professing the study of English literature. Believing a statement like Montaigne’s can seem naive, or damaging to the cause of unmasking deception. Writers are complex. Because they are human, they are fallible, and do not always act in good faith, even when they say–or think–they do. Yet readerly hospitality is still possible, and is often extended, surprisingly so. And on that assumption of good faith, a conversation can begin. Education can commence. We can go up into the library tower, just as Montaigne did, and see a little farther than before.

Au Lecteur

C’est icy un blog de bonne foy, lecteur. 

I’ll take a short break from the “good faith” series to share a video featuring Rod Serling, creator and principal writer of The Twilight Zone, as he talks to a small group of students at Ithaca College in 1972.

I first saw these interviews at a friend’s house as he showed off (and rightfully so) his new boxed set of laserdiscs collecting all of the original Twilight Zone episodes. This would have been in the early 1990s, just as I was beginning my career as an English professor. I vividly recall my fascination with the way Serling spoke to these students, the care he took to listen to them with intense attention, and his refusal either to talk over them or to pretend he was just one of them. The seminars are teacher-centered, not “student-centered,” because this teacher, and the center he helped to form in that room, was an example to all. And rightfully so.

Here’s one fascinating discussion, in which Serling takes care to disagree with one student but in a very cordial manner, and then takes equal care to engage the one woman in the room by highlighting her very important question. I felt such strength and warmth and true intellectual leadership emanating from Serling in this environment. I said to myself, “I want to teach like that.” And I still do.

To continue some of the thoughts from yesterday:

Zeynep Tufekci has been working nonstop–I think she must not sleep more than two hours a night–on the complexities arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the problems of interpreting data and, most importantly for this discussion, what she terms the metaepistemological problem of how we talk about, and ask questions about, the very idea of evaluating knowledge.

For Tufecki, metaepistemology involves among other things the “mundane skill” of “reading between the lines.” She first expounds on this skill in an essay called “Lessons from a Pandemic Anniversary,” in which she identifies three working principles (one could also call these “heuristics”) for evaluating not so much the content of specific knowledge as tell-tale signs about that knowledge, a kind of metaepistemological “tag” or “tell,” that will help you understand the truth about the facts presented. You’ll need to read the essay to make sense of these items. Here I’ll just list them.

• The  Principle of “You Can’t Finesse the Steep Part of an Exponential” (in other words, if the smoke is dense and the temperature is climbing quickly the fires are likely raging no matter what explanation is given)
• The “Principle of Always Pay Attention to Costly Action” (in other words, watch where resources are expended instead of listening to what people say about motives, plans, etc. I ran into this principle in senior leadership, where the saying was “if you want to see a university’s real strategic plan, don’t look at the plan, look at the budget”)
• The Criterion of Embarrassment, which Tufekci calls “something historians use all the time … the idea that something that embarrasses or puts the speaker in a difficult position is more likely to be true.”

I encourage you to follow the link to the “criterion of embarrassment,” as you’ll learn how important this criterion has been to New Testament research–which is not to say that by itself the criterion is always reliable. Indeed, part of the problem with the criterion of embarrassment is that it can lead to the sometimes useful, sometimes treacherous heuristic that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence,” which is essentially an irrefutable argument.

This problem in particular appears in Tufekci’s follow-up essay, “Critical Thinking Isn’t Just A Process“:

One of the things I noticed throughout the past year has been that a lot of my friends who had grown up in authoritarian or poor countries had a much easier time adjusting to our new pandemic reality. My childhood was intermittently full of shortages of various things. We developed a corresponding reflex for stocking up on things when they were available, anticipating what might be gone soon. That was quite useful for the pandemic. So was trying to read between the lines of official statements—what was said and what was not, who was sitting with whom on the TV, and evaluating what the rumor networks brought in. It turns out those are really useful skills when authorities are lying at all levels.

A principle that’s often useful in these situations is that most deliberate misinformation from authorities—especially in places that are mid-range in terms of institutional trust and strict licensing—comes from omission, not saying the truth, rather than outright lying. That offers a way to get at the truth by trying to detect a picture, and looking at the parts that have been obscured, to make out the actual shape.

Notice that “reading between the lines” really means “reading the real lines and ignoring the things the liars are calling the lines.” I say this because many of my students believe that literary analysis is all about reading between the lines, when it’s truly all about reading the lines–that is, attending to the words, their order, the arrangement of chapters and lines and rhymes and voices, etc. In other words, “reading between the lines” is a process of substitution, while what I want my students to do is to become skilled at detecting implied or symbolic meanings. (But I digress.)

In the end, it seems to me, Tufekci’s argument in “Critical Thinking Isn’t Just A Process” derives from a prior assumption, based on experience, that “authorities are lying at all levels.” This assumption is also a conclusion, and one that drives interpretive strategies for finding out what’s really true. But by now it’s clear that this survival strategy, born of hard experience and, from what I can tell, eminently justified, is also at the heart of conspiracy theories and, even less dramatically, the habit of “critique” and corrosive skepticism that one can routinely find in my profession. (Rita Felski and Lisa Ruddick have done very important work in this area. Ruddick’s “When Nothing Is Cool” has been a touchstone for me in this regard.)

Tufekci’s conclusion is sobering indeed, both as a salutary warning and, in its shadow, a strategy whose guardrails may not hold:

There is often talk of teaching people “critical thinking” thinking skills, and that’s certainly something worth doing. A mistake, though, is to think that such critical thinking skills are independent of knowledge: that there is a recipe, or a way of interrogating conclusions, that can turn into “critical thinking.” In reality, the process by itself isn’t where the magic happens.

These do not seem complicated skills in some sense—and especially not in retrospect, once the actual answer is known. But they require more than parsing of words. The institutional operation, and the status and psychological incentives of the people, matter greatly to discerning the truth. Like most knowledge, this is more than “word games.” It is a mixture of sociology and psychology—if we are putting them into fields—but also involve probability: what’s the most likely outcome? What types of evidence would help tip the balance in which direction? How do these institutions operate? What are the personal and professional incentives of this particular person? And so on.

Critical thinking is not just formulas to be taught but knowledge and experience to be acquired and tested and re-examined, along with habits and skills that can be demonstrated and practiced. But there is no separating the “process” from the “substance”.

I am not sure any community can survive the relentless practice of inquiring cui bono? about every single expert or authority. I cannot imagine reading a full financial disclosure of every physician I consult, though I can at the same time imagine a duty to inform that would compel the physician to disclose any clear conflicts of interest–while also raising the question of whether the clear conflicts are as dangerous as those that seem less defined and less of a problem. The question of how to judge a conflict of interest is itself not as straightforward in every case as it might seem. Some apparent edge cases may determine very unhappy outcomes.

But all of that said, I do think that “knowledge and experience … acquired and tested and re-examined, along with habits and skills that can be demonstrated and practiced” sound more like wisdom than simple “competency,” and point to a cycle of learning and thinking and learning and thinking that sound very much like the practices a liberal arts education seeks to model and encourage. It also does not sound like “critique” or “skepticism,” but a positive commitment to hope and trust that has to be renewed and re-asserted over a lifetime. That is to say, an enlightened, wise approach to assuming good faith where such assumptions are warranted, or even where such assumptions are necessary whether or not one can judge their warrant.

Which brings me to Montaigne and Bacon–but that’s for the next part.

Good Faith by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

I’ve been wanting to explore this topic for a few years now, and I need to start somewhere, but I don’t have the bandwidth just now to do more than juxtapose a few things.

The overarching problem sometimes goes by the need for media literacy, or news literacy, or (alas) “critical thinking,” the latter a phrase I always struggled with and now feel little more than exasperation over. What’s wanted, I think, is for people

• to be able to reason well,
• to ask pertinent questions,
• to be skeptical when that’s warranted and trusting when that’s warranted (because communities are ultimately based on elements of trust),
• to be self-aware enough to practice a certain kind of mindful self-correction at all times, if only at a low level.

The list is not exhaustive. (I warned you about my bandwidth.)

It’s worth noting that every single one of the items in the non-exhaustive list above is the site of not inconsiderable controversy. “Reasoning well” has been problematized on grounds of “reasoning” and criteria for evaluating “well.” What makes a question “pertinent” and who’s to say? (“Who’s to say?” is a frequently combative way of raising the problem of evaluation.) When is skepticism warranted and when is trust warranted? (See Othello, to cite one example, for a fascinating case study.) And by what magic properties are we able to transcend our own biases (or cultural contexts, or whatever one terms the determinisms) to be “self-correcting”?

I myself do not believe it’s turtles all the way down, but I’ve met people who’ve argued the opposite and seem unaware that turtles all the way down is a conversation-stopper, not a reasoned argument about axioms in reason.

And media literacy? Some essential reading here from danah boyd.

It’s one thing to talk about interrogating assumptions when a person can keep emotional distance from the object of study. It’s an entirely different thing to talk about these issues when the very act of asking questions is what’s being weaponized. This isn’t historical propaganda distributed through mass media. Or an exercise in understanding state power. This is about making sense of an information landscape where the very tools that people use to make sense of the world around them have been strategically perverted by other people who believe themselves to be resisting the same powerful actors that we normally seek to critique.

True story: I once argued with a colleague for an hour about the question of truth. He was a sort of everything-is-provisional, who’s-to-say, truth-claims-are-dangerous kind of arguer, so I wasn’t making any headway until it occurred to me to ask if he thought one could tell lies about the Holocaust. He thought a moment, and said yes, of course. To which I replied, then by extension it must be possible to tell truths about the Holocaust.

The point here is that today we seem to be able to problematize everything, often in a vigorous effort to stay on the run from dogmatic thinking (usually, but not always a good thing), and thus the very idea of combatting disinformation, let alone misinformation, becomes itself weirdly weaponized, as I saw over and over again with a small set of former high-school classmates during the prior administration.

So step-by-step methods such as SIFT seem to me to presuppose widely shared standards of reasoned approaches to informing oneself about the world, and I’m not sure that presupposition has ever been valid. I’m certain it’s not now. And I’m certain that some set of assumed truths must precede the operation of reason–not that that idea is original with me. (See danah boyd, above.)

At the same time, part of the operation of reason is to demonstrate limits to the operation of reason, including but not limited to the lack of conclusive evidence. This I take it is a sign of humility and evidence of good faith, as Jon Udell writes:

Here’s evidence that acknowledgement of uncertainty really is a powerful signal of credibility. Maybe machines will be able to detect it and label it; maybe those labels will matter to people. Meanwhile, it’s something people can detect and do care about. Teaching students to value sources that acknowledge uncertainty, and discount ones that don’t, ought to be part of any strategy to improve news literacy.

Part of this idea is the adage that “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” where too-good-to-be-true means “rest your weary head because there’s one answer and you have it.” (But what an interesting saying: “too good to be true”–as if anything more than a little bit of okay is likely hollow at the core.)

Another part, though, lines up nicely with the Walker Percy quotation I included in a post several days ago:

The technician and the sophomore who loves his textbooks are always offended by the genuine research man because the latter is usually a little vague and always humble before the thing; he doesn’t have much use for the equipment or the jargon. Whereas the technician is never vague and never humble before the thing; he holds the thing disposed of by the principle, the formula, the textbook outline; and he thinks a great deal of equipment and jargon.

(My earlier note about Percy’s androcentric language applies here as well.)

It doesn’t take long, though, to see that acknowledging uncertainty can lead to cascades of turtles, especially where there are highly specific outcomes that are easily tracked and, in many cases, readily verified (did they live or die? did I pass or fail? did it happen or not?). Too much acknowledgement of uncertainty begins to feel like evasion, as our epidemiologists have found to their sorrow (and ours).

Then come the virologists who seem to make all the above completely beside the point, as they engage, like Milton’s Belial, with “words clothed in reason’s garb.” This 2015 New Yorker article is essential and difficult reading:

On this occasion, I was the only person listening to his speech, but he spoke in a distant and deliberate tone, using studied pauses and facial expressions, as if I were a video camera’s lens. When he got to the part about virality being a superpower—“I realized that if you could make ideas go viral, you could tip elections, start movements, revolutionize industries”—I asked whether that was really true.

“Can you rephrase your question in a more concrete way?” he said.

I mentioned “Kony 2012,” a thirty-minute film about the Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony. It has been viewed on YouTube more than a hundred million times, but it did not achieve its ultimate goal: Kony remains at large, as does his militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army.

“To be honest, I didn’t follow too closely after the whole thing died down,” Spartz said. “Even though I’m one of the most avid readers I know, I don’t usually read straight news. It’s conveyed in a very boring way, and you tend to see the same patterns repeated again and again.”

He went on, “If I were running a more hard-news-oriented media company and I wanted to inform people about Uganda, first, I would look it up and find out exactly what’s going on there. Then I would find a few really poignant images or story lines, ones that create a lot of resonant emotion, and I would make those into a short video—under three minutes—with clear, simple words and statistics. Short, declarative sentences. And at the end I’d give people something they can do, something to feel hopeful about.”

This apparently admirable rhetorical advice, the kind of thing one might encounter in a freshman composition class, turns out to be in the service of clickbait, and the narrative of “The Virologist” finds its climax in the infamous New York Times report on how to stay afloat (successful, impactful, important, profitable, relevant, relatable, etc.) in the digital age. You may recall that the report caused a bit of a stir at the time.

In March, a working group at the Times presented an internal report to the paper’s top editors. A few weeks later, the report was leaked, and BuzzFeed published it. The first sentence was “The New York Times is winning at journalism.” However, it warned, “we are falling behind in a second critical area: the art and science of getting our journalism to readers.” Virality, in other words. The report’s authors argued that sharing and promotion should not be seen as a “chore”; on the contrary, “watching a year-old story go viral on social” could be “truly exciting.”

Old-media loyalists were troubled by some of the report’s recommendations. The metaphorical “wall” separating editorial staff and business staff, long considered an axiom of journalistic ethics, was cautiously called into question. Yet traditionalists might not have recognized how good they had it. The report repeatedly distinguished the Times’ core mission—“winning at journalism”—from more easily quantifiable goals, such as winning at page views. In our data-obsessed moment, it is subversive to assert that the value of a product is not reducible to its salability.

When I e-mailed Spartz to ask about the report, he said that he hadn’t heard of it. After skimming it, he wrote that it seemed like too little too late: “Nothing struck me as being particularly eye-opening, just confirmed my suspicions about how far they are behind the . . . Times. (Sorry.)”

The report acknowledged a “tension between quality control and expanded digital capabilities.” Spartz experiences no such tension, because he does not distinguish between quality and virality. He uses “effective,” “successful,” and “good” interchangeably. At one point, he told me, “The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that’s fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”

Spartz does not call what he makes journalism, even if he employs a few journalists, and he does not erect barriers between his product and his means of promoting it. Asked to name the most beautiful prose he had read, he said, “A beautiful book? I don’t even know what that means. Impactful, sure.”

Now you can see that I was unfair when I compared the virologists to Belial. Their words are not clothed in reason’s garb. Their words are reasonable. They simply start from a vastly different set of assumptions about what constitutes human flourishing, what is the common good, and how then must we live.

One last item in the series is Wikipedia’s dicta that editors should “assume good faith” and strive to write from a “neutral point of view.”

Assuming good faith (AGF) is a fundamental principle on Wikipedia. It is the assumption that editors’ edits and comments are made in good faith. Most people try to help the project, not hurt it. If this were untrue, a project like Wikipedia would be doomed from the beginning. This guideline does not require that editors continue to assume good faith in the presence of obvious evidence to the contrary (e.g. vandalism). Assuming good faith does not prohibit discussion and criticism. Rather, editors should not attribute the actions being criticized to malice unless there is specific evidence of such.

All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic….

NPOV is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia and of other Wikimedia projects. It is also one of Wikipedia’s three core content policies; the other two are “Verifiability” and “No original research“. These policies jointly determine the type and quality of material that is acceptable in Wikipedia articles, and, because they work in harmony, they should not be interpreted in isolation from one another. Editors are strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with all three.

This policy is non-negotiable, and the principles upon which it is based cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, nor by editor consensus.

Both of those principles have been widely contested, even mocked–I got in a brief but intense Twitter back-and-forth on the NPOV principle at the 2019 WikiNorthAmerica conference–and both are, I think, essentially related to the problems and problematizings I’ve sketched out above. I also believe that both principles are vital to the success of any human endeavor, and never more bewilderingly elusive in a hall-of-mirrors way than now.

Lest you think I have become completely untethered, or am perhaps bouncing on every carapace on a joyride down that lovely series of turtles, I should say that I encounter and wrestle with each of the items above on a daily basis in my teaching, my research, and my writing. I understand that may be more the case for folks who work in the humanities, as I do, than in the physical sciences. But that’s not an answer to any of these questions.

I have some additional thoughts but that’s the bandwidth for now. All I can say in my own defense is that I go through these items, these questions, because I am trying to keep my thinking straight, or as straight as possible. If I end up sneaking in a version of an assumption I am apparently inquiring about, I would like to be able to detect it, admit it, and ameliorate the situation enough to take another step or two. I am not confident I can do that, but I am confident that I must try, and I am confident that I must believe it is possible to do so lest the effort be anything other than absurd.

I also find it all kind of fascinating, and every now and then I’m in a conversation that seems to me, for at least a while, to be built out of good faith and a scrupulous attention to the conditions and progress of the argument. But then someone says “and you know, higher education is a business,” and I drown.

Are we having fun yet?

I think back to Maundy Thursday 2015, April 2, when Alice and I were visiting daughter Jenny during her semester abroad in Valencia. We scheduled a road trip to Granada to see the Alhambra, and we were in Granada during Semana Santa, the Spanish observance of the Christian time called Holy Week. Alice and Jenny are the Spain experts in our family, so they knew what was happening, but we were all pretty much overwhelmed by the parade that night.

Semana Santa, Granada 2015. Photo CC BY-SA-NC by Gardner Campbell

Today Alice and I celebrated Palm Sunday by watching the service at St. Stephens Episcopal, our home church. As on every Sunday, it was a lovely service. And as usual, I found I couldn’t sing more than a verse or two of any hymn without a lump in my throat.

Holy Week is the last week of Lent. It begins and ends in triumph, with anger and love and terror and betrayal and solemn vows of remembrance in between.

For all who observe this time, a blessed Holy Week to you.

How do I evaluate student analytical work?

What follows is what I told my students as I discussed the midterm assignment of analyzing a clip from Citizen Kane. I’m looking for these things, and asking these questions. I note that the questions are student-facing and address students in the second person, instead of (for example) “what did the student see?”

1. ATTENTION: What do you see?
2. PRECISION: How do you use the specific vocabulary and concepts of cinema to
   describe what you see?
3. INSIGHT: Why does your observation matter? What’s being communicated or
   suggested by the things you’ve seen and described?

What does Dr. C. want? What is he looking for?

Attention, precision, and insight.

Easier said than done, certainly, but that’s true of most worthy attempts. And the saying may help the doing–part of the teacher’s job, I think.

This is standard stuff, and the categories and questions reflect my current articulation of the standard stuff. That said, I wish someone had said this to me in something like this way when I was coming along. By the time I got to college I had more or less figured it out, and to be honest, I found that when I was really passionate about my topic I would almost certainly do exactly this. Yet it would have been good, even at that, to be more intentional about the categories and questions, and it might have saved me a few awkward, disengaged, or flailing papers.

Looking over my students’ analyses, I found insight to be the rarest accomplishment. I expected that, because it takes practice to get to that level, and we’re only halfway through the term (or we were when the exam was given). What’s more of a concern for me at this point is the work that reflects very poor attention. The clip was about two and a half minutes long, so it’s not the span of attention that seems to be the problem. Rather, it seems more like the practice of patient, focused, even ferocious attention that is unfamiliar or somehow thwarted, or even refused, in some instances.

It’s interesting to think about the difference between casually experiencing a stream of stimuli and concentrating on a stream of stimuli in an effort to find patterns and make meaning. The latter effort also requires some faith that the ardors of concentration will reveal patterns and meanings that are really there, and that the effort is not just performative because every interpretation is valid and it’s all subjective anyway etc.

Of course subjectivity can be shared, inquired into, self-corrected, improved in judgment, and so forth. Subjectivity and extreme relativism are not the same. But I wonder, often, if there’s some way to discuss such matters with greater sophistication earlier in my students’ education. Many attitudes ranging from cynicism to indifference to outright disbelief and hostility (sometimes in the guise of a kind of critical libertarianism) have already been cultivated before I see them.

Nevertheless, it’s often still possible to recognize, encourage, and share attention, precision, and insight. Given the difficulties of life in 2021, perhaps the miracle is that I see attention, precision, and insight as often as I do. But it is a challenge, and saddening, to see the work that can’t (or won’t?) attend precisely or with insight to a focal point of shared attention–especially because the explanation or commentary I offer will in many cases (not all) suffer the same fate as the original object of analysis.

So I try to say the same sorts of things in as many different ways and at as many  surprising times as possible. Brains, hearts, spirits are so distinctive that it can be impossible to know what will catch or when it will sink in. Though it seems many years now since we started our course of study, in truth semesters are short. Teaching must be content, often, with the long term and much that may forever be invisible to the teacher. After all these years, I’m not quite used to that.

Photo CC BY-SA-NC by Gardner Campbell

A couple of days ago I saw a modest little item on “Memex 1.1,” John Naughton’s web home. As I’ve noted earlier in this Lenten season, I’ve begun reading blogs again as well as writing them, and Naughton’s blog was one of the very first I re-subscribed to. The little item was this notice:

Memoir of a recovering Utopian

I was invited to give a brief talk on March 16 at a (virtual) symposium on the history of UK computing from the 1950s to the 1990s organised by the Royal Society. The video is here if you’re interested. It’s short — just under 5 minutes. (It’d have been longer if I had a Nobel prize, I guess.)

When I saw the title, “Memoir of a Recovering Utopian,” I felt sick at heart. Here would be another lament by an early celebrant of the Internet’s and the Web’s potential who who tell us about his gnawing disillusionment, or perhaps even his sense of shame for ever having promoted a hopeful view of this global lightspeed telecommunications network. I don’t like to read these, for lots of reasons; certainly one of the most powerful reasons is that from time to time I feel pretty gnawed and ashamed myself. But only sometimes. As I say, I’m a teacher: with regard to human capacities and ingenuity, I’m committed to hope, no matter how I feel on any given day.

Today I finally felt strong (or numb) enough to watch the video. I was delighted, comforted, and encouraged that the title was misleading. Naughton is not a “recovering” Utopian the way folks are recovering addicts. I’m not entirely sure why he gave the video this title. Perhaps the “recovery” in this case is the recovery of utopianism. I like to think so. I offer in support of my reading the way the video ends. The internetwork is still here. The technical framework we need to build a better Web are here. It may still be possible to tear down the inimically walled gardens and use this gift hopefully and justly and not in thrall to late-stage data-mining market capitalism.

I offer only one friendly amendment to Naughton’s list of what we underestimated as the Web turned toward toxicity: not just the somnolence of governments, but in the main, the somnolence of higher education, too. Or perhaps something worse than sleepiness, in both cases.

Nevertheless, as Naughton so beautifully says, without the essential hopefulness that underlies utopianism, we’re done for.

I do believe we can create the evidence to support our hopefulness by continuing to work to build that better world.

I’ve followed Naughton’s work for nearly twenty years now. I am glad to see there is a light that never goes out. A candle in the window, still.

Since many roads lead back to The Who for me, I’ve been looking through some of my collection and re-reading things I hadn’t looked at for some time. In the “Director’s Cut” edition of Quadrophenia, I found this striking observation from Chairman Pete Townshend, and it made me think about parts of my approach to teaching online during pandemic time:

In 1971, as the chief songwriter for The Who, I faced a new problem: our audience apparently hoped for another rock-opera. No one else had picked up the system, not properly; quite a few people thought it was a rotten system in any case. I was already running with it, and I felt there was more mileage in it. After a lot of scrabbling around with various other ideas, I landed on the dystopian Lifehouse that gathered a lot of the futuristic ideas that had bee presented to me when I had been at art college. This failed as a rock-opera collection, but produced Who’s Next, an album of separate tracks that with ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, developed the rock-anthem trick we had stumbled  on almost by accident in the finale of Tommy. The high energy presentation of songs like this soon made it possible for us to perform with some intimacy to much larger audiences in the open air as a matter of regular occasion from this album onwards.

I’m always intrigued by the counterintuitive, especially when it seems to describe a hunch or intuition I have had and am puzzled by myself. (Yes, my intuition is often counterintuitive, which you must admit is a genuinely puzzling state of affairs. Or a colossal failure of understanding.) So I’m drawn to that idea that going toward a high energy presentation of a rock anthem helped The Who maintain a sense of intimacy when performing to larger audiences.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been experimenting with in my larger classes (N>100). Not sermons, not lectures even, but learning-anthems. A way of taking all of us out of ourselves, if only for a while, and thus creating an opening for thinking, re-thinking, and hopefully that sense of nearness and empathy that conveys the feeling of community. If the feeling is there, the thing itself may follow.

Maybe I am trying to design learning experiences that are anthemic.

I do not believe that critical thinking [sic] and anthemic learning experiences must be mutually exclusive. Like Milton, I think “the sober certainty of waking bliss” is both desirable and possible.

Listening to you, I get the music.

Sometimes I get carried away in a comment and the comment becomes a post-disguised-as-a-comment. Then the comment is due for a promotion, herewith conferred.

For context, see this post and this comment.

My idea for archiving the Great VCU Bike Race Book was to use the Internet Archive’s “Archive-It” service. Something is a lot better than nothing, and I’m really very very happy for those PDFs in VCU’s scholarly repository. But I always wanted the web “book” to be a preserved website that could be encountered and experienced just the way it was when we called it a wrap at the end of the project. I had at least one or two conversations with a very friendly and helpful fellow named Jefferson (no, not that one–and hey, he’s now the director) at the Archive-It offices and had actually gotten some price-and-service quotes when I was called to the Tower of London on a spring Friday morning and beheaded. (Here’s your head; what’s your hurry?) Like the Green Knight, I was able to pick up my head and walk away, but unlike the Green Knight, I was not enchanted–rather the opposite–in fact so downcast that I couldn’t even bear to think about the GVCUBRB in any focused way for years afterward. Even now it’s tough. But do-able.

Anyway, if Jimmy Ghaphery had not been so honorable as to say “I told you I’d do it, Gardner, so I am going to do it,” there’s just be scraps and your archive today. Jimmy told me to feel free to come in and supply anything that was missing or needed changing, but I never had the heart to do it. Still don’t, yet.

All of that said, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever tried to do, and a model that could be widely emulated but, so far as I know, has not been. And as the true saying goes, I had an astonishingly talented and enthusiastic team to assign to the project. Just looking over the course we did makes me wonder how in the world we were able to pull it all off. Of course I know very well how we were able to pull it all off. In 2015, when the project ran, I had a sympathetic and supportive Provost. I had interested and supportive collaborators among my fellow Vice Provosts, especially Dr. Cathy Howard, who was then Vice Provost for Community Engagement, and whose initial brainstorming sessions with me took my ideas to a much higher level. I had a budget. I knew some amazing people and was lucky to convince many of them to come along for the journey. Just the usual success story, the lightning that strikes just a few times during a lifetime.

Moral: make projects while the sun shines, when the lightning strikes, when the Spirit moves, when the muses come to haunt you. There’s always an axe nearby with your name on the blade (not the handle).

By Unknown author – http://gawain.ucalgary.ca, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=621711