It’s Election Day today and as part of my fieldwork I visited three polling stations around the South End, took photos and spoke to campaign officers and volunteers (who were very friendly and more than happy to pose for my camera). Apparently turnout is up on the primary and people are optimistic. As you can see there’s ample evidence in public space and around the city that an election is taking place as these three polling stations are all in a distance of a few blocks from each other.
On Monday, November 4th, I gave my first guest lecture at Emerson College. It was a double bill, with a matinée from 4-6pm and an evening performance from 6-8pm, as this is a large freshman cohort. The title of my lecture was ‘Managing Choice: Why having more media means we may be getting less out of it – and what we can do about it’.
I started with the 1938 Halloween Eve radio production of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles…
From FDR’s Fireside Chats to the broadcasting of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the announcement of JFK’s assassination, the moon landing, Watergate and the Challenger Disaster – to name but a few – ‘old’ media structured the public sphere, shaped our collective identities and created an imagined community. Elihu Katz called TV ‘the altar of the living room’ as watching it was a familial and social experience.
In the following part of the lecture I looked in more detail at Katz’s seminal (and at many levels prophetic) work on segmentation, the loss of shared experience, the changing nature of media events and his tongue-in-cheek declaration that ‘television is dead’.
Transcript of MIT forum with Elihu Katz
Podcast of MIT forum with Elihu Katz
AAPS podcasts on the End of Television
At this point students usually protest, citing emerging forms of shared media experiences and events, such as ongoing commentary during TV shows using the hashtag (not to mention big sporting events and celebrity/reality TV shows).
I then examined contemporary patterns of internet use and our tendency to quickly fall into habitual patterns of convenience and comfort, which inevitably create distortions – such as power laws and echo chambers. While in theory choice is a great concept, in reality it is a double-edged sword as it creates paradoxes and dilemmas while augmenting humanity’s worse traits (fear and laziness).
The combination of user-centered / choice-oriented web navigation and highly intensive, sophisticated algorithmic personalisation by search engines and social media creates filter bubbles, which further narrow the range of opinions, ideas and people we come across online.
The last part of the lecture gave students an opportunity to reflect on the conditions, situations and conscious choices that enable us to become active users, citizens and consumers. Understanding when and why we are more mindful and aware of the surroundings and people around us is key to engaging with others.
Choice is fundamental to human freedom and progress. However, choice has to be framed and managed. It is framed and managed anyway – there is no such thing as infinite choice, especially when money, time and energy are involved – so unless we actively manage it outselves, others will manage it for us. The media – and in particular new, social and civic media – can be an amazing tool of empowerment and voice. But, at the end of the day, we are the ones who have to actively seek ideas and people who challenge us – who are different from us. This is how we learn.
Community. A word/concept that is very rarely used in parts of Europe – or it is used in very narrow terms to describe an administrative area or population of a small town – and yet it’s so widespread and fundamentally central to American everyday and civic life. It’s not just a case of using different words to describe the same thing (lift/elevator or pavement/sidewalk). It is true that some of the functions of ‘community’ are just called different things in the UK or in Europe. But most times when Americans talk of ‘community outreach’, ‘community leaders’ etc they are talking about concepts and practices which do not have a direct equivalent in other parts of the world (in Europe we make use of the terms ‘society’ and ‘civil society’ instead). For me that difference is of huge importance, and unless we can understand its roots (going back not only to Tocqueville but possibly even the first settlers, the geographic spread etc) we won’t be able to unlock and interpret key differences even at the level of international relations and global politics, let alone at that of political systems.
Recommended reading:
“If one adopts a full-blown relativistic position, one has no foundation (by definition) to judge the legitimacy of the acts of others, at least not if they are members of other communities. Such a rejection of the possibility that there are values that hold for all people precludes transcultural moral claims. This in turn leads one not merely to give up the moral high ground, but to give up any ground for laying moral claims on others”.
(Etzioni 2011: 119-120)
Briefing at the Engagement Game Lab, followed by a visit to the new offices, followed by another productive evening transcribing and coding interviews in the library.
Nine hours in the library, editing the paper on Facebook’s personalisation algorithm and its impact on user satisfaction. After spending exactly an hour and a half on disentangling one single comparative statistic (and why the comparison is not valid), I think my brain is about to explode. Still – this is much closer to how I imagined my sabbatical to be: stuck in a library doing stuff that I wouldn’t normally have the time to do while teaching etc.
The weather is finally turning colder, especially at night, but the sunshine is still brilliant.
“Place can function as the most powerful organizing theme of shared meaning. Street corners and neighborhoods, parks and schools, monuments and memorials— these are not just spots on a map. They are what hold the abstraction of social life
together” (Gordon and Koo, 2008: 206)
Walking through Chinatown I noticed that in contrast to other downtown neighbourhoods which feature very little evidence of the upcoming mayoral election – it is quite a politicized community (interestingly there are more signs here for John Connolly than in other parts of town, although the majority are probably still for Marty Walsh).
Also visited the State Transportation Building, which includes a public exhibit space featuring many photos taken by young people.
Most of the day was spent in Emerson’s Iwasaki Library, editing the paper on Facebook’s personalisation algorithm and its impact on user satisfaction for the upcoming Media & Politics Group annual conference.
One of the perks of working at Emerson is that the original set of Will & Grace is permanently housed inside the College’s Iwasaki Library, on the 3rd floor at 120, Boylston St
Saturday evening in downtown Boston, spending the evening transcribing interviews for the project on public space, urban/civic culture and the role of the citizen in Athens.
“When you walk through a city and you feel a wave of emotions it’s because you come across the footprints of those who have lived and died there – whatever is left behind, a certain ‘humidity’. This is not merely the product of our individual culture – it is that, times one billion for those who have gone before us, and times another billion for those who will come after us. We exist at that edge of the present and this is what a city is”.
Nikos Vatopoulos (interview with the author, Athens, April 2013).
So I’m walking along the beach at the Old Harbor, listening to this incredibly nostalgic, wonderful album with traditional songs from the Greek community in Southern Italy (forever grateful to BBC Radio 3 for introducing me to it) and I’m thinking of all the people in my life who left their home in search of a better life. That aspirational (often desparate) quest is sacred and fundamental to humanity and we should always respect immigrants who left everything behind in order to build a better future for themselves and their families. The tension between the need and hope for a new dawn and the permanently painful sense of uprooting never goes away.
At Kendall Square, Cambridge. Endlessly transcribing interviews, pondering the role of architecture in urban public space and having a great latte at Voltage Coffee & Art, currently exhibiting art by Caroline Board and Kate Castelli (‘What is left unsaid’).
Incredibly beautiful, warm, sunny day – I had forgotten what a mild October feels like.
