Coop and Brando

Two movies that I keep returning to over the years are High Noon and On the Waterfront.  Both marvelously directed, of course, by Fred Zinnemann and Elia Kazan, starring marvelous leads:  Gary Cooper and Marlon Brando.  Both leading ladies — Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint — were terrific.  The black and white photography was stunning.  The music, by Tiomkin and Bernstein, breathtaking.

But none of this is what draws me back to them and forces me to watch them yet again whenever they show up on the TV, in spite of many viewings.

Both Will Kane and Terry Malloy are abandoned by the communities they have depended on.  That seems like a slender thread upon which to hang a life-long fascination, but that’s about all I have.  It’s not that either has roamed into bad terrain, like Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock or Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The African Queen.  Or wandered into a good terrain threatened, like Alan Ladd in Shane.  Both Will and Terry are esteemed members of their discourse communities who are betrayed by those communities.

They have found their security, their identity, and their purpose in those communities, and in both cases their communities have displayed a treacherous nature.  They both know, from the beginning, the right thing to do, but both are dismayed that their communities don’t recognize this moral imperative.

Plenty of movies, especially westerns, project the authority of the loner against the collective, but few westerns show the protagonist as initially embedded in the community only to step outside it, to challenge its assumed ethic.  And in doing so find themselves facing death.

Both Will Kane and Terry Malloy are scared, confused, and completely uncertain of the end result of their actions.  The power of the acting convinces us of how precarious their final choice is.  In spite of many viewings of both movies, there remains a part of me that wonders in each instance how it will turn out.   I mean, I know how it will turn out, but the actors continue to convince me that the issue is always in doubt.

Courage under pressure is not exactly a rare theme in movies or novels.  But almost always in movies — and I’ve seen a lot of them — that courage is manifested by the heroic strength of the outsider against the odds, not the insider against his own people.  Kazan, in Waterfront, was reflecting his own sense of betrayal by the movie community because he had testified for the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), and Stanley Kramer, the producer of High Noon, and Carl Foreman, the writer, were reflecting their position on the opposite side of the same issue.  In both cases the community, oddly the same community, let down the heroes.

I’ve never trusted my community.  Whichever community at whatever time.  I do believe that most people mean well and in most circumstances do the right thing, which in Richard Rorty’s terms means do the least harm to the most people.  But whether it’s the towns people in High Noon or the union thugs in On the Waterfront, a community can easily be persuaded into absurd conclusions.  I need not mention any current political movements.

I’m not as strong as Will Kane or Terry Malloy, but I’ve learned over the years to realize how fragile any community who would have me as a member probably is.  (Pace, Groucho)

Parallel Universes, Parallel Me

I just finished reading Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality:  Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.  A couple of weeks ago I saw the documentary Transcendent Man, which entertainingly presents Ray Kurzweil’s ideas about what he calls the “singularity,” also described in a book of his I read a couple of years ago called The Singularity is Now.  Add a pinch of Inception and a dash of The Matrix, and one has the recipe for retreating to the fetal position.

Greene’s thesis, which is supported by most major physicists (of which he is one), is that quantum theory and the general theory of relativity can be combined only by hypothesizing that “reality” (whatever that is) constitutes an infinity of parallel universes, each one of which is created every time I make a decision.  If I decide to go left, another universe appears in which another me goes right, and that me goes on making decisions and creating universes each time.  And that happens with each of us.  The math works, and most tellingly, Schrodinger’s equation is not compromised as it moves from the micro level to the macro level.

Don’t ask.

The point is, since this is my blog and exists in the universe in which I decided to write this entry … I buy it.  I’m terribly attracted by Greene’s writing, but moreso by the work of thousands of physicists who also buy it.  In spite of its complete nuttiness.  In spite of its ultimate incomprehensibility even to the people who comprehend it.  And when Greene moves over into Kurzweil territory and discusses exponentially increasing computer power and the increasingly likely possibility that we will sometime not too far away be able to create simulated existences for seemingly sentient, self-aware avatars, who may indeed be sentient and self-aware, and then compares those existences to the particular universe we exist in, wow.  Heavy.

But is there a point that fits into the universe that I occupy right now beyond issues of event horizons and holographic information surfaces and 10 dimensional open and closed strings?  I mean, do I care?

Oddly, I do.  All this, believe it or not, fits into some intuitions I’ve harbored for many years.  Maybe this is the result (or fault) of too much science-fiction  as an adolescent.  I always wondered about me as me.  Not in any pathological way or shaky identity or loose grip sense, but in a kind of intriguing speculation about why I was as I am.  And I don’t mean psychologically, but cosmically.  And I don’t mean theologically, although that entered on the peripheral, occasionally, as I exerted from early on a difficulty with God.  But I did wonder why was me me?

So I’m much encouraged that the world of deep thought and main-stream physics has finally caught up with what I was questioning as a 13-year-old.  There was simply no reason to assume that I was what I really wanted to be, the center of the universe, but that I couldn’t avoid the deep conviction that I indeed was.  Now I find out that I am indeed the center of my universe, at least the one following along my particular decision tree of choices.  Everybody that I encounter now is basically a product of the last decision I made.  I wish they were more appreciative.

The real meaning of parallel universes is that no individual, no country, no world, and no universe should take itself so darn seriously.  Our sentience will eventually be simulated by computers, whether it’s as quick at Kurzweil wants or not.  He hopes it happens before he dies, so that he doesn’t die, but I doubt it.  I strongly suspect that Ray and I will go into that vast beyond together, cursing that we didn’t make it to the singularity.

Or maybe not.  The fact that there are an infinite number of universes in which I did this or that in the past instead of what I actually did in this current universe I am occupying doesn’t mean much to me.  Each of the infinite multiple me’s can only exist in one universe at a time.  I do hope that all the other infinite me’s are having a blast in their universes, but as for me, I have to get the pool pump fixed.

But, as is my nature, I must extract a greater meaning from what I read and apply it to my particular mission in life, which is as a professor of rhetoric.  So what does a parallel universes concept mean to, for instance, how college freshmen write their essays?

Wow.  What a stretch.  But here it comes.

We have to stop pushing these young people into ancient forms of written expression.  The academic essay.  Yes, I’m extending a multiple universes idea into how we teach composition.  And I do believe it.  Writing is always a matter of one’s individual universe, and should be encouraged as such.  The way we usually teach writing is how we expect students to reflect OUR universe.  Write about things the way we see things and you get an A.

What about the way that they see things?  Is it possible that young people could see things in a way that is valuable in some sense or other?  Could our banality be their reality?

Even more so, could our universe be their alter-universe?  Could what we consider so normal be their abnormality?  Is there a universe in which I am 40 pounds lighter?

I enjoy the universe I inhabit.  I will live and die in this universe, whatever the disparate paths.

Kindle, My Kindle

My first ebook was a Rocket eBook, which weighed about 22 ounces (heavy), could hold about 10 books (not many), and was backlit, meaning that it wasn’t that easy on the eyes or the battery.  I was lucky to get 20 hours from a charge.  I bought one of these in 1999 and loved it.

Even then people were upset with the things.  There were plenty of folks who told me such reading devices were a fad, that they cheapened the experience of reading, that, in some fashion that they couldn’t explain, reading from an ebook challenged something sacred.  The unease with ebooks reminded me of the disappointment people felt when Bob Dylan used an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

It ain’t fittin’, it ain’t fittin’, it just ain’t fittin’.

I respond to propriety in many things, but how one reads?  I have no allegiance to ink or paper or the glue that binds.  Colleagues tell me how wonderful a book smells, and usually I just smell dust, and then sneeze.  Some perpetuate the strange argument that you can read an ink-and-paper book in the bath tub, as if being emerged in bathwater heightens the experience of Jane Austen.  In any case, I take showers.  Others wax eloquent about the metaphysical connection they have with the great tradition of reading when they hold a book, imagining, I guess, all the great folks throughout all the ages that have … held books.

I can see the value, perhaps, in owning a first edition (and I do, of Yeats):  the old tingle of history, the satisfying buzz from the past.  But just books?  I have, in the many moves i have made in life, easily thrown away five or six times the number of books I have now.  Had to.  No choice.  Unless I wanted to rent two moving vans: one for the furniture and one for the books.  And I admit to some sadness, or at least irritation, as I carted off books to half-price book stores or to the local library or donated them to English department book sales.  Not so much because I was feeling an existential loss but because I was thinking of the megabucks that have flown away at $15 a pop in order to get a one-time read and then clutter my house and eventually all available surfaces.

I do admit that I’m impressed — not so much anymore — by people who have entire walls of shelves crammed with books, and by intellectuals interviewed on television peeping through their fashionable mangle of books, and by characters thus accoutered in Woody Allen movies.  But more from the sheer spectacle of it all and the evidence that such people don’t move very often than any feelings for the books themselves.

I would find nothing wrong with an ink-and-paper book fetish if only the fetishizers didn’t continually find something wrong with my affection for ebooks.  I progressed from the Rocket eBook to an early version of the Sony eReader, and then on to the Kindle 1, the Kindle 2, the Kindle DX in white, and then the Kindle DX in slate, this last because it had “50% sharper image.”  And it seems to.

I admit that all this hooking up with ebooks may in itself seem as weird as the apparently visceral hold that the ink-and-paper book has on some people.  But I have found great advantage in ebooks, especially the Kindle, and this in addition to the now thousands of books it can hold.  My DX weighs 18.9 ounces, is not backlit so it is very easy on the eyes, holds battery life for almost a week of heavy use, pushes newspaper and magazine subscriptions to me through free 3G (New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker, etc.), pushes blogs to me (Eugene Robinson, Kathleen Parker), lets me choose on the fly whatever I want to read among everything I have to read, and lets me clip text sections easily and download them to a computer.

But best of it, it reads to me.  I drive a lot in the car, trips of up to 7 hours, and the Kindle reads newpapers, magazines, and books to me as I drive.  The text-to-voice is the best I’ve ever heard, practically the quality of audible books.  I have a set of distance earphones, so I listen to books while I shave, wash dishes, tend to the pool, mow the lawn, and do whatever else my wife directs me to do.  I can’t tell you how enjoyable it is to “read” while I’m doing the usual mindless tasks.

The only problem is that sometimes I’ll be listening to a book and drift off to sleep, and find out in the morning I’ve finished it and can’t remember past the third chapter.  But that’s a small problem.

The Appeal of Appeal

Of all the things that can be said about the Internet and social networking, good or bad, accurate or bogus, one thing seems manifestly indisputable.  People like it. The New York Times reports that in 2010 over 266 million people got online in North America and 1.97 billion worldwide.  This last number represents a rise of 14% over the previous year.  Facebook, as TIME magazine has reported, is now the third largest country in the world.

People like it.  So many people like it and have flocked to it in such astonishing numbers that the anti-Internet, anti-mobile computing industry is making best seller lists everywhere, as we read about distraction and diminished cognition and a gathering menace for our youth that rivals Reefer Madness in the 1930s and comic books in the 1950s for terrorizing parents, educators, and politicians.  Anything that people like so much, especially young people, must contain the seeds of human degradation, deprivation, and degeneration.  A kind of print Puritanism has gripped the florid consciousness of those advocating for the no pain, no gain school of public and post-secondary education.  If students don’t feel the “burn” of dreary and deadening instruction and the insistence of self-denial and self-discipline, the story goes, then how on earth can they be learning anything?

Well, indeed.  As we all know, human beings hate to learn things, hate to be curious about new experiences, hate to wonder.  If we aren’t beaten into learning, once physically and now psychologically, then won’t we all just stumble around in a stagnant ignorance?

Of course not.  We are genetically charged with experiencing, explaining, adapting, and learning.  Just follow a pre-school child around for a while.  If the child is healthy and mentally normal, and not abused, he or she is a pure curiosity machine.  Learning itself is a pure pleasure, even though the fruits of such learning probably allow for little real coherency.  It doesn’t matter.  Just the learning of a “thing” is happiness.  Again, just follow a kid around a while.

Somehow we strip away that pure pleasure in how we manage education.  Studies have shown for years that what we might measure as “learning” declines with every year in school that a student spends.  George C. Scott says in Paddy Chayefsky’s wonderful screen play The Hospital, as the hospital administrator,  “for god’s sake let’s get him out of the hospital before we kill him!”  After 37 years in education at all levels, I sometimes feel the same about our students.

For god’s sake let us get them out of the classroom before we kill all desire to learn.

Aristotle talked about the rhetorical “appeals.”  Competent speakers address what appeals to people.  It’s not a compromise or sell-out.  It’s a way of moving an audience to accept the speaker’s point of view.  Open discourse and negotiated policy cannot exist without it.  In a democratic society, you have to give the people what they want.  A lot of times what they want is obnoxious, but usually most people end up wanting what is good for most people, and what harms the fewest.

Appeal is a good thing.  Curmudgeons see the Internet as a kind of satanic “spoon full of sugar,” but not so at all.  The Internet is responding as our schools aren’t to the natural human desire to communicate and interact.  The classroom shuts down just about everything that young people want to do.  Educators have known this for years, and hence the “open classroom” movement and the “student empowerment” movement and gawky efforts like those.

The real “open classroom” is the Internet and social networking and mobile interactions.  As teachers and learning theorists we are about as stupid as we can be to ignore the appeal of appeal, to ignore people in their hearts want to do, which is relate to other human beings.  I’m convinced we either use the Internet to restructure our formal learning situations — our schools — or we continue to grow irrelevant as factors in society.

The Rhetoric of Personal Agency

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
— Darwin

Our schools do not prepare people. The school is an invention of the eighth century. Antiquity didn’t have schools in our sense. It had tutors. Then the monastery came. If you put one of those Benedictine Monks into a modern high school, he would feel very comfortable. And in the 11th century come the convent and schools for girls. We really haven’t changed all that much. The subjects have changed, but not much since the 19th century…. Traditionally, schools have not been changed by the needs of society or the change in knowledge, but by external technology.
–Peter Drucker

For several thousand years, the ancient dynamic for creating community and focusing group purpose and identity centered entirely upon the orator and the orator’s rhetorical skills. The powerfully delivered words of an accomplished speaker decided legal issues and motivated political will. While that dynamic still exists, the extraordinary person-to-person connectivity enabled by the Internet has given rise to a new organizing principle based upon a personal agency now projected independently into the ether. For the first time in history, everyday people have the ability to present their ideas to a few or to many, with almost zero cost, with almost no technological overhead or burden, and with practically no human mediation.

This digital capability appears to have stimulated a new organizing principle, or at least suggested one. As broadcast television declines, as print journalism declines, as the ancient principle of one-to-many undergoes a startling revision, the current citizen increasingly discovers a new mode of attaching himself or herself to ideas and social theories and community values, a mode that — amazingly! — he or she glomes onto as something of a central participant, a central participant among a wide-ranging field of central participants.

Suddenly — and in the general scheme of things this happened very suddenly — all members of a community have attained a new rhetorical standing, in some ways a new rhetorical equality. The Internet complexly delivers person-to-person contact with such competency that older technologies of inclusion and exclusion seem passe. Previously, whoever held the microphone (in Lord of the Flies, the conch shell) had the “floor.” Now, the “floor” has become the computer in front of you, if it is connected, and few computers these days aren’t connected. Nobody can unplug your microphone or disconnect your amp.

Those conditioned to one-to-many rhetorical and managerial systems are disconcerted, if not frightened. How can anything reasonable come from this cacophony of voices?

But it isn’t a cacophony of voices. It is a system of interaction that distills structure from a new kind of rhetoric, a rhetoric of personal agency. In simplest terms, capable voices rise to the top, and weak voices sink to the bottom. Instead of the overwhelming authority of a Pericles or a Cicero, we find a gathering authority of capable participants, many, many capable participants. One person isn’t moving the crowd this way and that, the way that Brutus and Antony move the mob of Rome, but an accumulation of voices gather like attractors to assert an attitude, a value, even a political position.

That the technology is irresistible is something nobody can deny. As rhetoricians, we must look at irresistibility very carefully. A Caesar, an Augustine, an Elizabeth I, a Hitler, all managed irresistibility extraordinarily well in their use of language. Now we have a new irresistibility, the digital irresistibility, and we must learn what this portends for the decisions we will be inclined to make.

I make no claim that this new rhetoric of personal agency will somehow solve ancient problems or bring us to a new dawn of human endeavor. It is possible that the diffusion of authority and the chaotic incrementalism of millions of voices chattering away about nothing will create a new Tower of Babel signifying little of value to anyone. That is certainly the oft-stated assumption of the guardians of traditional channels of managed information, that this new verbal egalitarianism will give seed to a jungle of idiocies.

And it might well do that. We see now, at the first signs of a rhetoric of personal agency, plenty of blather and ill-considered verbal combat, and enough scrambled facts to swamp the Encyclopedia Britannica a thousand times over. But we also see a growing awareness that everything, everything, is to be judged critically. The role of judge has moved from the control booth, the editor’s desk, the publisher’s boardroom to the independent agent, and only time will reveal whether we the people can handle the job. I think that, with practice, we can.

As should be obvious, a course that attempts to capture a new, participatory rhetoric should not be delivered in an old, broadcast, one-to-many format. But Web 2.0 (if there is such a thing) assumes a bottom up development, a percolating of ideas from what we are tentatively calling “the agents of personal rhetoric.” The assumption that we will be examining is that something substantial crystallizes from what appears to be (from a traditional perspective) a manifestly undirected cloud of Internet activity, something indeed of rhetorical and therefore social value.

But a graduate course is, or should be, a highly directed activity, or the students feel unrewarded for their time and expense. Most courses diligently define a particular knowledge domain and then move through it A-to-Z, in effect transmitting, or re-constructing, a large chunk of something from the mind of the teacher to the minds of the students. As usually conceived, a course that derives its knowledge-constructing energy from “personal agency” might seem a bit like turning over the institution to the inmates.

Which may be why the activities of Web 2.0 (if there is such a thing) profoundly disturb teachers and librarians and thoroughly delight students. It may also be why the Internet itself and Web 2.0 have become a massive attractor without equal in human history, drawing vast numbers of participants into a shared activity that few outsiders can figure out, even to the degree that we can’t be sure this “massive attractor” actually exists, beyond the phenomenal sales of connection gadgetry like netbooks, smart phones, digital tablets (iPad, Galaxy Tab, etc.), and ebooks, and the astonishing participation on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Delicious, and “folksonomies” (don’t ask).

iPad: The Universal Learning Tool

I’ve had an iPad for two weeks now and sympathize with those who say that if you have a reliable laptop, who needs an iPad?  But sympathy is not the same as agreement.  The iPad makes a lousy laptop, but the laptop makes a lousy iPad, even though the laptop can do everything the iPad can do and considerably more.

But that misses the point.

I call the iPad a “universal learning tool,” something I would not call the laptop even though I’ve had seven of them extending back into the early 1990s (remember the “PowerBook”?).  What distinguishes the iPad as a “learning tool” is not what it has but what it doesn’t have, namely neither a mouse nor touch pad, nor a keyboard.  Nor an extra 3 pounds.

As David Pogue at the New York Times has pointed out, the laptop is primarily a “producing” machine, while the iPad is primarily a “consuming” machine.    The laptop (and desktop, of course) is good for putting stuff into the web; the iPad is good for getting stuff out of the web.  Better than good, actually, which is why I call it a universal learning tool.

For years technological grumps have touted the printed book as a superior reading device to the computer mainly for the convenience of the technology.  Easy to hold, easy to carry, easy to change distance from the eyes, much easier than backlight on the eyes, smells good, never runs out of power, and you can read it in the bathtub.  Who could ask for anything more?

The Amazon Kindle responds effectively to the “who could ask for anything more?” query (I’ve had three Kindles over the last two years).  The electronic ink is much easier on the eyes than a backlit screen and you can easily hold it in one hand (10 ounces for the 9” DX), much more easily than many hardback blockbusters.  It doesn’t have a particularly pleasing or non-pleasing smell (I’ve never really bought into the smell argument for the printed page) and I wouldn’t recommend reading it in the bathtub, though with some care that’s perfectly doable.  The battery can last for a week, and the thing can hold hundreds if not thousands of books, you can store your own documents in it, and you can buy a book from Amazon in under 60 seconds direct to the Kindle.  (I’m not sure this last is that much of an advantage, considering my impulse buying.)

Then too, up to five Kindles can share the same library.  My wife and my daughter have Kindles and can read any book that any of us buy for no extra cost.

BUT, in spite of my obvious affection for the Kindle, I do not call it a “universal learning tool.”  While the Kindle can enter the Web through the 3G network (called “whispernet”) without connection or subscription cost, the speed and interface are severely limited.  The great advantage to the eyes of the electronic ink display make any but the most cursory display of web pages impossible.  It is a fine, even terrific, e-reader, but that’s as far as it goes.

The iPad is not as easy on the eyes as the Kindle.  The backlight is essentially pulsing light out at you, which can create eye strain during long reading periods and make reading in daylight difficult.  The backlit screen also eats up more battery, but the iPad has managed about 10 hours of continuous use (I’ve experienced it) and that mitigates most of the concern with the battery.  But the nature of the backlit LED screen allows three of the most valuable assets of the iPad:  the beauty of the display, the touch screen, and web browsing.  In addition, the Apple iPhone Operating System runs off of “apps,” or individual applications, that make managing the activities of the iPad astonishingly simple and intuitive.

Here’s the point.  What a device can do is not nearly as important, not nearly, as what people will actually use.  The printed book is infinitely more valuable to my brother than a computer because he picks up and reads books all the time and will never, never, touch a computer.  That a laptop can do much more than an iPad is not nearly as important to students as the facility in carrying and handling the thing, and how they feel empowered.  The Kindle, of course, can (and will) hold all the textbooks a student needs, but that’s all it can do.  The iPad can hold all the textbooks, get to the course’s website, check online resources, view instructor videos, listen to relevant podcasts, allow interaction on course email and discussion sites, and a lot more, all in something as thin as an iPhone and about as heavy as the lightest textbook in the class.  And it can check Twitter, Facebook, buy music from iTunes, and engage in all the compelling non-instructional web activities.

This last point is important.  I firmly believe that the isolation of “formal learning” into what has been assumed to be the “school years” has been harmful, especially during the last 200 years as education has extended to the general population.  More than ever, people need to learn as continuing activity, not something they may opt into for “retraining” or as an alternative to the empty nest, but something necessary as a life-long encounter.  The need for a smarter society is growing:  vocationally, politically, and technologically.  The idea of “school” needs to blend with the idea of “living,” and a universal learning tool like the iPad brings the information resources of both together into something intuitively managed, easy to carry and handle, and powerfully eclectic in its access to the world of knowledge.

And with a Kindle app on the iPad, I can read my Kindle books on it.  Is this a great country or what?