Post Category → social media

The #UWinToolParade: Open Pedagogy as #OER

I have a new project I’m really excited about. Even if it kinda goes against just about EVERYTHING I’ve said about tech in education over the past, uh, decade.

It’s a Tool Parade. At least on the surface. I’m marshalling the #UWinToolParade with three – soon to be four – brilliant and creative B.Ed students at the University of Windsor, thanks to (yay!) grants from our Office of Open Learning and Centre for Teaching & Learning.

And yep, we’re talking about tools. And tech platforms.

(Lightboard outtake: happily the only place I appear in the videos.
Apparently my “fun” face & my “deranged” face aren’t as distinct as they, um, could be)

***
I have opened just about every tech course and tech talk and tech workshop that I’ve given for YEARS with the caveat that I don’t talk about tech platforms, really. Or stand-alone tools. I talk about thinking tools for dealing with the digital. I talk about pedagogy. Or andragogy. Or heutagogy. But not about tools as shiny-things-by-themselves, decoupled from sociocultural and sociotechnical analysis.

I still stand by that. I think platforms are, socioculturally, a major problem. They mine data. They undermine democracy. Youtube just announced yesterday that homophobic slurs don’t violate its platform policies (edit: OOH LOOK that changed fast. But basically, hate and surveillance and anti-social behaviours are profitable. At least until they aren’t. Full stop.

Still. Critiques of platforms don’t keep edtech from being sold to school boards, mandated by governments, or used by students, often with unintended effects. AND I still think the participatory infrastructure of the web has huge educational value and potential, when web platforms ARE used to build participatory literacies and connections.

So. If you want a better web, you gotta help build a better web, right?

Part of that for me is the idea of the #prosocialweb. Part of building a #prosocialweb, IMO, is building capacity for educators and learners to engage with it, thoughtfully and productively.

And part of that is building critical literacies around edtech platforms and tools. Among educators…in K-12 AND in higher ed.

Especially in that notorious Bermuda triangle where conversations between Faculties and Education and pre-service teachers and School Boards/schools/practicing teachers seem to go to die.

Yes, K-12 and higher ed are different organizational realities, for sure. But when it comes to digital integration, we are ALL on the same learning curve. And we all have the same human tendencies to revert to what we know and time constraints on changing what we know.

***
So. We’re building the #UWinToolParade – coming soon to Twitter and Instagram feeds near you – to help do some of the heavy lifting of change, for faculty, for teachers, and for absolutely anybody else who might be interested.

  • (UDL greenscreen outtake: Stephanie & Alyssa rock the filming learning curve)

Our project will produce a Tool Parade of at least ten smart, short Youtube videos by pre-service teacher candidates, hosted on a Faculty of Ed page for Open Educational Resources (OER).

(Note: huge shout-out to my Dean for being game to support this)

The Tool Parade’s 3-4 minute videos will focus on:
1. what a tool or platform actually does (the educational perspective rather than the vendor perspective
2. critical assessment of costs/risks/Terms of Service/data surveillance
3. how the tool could be used for differentiated learning or participatory pedagogy

The videos are just a start, though. Ultimately, they’ll be accompanied on our Faculty of Ed Open Page by pedagogical resources – ideas for classroom use, further readings – and hopefully by podcasts and other kinds of tool overviews, in different modalities, once my Service Learning students get engaged in the project next fall. All resources will be CC-BY-SA licensed. :)

There will definitely be comics, or at least release of the awesome storyboards behind the videos’ creation.

(Sample Flipgrid video storyboard: thanks to Oliva, the talented @mspaty1)

But the real purpose of the project – the part where it’s just a Tool Parade on the surface – is professional learning and open pedagogy.

We’re reaching out to local school boards and schools to lead brief, fun PD sessions for teachers AND parents, about selected tools and participatory learning and differentiation. We’re aiming to try a couple of pilots for 2019-2020 – SO IF YOU’RE LOCAL & INTERESTED, GET IN TOUCH @bonstewart – AND we’ll be leading a faculty development side to the project, inviting and supporting my faculty colleagues to contribute videos or podcasts to the Tool Parade and showcasing these on campus.

The goal is to seed a conversation about tools that’s actually learning-focused, and that models open practice and participatory professional learning for educators at all levels: pre-service, K-12, and higher ed. It’s a big goal for a small project. But worth a shot. :)

***
We’re also hoping some #open colleagues find the resources – or the model – useful and interesting.

If you have suggestions for tools and platforms we might want to add to our roster of Tools To Talk About, let us know in comments or on Twitter using the #UWinToolParade hashtag. So far, we’re working on videos analyzing Flipgrid, Twitter, and Google Expedition, and a Canva v. Piktochart scrimmage between two of the project team has led to plans for a jaunty onscreen debate. We’ve also had suggestions for Prodigy, Grammarly, Phet, and Quizlet v. Kahoot. MORE WELCOME!

bringing back the participatory: a story of the #ProSocialWeb

So. We need to talk about the web.

Disclaimer: I spent the early part of April living the Very Best of the Web. I’d doubted, frankly, that “best of the web” was a phrase I’d be likely to use again, but…life is funny.

A whirlwind journey landed me in Virginia, Nova Scotia, and Ireland over the first half of the month. In each space and with every collection of people, I framed the web in dire terms.

“We need to talk about the web,” I’d say, and I’d launch into a rat-a-tat battery of images depicting digital spaces in our present: the weaponization of attention. Monetization. Quantification. Algorithmic-decision-making. Surveillance. The enclosure of commons by totalizing technical systems. Basically, THIS:

https://me.me/i/fun-fact-the-internet-nas-once-a-fun-place-for-21441614

I’m fun at parties.

But the conversations in the hallways and the restaurants and pubs and hotel spaces – and, yep, online – after each of those talks actually reminded me what the web can DO.

Because I would not have been in any of those rooms if it weren’t for the web.

The participatory web, originally – the old-skool Web 2.0 where readers were also writers and contributors and people were tied together by blog comments – but also social media. Twitter. Even Facebook. Together, these various platforms have networked me into some of the most important conversations and relationships of my life.

And at each stop on my trip in April, ties that had started online brought forth hopeful, meaningful exchanges, and real intellectual and emotional connection to other human beings in spite of geographic distance between our day-to-day lives. Moments of shared purpose and learning and capacity-building. Even in 2019.

This is the the Very Best of what the web makes possible. It was a mini-version what Jim Luke called, in his #OER19 reflection, “technology in the service of people.”

I was basically living the paradox that I was flying around trying to talk about: THE SYSTEMS WE ARE EMBEDDED IN ARE TOXIC. BUT THEY ARE ALSO AN IMPORTANT INFRASTRUCTURE ENABLING US TO WORK TOGETHER AND KNOW EACH OTHER.

We *do* need to talk about the web. But not just so we can all opt out and go home. Those of us who are already there, and for whom the web is more than just Google and a garbage fire, need to talk about it differently.

We need to make the participatory web visible again, in our small human corners of it…even amidst the sea of bots and surveillance and polarization.

NOT because we can drown all that out. So that we are not drowned by it. So we can help others struggling against the current. So we can build rafts, together…until we figure out how many rafts it takes to make a dam, perhaps.

***
Obviously, the toxicity doesn’t stop with digital systems.

It was Earth Day yesterday. I need to stop flying around. I need to work towards the fundamental, drastic changes that will mean my kids have the possibility of a long-term future on this planet. I gotta go deeper than the “one-car family with a hybrid car” schtick and actually change.

I’m reading pieces like Monbiot’s Only Rebellion Will Prevent an Economic Collapse. I signed up for notifications re Extinction Rebellion protests in my area. I note my area does not have an Extinction Rebellion Coordinator.

That kind of work is hard: change work, drastic non-status-quo work. I didn’t even know what a Community Organizer *was* until Obama came to prominence and people started throwing the term around in a loaded way.

When the next US President got elected, though, and terms like “fake news” started to be tossed around like grenades, there was a hot second where I thought maybe *I* could coordinate something. My professional background is part media literacy and part adult ed, and late one night I rambled my way to the idea that maybe we could model off the 20th century Antigonish Movement – an extraordinary Eastern Canadian legacy that brought people together to learn, and to fight The Company Store.

I thought an Antigonish 2.0 for community, citizenship, and information literacy might be a way to address some of the yawning literacy gaps of our own time.

A LOT of people signed up.

I found an amazing ally based in Antigonish, and we started writing grants and spreading the word in places like Educause and via DavidsonNow’s #engageMOOC.

And then we hit a wall. And realized that – whoopsie! – a lot of models of coordination and community organization require a structural position of power within whatever community you’re trying to organize. The #Antigonish2 model needed universities as its centre layer, in addition to networks and communities.

As precarious staff at our respective universities, my ally & I could hustle up a network and publish and write grants on our own time and plan community events and even generate *some* institutional support, but ultimately we did not fit funders’ models for Principal Investigators and we did not fit our institutions’ ideas of the package Strategic Change should come in.

You cannot leverage an institution when you have no real foothold IN the institution.

***
So. Ultimately I uprooted my family from the Maritimes, and #Antigonish2 lay low for the better part of a year. Until I got an invitation – thanks to the networked and institutional roots my ally had laid down – to go TO Antigonish and deliver a keynote for THATCampX in April.

That keynote is here. Its ending is probably more radical than its opening…but it posits that datafication and AI are the new Company Store. And it suggests that resisting the technocratic systems encroaching on our institutions and our lives means – in part, for those of us already online – bringing back the participatory web.

It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. It is, however, a call to action…and a way of returning the #Antigonish2 name to its rightful home while building next steps for the network who were keen and generous enough to sign on. It’s rooted in what Dave & I have been calling “the #prosocialweb:” an invitation to think and write and build together.

The idea of the #prosocialweb assumes that our small social worlds matter.

Few decision-makers have lived the Best of The Web. What if those of us who have were able to make it visible? To counter the Company Store mythology of capital data solutions that’s gone viral among our leadership strata?

If our contemporary information ecosystem has taught us anything, it should be that that humans are VERY vulnerable to social contagion. All the systems we’ve accepted are neither natural nor inevitable.

And the system I am positioned to make a difference in – at the coordinating level – is networks…so the web and this idea of the #prosocialweb is where I’ll take the subversive hope that underpinned #Antigonish2, for now. To try to counter misinformation, yes. But also to try to push for change, and for a more pro-social and humane digital space through three key ideas: complexity, cooperation, and contribution. To try to foreground the “ethic of care” that Kate Bowles called for at #OER19, quoting Giroux:

“Hope is not a pipe dream, it is the most important resource we have. It is the heartbeat of our politics.”

If no one believes there are alternatives to this inexorable march towards The Company Store of datafication and automation and extinction that we seem to be on…there won’t be.

But the people I’ve met through the participatory web keep me believing in alternatives. And believing I am not alone.

Antigonish 2.0 – the plan

America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories
I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

– Allen Ginsberg, America, 1956

The Backstory: Fifteen years ago, I lived in the suburbs of Bratislava, Slovakia, next to a corner store that sold absinthe.

Bratislava’s medieval city centre was all cobblestone and Hapsburg extravagance, but the suburbs where the teachers’ sublets were located were concrete sameness for miles, broken only by public statuary and tram stops and the requisite pubs and potravinys.

My apartment came furnished with an old secretary desk, two chairs, a bright red plastic rotary phone, and a folding couch that served as a bed. I thought of it as mid-century modern, even if was more Soviet than stylish. I loved that apartment.

In Bratislava in 2002, I drank absinthe and cheap wine and listened to mixtape CDs I’d burned on Napster: Tom Waits and Edith Piaf and Stevie Wonder and Allen Ginsberg reading America, aloud. I was thirty; a Canadian English teacher abroad. I only made $400 a month, but I’d paid off my student loans and I’d helped out my mother and I didn’t know enough to know that I should aspire to more. I read Umberto Eco. I was trying to self-educate my way into getting a grip on the 20th century, even as the 21st was shaping up post-911 to be a spectacle of a different sort.

I walked a lot. In the middle of Bratislava, in a square near the Danube, there was a monument…a striking, harsh-looking modernist metal sculpture topped by the Star of David, and chains. It stood out from the other Fathers of the Revolution monuments.

This sculpture is Slovakia’s monument to its Jews. It is a strange, stark public penance. A plaque tells its story.

In WWII, Slovakia sold its Jews.

The Slovak Republic – a client state of Nazi Germany established in 1939 after Hitler mobilized into Czech territory – made a deal. In exchange for keeping Slovak workers out the war effort, they agreed to deport their Jewish population, whose roots in Slovakia went back 500 years. In the deal, the “republic would pay for each Jew deported, and, in return, Germany promised that the Jews would never return to the republic.” According to Wikipedia, the deal was initially for “20,000 young, strong Jews,” but the Slovaks eventually agreed to deport the entire Jewish population for “evacuation to territories in the east.”

In 1942, the first mass transport to Auschwitz came out of Slovakia. In total, in 1942 alone, 58,000 Jews were deported by the Slovak Republic. 99% of them are reported to have died in the concentration camps.

I took the above picture of the monument one sunny autumn afternoon, in black and white film on an old Pentax K-1000.  I framed it in the frame with the little wooden doors, and it has lived with me on three continents since. I still don’t know entirely why.

It makes me think of Allen Ginsberg’s voice, intoning America aloud in that little Soviet-stark apartment, teaching me histories I didn’t know. It reminds me of things I’d rather not acknowledge about human nature.

We sell each other out, we humans, the picture cautions me. Our better angels regret it later. But we sell each other out.

The picture forces me to ask what part I am playing in the world, what wheel my shoulder is turned to, or turned away from.
***

The Rest of the Story: Back at the end of November, I wrote about adult education and a piece of history far closer to my own part of the world.

The Antigonish Movement was, in the 1920s and 30s, an adult education & cooperative movement based out of the Extension Department of St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Led by Father Moses Coady and Father Jimmy Tompkins, Irish Catholic cousins from Cape Breton, the Antigonish Movement fostered the idea that ordinary people could take control of their circumstances and their economy through critical thinking, scientific methods of planning and production, and co-operative entrepreneurship, taught in kitchens and community halls, and via radio and whatever means were available.

It had a huge impact. Even today, the legacy of the Antigonish Movement dots the Maritime provinces in the form of credit union buildings, which got their start through the cooperatives that Coady and Tompkins fostered.

So.

I look at our media literacy and information literacy landscape – our democratic society, interconnected and border-blurred as it is – in the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States on January 20th, and I shudder. Arms race tweets. Putin. Fake news. White supremacists gloating. Wikileaks uber alles. Basically, it’s the West Wing version of what danah boyd calls the hacking of the attention economy, not just by trolls but by a Troll in Chief.  Messy through multiple lenses…and by my lights, potentially terrifying no matter where one lives or what one’s party affiliations are.

But I am not a foreign policy analyst. I am a digital literacies educator…and that is the lens I focus through.

So I proposed a new adult education movement for our times, an Antigonish 2.0. With a media and information literacy focus.

I said: To me, at this current moment, it is our societal lack of understanding and agency regarding media literacies and digital literacies – and thus the stories we tell ourselves about truth, decency, and each other – that is the poverty I know how to address.

And a whole freaking whack of you said…ME TOO.

So I’ve spent the past month in conversations with people – individual educators, people on the street, government folks, the excellent & quick-thinking Wendy Kraglund-Gauthier from the Coady Institute (yes, named after THAT Coady) at St. FX University – and we officially really and fer real *do* have an Antigonish 2.0.

We’ll draw on the model of the original Antigonish Movement of participatory learning – see below – but re-tooled for the 21st century and the local and global connections that digital makes possible. It’s particularly meaningful to get to do this with Wendy at St FX.

The Plan, As It Stands: As I noted in the first post, the Antigonish Movement had three key structural components: mass meetings, organized with community members from villages and towns around the entire region, study clubs, where community members gathered together in homes to study materials available, and the school for leaders, where members of the study clubs could attend six-week programs at the university in Antigonish, to prepare people for action and minimize business failures.

I see Antigonish 2.0 as having three potential layers or structural pieces, too.

The first layer will likely be mostly the people who commented on the original post – a distributed international network of people. Maybe mostly educators, with relatively high digital presence and the knowledge capacity to lead this kind of work, but in need of something to coordinate around and up-to-date resources on specific media/information literacy conversations. And the broader epistemology and truth conversations that we all need to work our way through to understand the times we’re living through.

Building a site and awareness and a hashtag around this first layer – and getting people connected to the work that initiatives like the Digital Polarization Institute are on about – would be how this layer would get started. INPUT WELCOME ON WHAT IT WOULD ACTUALLY NEED TO FUNCTION FOR PEOPLE. But basically the first layer would be self-selecting and networked; our mass meetings, for people who might be interested in taking on aspects of levels two or three in their institutions or their communities or spreading the good word.

The second layer – from our perspective here in the Maritimes – would be capacity-building among local institutions as well as among any Layer One individuals interested in joining in with an eye to building institutional media/digital literacies and capacity. We’re looking at a grant to hold a summer institute or mini-conference – essentially our school for leaders – that would be open both to members of Layer One but also focus on getting buy-in from Atlantic institutions, for faculty and staff development….for people interested doing media literacies and critical literacies stuff in formal classes. We’re looking at August 2017. We have a lot to figure out (EDITED TO ADD: AMENDED TO JULY 2018)

The third layer is my real, original goal, the study clubs: getting past institutional boundaries to having the Layer One and Two people starting up localized workshops for people in their own communities, people not necessarily affiliated with higher ed. Workshops at libraries. Discussion series in bars or restaurants. Participatory art events. Kitchen parties. This is the part where people get – collaboratively – the kind of information they need to be critical citizens and consumers within an attention economy run from the top down; our Hunger Games mediasphere come to life. This is the part where people (maybe?) learn to rise and hold mass media accountable for the narratives we are sold. This is where, in whatever small part, I can put my queer shoulder to the wheel of spectacle that’s turning our time, right now, and try to make a difference.

So that sometime down the road I don’t find myself standing in a square in front of a sculpture, saying about some population being symbolized in wrought iron, Yes, a terrible shame. We sold them out, to Nazis. We even saw it coming. (shrug) What can you do?
***
If you’d like updates on this initiative as Wendy and I work to get it up and running…send an email to bstewart@upei.ca. We welcome you. :)

The Spectacle…or Welcome to the Handbasket?

I ended up thinking about Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) whenever I opened up Twitter this past week.

I mostly blame the clown-car/lynch mob that was Trump’s Republican National Convention (America, you have my bewildered sympathies). The ghastly God-I-wish-this-were-surreal-but-nope-it’s-reality sense of overwhelm that the convention engendered in me, even from the comfort of my securely-Canadian couch, was ugly. Add in the recurring black death and hashtag resistance that populates my Twitter feed all too often, the increasing regularity of mass-scale terrorism and retaliation, even the banning of professional troll @Nero from Twitter for unleashing all sorts of racist, misogynist hell against Ghostbusters’ Leslie Jones…it all adds up, for me, to a societal social contract that my existing conceptual tools are inadequately equipped to deal with.

Because what the hell is all this hot mess if not Spectacle with a capital S? (plus some other words that start with S and end with “storm”)…

So. Debord’s been niggling at the back of my mind. He defines the spectacle as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (p. 5).

(Caveat: I am a very casual reader of Debord. I didn’t work with Debord’s spectacle in my dissertation on academic Twitter, except insofar as so many of my conversations during that period were with participant and mentor @KateMfD, whose visual identity on the internet during that time was the cover photo FOR Society of the Spectacle (see below). I spent that intensive and relational research period interacting with Kate while primarily visualizing her as that cover image, which…Debord would probably have something to say about.  I’ll leave that one for some other keener to unpack.)

Cover of Debord's Society of the Spectacle, people with 3D glasses on

@KateMfD, as I will forever see her in my mind

Anyhoo, while I was musing about spectacle thanks to the mangled mob pageantry of the RNC and its blue-collar billionaire, a Debord reference landed smack on my screen much closer to home.

Because last week for us here was also the extraordinary #DigPed PEI, which brought people from all over PEI education and from the US, UK, and other Canadian provinces together for three days of intensive engagement with ideas and tools – Twitter among them. And in one of the (so far very positive and thought-provoking) anonymous feedback forms I solicited afterwards, a participant brought up Debord and spectacle, as related to that individual’s residual hesitancy about social media.

And so I thought, clearly this is a combo endorsement from the universe to go back & read me some Debord.

(After all, beyond politics and societal participation, how many of my household’s personal and professional relationships find communicative and affective expression in Facebook/Twitter/Instagram? What about the casual but relationship-augmenting encounters that Pokemon Go has created for my kids and, erm, me this past week?)
***

So I did. Spoiler? I don’t, ontologically, buy the ways Debord separates society and the subject, and the implied essentialism of a reality outside the spectacle…which is why there was no Debord in my thesis. Still, there’s something to his idea of the spectacle I think we all ought to be digging into and trying to grapple with, especially those of us who see ourselves as educators. Or, um, people who don’t want the world to burn. Or both.

It’s this. What I took out of seventy cobbled-together minutes of my life spent re-aquainting myself with Debord is:

…the spectacle of contemporary society is about power. Full stop.

(Okay there’s more about identity & commodity & reification but Ima hafta dig into that another day. Or you can. Ping me if you do!)

Debord, on power:
“At the root of the spectacle lies that oldest of all social divisions of labor, the specialization of power. The specialized role played by the spectacle is that of spokesman for all other activities, a sort of diplomatic representative of hierarchical society at its own court, and the source of the only discourse which that society allows itself to hear. Thus the most modern aspect of the spectacle is also at bottom its most archaic” (Debord, p. 8).

In other words, the bread and circuses we are being fed are pretty much naked, craven power subsuming all other forms of societal organization.

So Trump’s bizarre content-free campaign video, above? Just power as spectacle, image circulation subsuming any other form of discourse.

Those English people who voted for Brexit but now don’t want to leave? Who voted as they did as a way of signalling “burn it all down”? A sheer exercise in power, both from the political engineers and from many of the individual voters.

And everything Milo Yiannopoulos ever wrote on Twitter? Same. As Laurie Penny says in what is pretty much a mic drop to this particular cultural moment: “It’s all an act. A choreographed performance by a career sociopath who will claim any cause to further his legend.” 

The problem, of course, is what Penny points out: there’s no room in this kind of game for truly believing in much of anything. That’s why the disconnects are so vast and nobody seems to care. The “attention hustlers,” as she calls them, “channel their own narcissism to give voice to the wordless, formless rage of the people neoliberalism left behind.”

Spectacle. Power. The fomenting of archaic hatreds, not because one necessarily believes them…but because they’re there. Because they allow social relationships to be mediated so effectively by images and symbols.

Oh goody. So THAT’s why most of my Twitter feed is so damn bewildered and depressed these days. For those of us who still believe in just about anything beyond the spectacle of power for its own sake, the way the Overton window on this kind of politics and personal practice has shifted is kinda staggering.

Now, given that Debord was writing in 1967 and Ann Coulter’s “career” – to name but one of Penny’s “attention hustlers” – pre-dates social media by at least a decade, Twitter itself nor social media more generally obviously can’t be the source of the spectacle. I don’t actually even believe it’s a more pure or powerful instantiation of the spectacle than television, especially in cable news territory.

But I don’t have cable news on when I work. I don’t spend my professional days with TV constantly in the background.

Whereas Twitter – for me, Twitter even more than Facebook – has been, for the past six or seven years, a constant presence. It’s a stream I dip in and out of as I work, even when it is not the site of my work…and it has been a rich source of connections and conversations and resources FOR that work as well as a space through which my work and voice have been amplified.

But it is also part of the spectacle-ization of broadcast media, part of the crush of the attention economy within which we all swim these days whether we sign up for Pinterest or Twitter or Instagram or no. Because our narratives are all filtered through the spectacle and its steroids of scandal and somewhere after years of 24-hour news cycles and Twitter fights and identity commodification, we all just seem to be rolling down hill in the same unfortunate handbasket, labelled “power.”

Or that’s how it felt this week.

I’m not quite done with Debord, I don’t think. Gonna try again – next week – to figure out what it means to be an educator in the midst of this sea of media and spectacle in which we all swim, and think about the ways in which social media in particular are handmaidens of spectacle…and yet maybe also means of subverting the spectacle that mass media and politics serve up? Maybe.

We’ll see. That’s next week. For the remainder of this week, I’ll just be over in the corner here rocking gently and staring at the wall trying to figure out how to get through another 5+ months of 2016. Join me! I have jellybeans.

What Your New Year’s Facebook Posts Really Mean

So I did that Facebook “Year in Review” thing a week or two ago even though I’m moderately sure it serves up some extra layer of data-mining capacity on a platter to Zuckerberg’s new personalized learning minions. Encapsulated in ten photos, my reductive 2015 in review looked…nice.

Really nice. A lot of travel, a lot of family time, a Ph.D earned, a conversation on Twitter with David Bowie’s son. Some excessive (expletive deleted) snow, but otherwise nice.

It left the rejected papers out. The time my son wore the same socks for four days. My posts about alcohol and fascism and friends leaving town all stayed conveniently out of the frame, presumably because Facebook knows these are not the prettiest things upon which to reflect fulsomely at the close of the year. Or perhaps Facebook only *knows* that because nobody much liked those posts.

All in all, it made me appear more or less like an amalgam of the identities I aspire to. Yeh, yeh.

You already knew that about Facebook.

But I think there’s more going on there. Today, on New Year’s Eve, my Facebook feed is a radiant orgy of Auld Lang Syne recollecting the year gone by in (mostly) tranquility and (mostly) appreciation, with a smattering of don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out, depending on what kind of a year people had & also where they self-identify and perform on the emo-to-chirpy spectrum. It is also, increasingly, a site of exhortations to do better as a society in 2016, a space for calling out the broken social contracts and structural underpinnings that differentiate individuals’ life chances so drastically even in some of the wealthiest countries in the world.

It occurred to me this morning that a thousand years hence, should archaeologists or aliens dig up the remnants of bourgeois North American “civilization,” such as it is, they will be sorely challenged to understand a damn thing about who we were and how we lived without our Facebook feeds.

If we cared about the future, people, we’d be chiseling this stuff into stone.
***

I got a book for Christmas – thanks Santa Dave! – called A Colorful History of Popular Delusions. Like all good gifts for fledgling academics, it has me thinking about work, even while I appear to be lolling in sloth over the holidays.

The book is a cultural history – without excessive depth, but this is not a peer review – of mass phenomena that overtake pockets of society at various intervals: fads, crazes, urban legends, mass hysterias. It details examples of each of these phenomena, from the tulip craze in Holland through the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism, and some of the extenuating cultural factors that generated them.

Two things strike me:

  1. We, as humans, are profoundly adaptable – we have, historically, in matters of weeks and even days, on occasion adjusted the norms and compasses of our societies – in ways that seem almost unimaginable later on – in response to triggers that prey upon particularly cultural powerful fears, aspirations, or repressions.
  2. We, as cultures, are profoundly vulnerable to the narratives that we circulate and enact as members of our societies, particularly surrounding fears, aspirations, and repressions.

What does this have to do with Facebook?

Facebook – and more broadly, social media in general…but Facebook remains for the moment the space of the widest participation across demographics even while targeting ads designed to keep people IN their existing demographics – is the stage upon which the battle over dominant cultural narratives is played out.

Social media is where we are deciding who we are, not just as individual digital identities but AS A PEOPLE, A SOCIETY. Or perhaps, as we haven’t quite acknowledged yet, as almost separate societies within the same geopolitical entities, subject to laws and policies that have differential effects on different bodies and identities. Day-to-day, social media is the battleground for the stories we live by. It is the space where our cultural fears, aspirations, and repressions circulate.

Previously, at least as my book loosely outlines it, these narratives tended to be nursed and cultivated through a combination of institutional and moral edicts, generally protecting whatever the status quo was except in times of upheaval wherein individual voices – or, occasionally, intentional power gambits – destabilized those normative belief systems and identities and galvanized new ones around them, even if only for a brief window of time.

I’m not naive enough to think this means we’re free from our institutions, the media perhaps most outsizedly and dangerously powerful among them in terms of narrative capacity, but as any of us who have had any level of professional media exposure via social media participation can attest, even the media now draw their sense of the tenor of things from social media, even if they insist on repackaging them in binaries in the process.

This is why hashtag activism matters, and why social media visibility is risky and why posting about mass shootings draws out your weird uncle (who otherwise never acknowledges anything you say) in full Gandalf “YOU SHALL NOT PASS” mode, even if Gandalf wouldn’t approve of his from-my-cold-dead-hands politics.

Facebook and the rest of social media are our day-to-day archive of who we are trying to become.

These are our times and they are fraught and sometimes ugly and we move too fast from fad to fad and whiplash to whiplash in the outrage generator that social media creates, absolutely.

Still, I watch people get a little bit more media literate all the time, make the wizards behind the curtain a little more visible, push back against witch hunts in ways that I’m not sure were possible in closed and isolated societies like 17th century small-town Massachusetts.

Sometimes I have hope that maybe this isn’t all just a one-way sinkhole. Sometimes.
***

Which brings us back to the New Years posts. We live lives of inexorable and relentless change, amplified by the bucket lists and planned obsolescences and precarities and excesses the kinds of lives Facebook seems designed to reflect. A lot can happen in a year of living one’s Best Life (TM), after all, and if one fails to reflect on it all with sufficient attention, one is committing the ultimate sin of those aiming for Best Lives. My thoughts on the pressure to live our Best Lives are not pretty.

But when I see our collective New Years wishes and reflections and updates and hopes less in the vein of the “yay me” holiday update of wonderfulness and more in the spirit of a mass ongoing narrative conflict in which we try to influence our peers’ understandings of what has meaning and value, of what our repressions are and what our fears and aspirations *should* be…I’m less cynical.

Bring on the New Years posts and wishes and wrap-ups. Maybe these little outpourings help us focus on bits of hope as we cross into a new turn around the sun, bring collegiality to spaces and identities that are often fraught. Even if the aliens and archaeologists never see it all, maybe it makes a difference to the rest of what they dig up someday.

Happy New Year, friends. :)