Is the Water Hot Enough for You?

The case of Professor Steven Salaita has recently become a cause célèbre among faculty who once felt comfortable airing their political grievances on social media.  What interests me about this story is why a particular set of issues about academic freedom, political expression, and digital communication is getting so much attention precisely now.  I would argue it has a lot to do with a specific alignment of empathy and personal risk on the faculty side and the fact that university administrations have reached a tipping point in their public relations strategies toward social media that involves both emulating and monitoring network-savvy professors.  

Salaita's use of Twitter to object to Israel's policies in Gaza -- often in hyperbolic or crude language -- has been cited as a key factor in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's decision to rescind a job offer for a tenured position that was seemingly only waiting for the last pro forma approval from the Chancellor's office.  According to "Out of a Job," a story that broke in the blog Inside Higher Ed, Salaita had already resigned from his post at Virginia Tech and had made arrangements to relocate when he received the surprising news.

On the Internet there has been considerable outrage vented and analysis unpacked in the days since the revelations about UIUC's backpedaling.  Steven Krause notes Salaita had many more rights to digital expression than assistant profs, adjuncts, alt-acs, and anyone else on campus without tenure.  Ian Bogost contrasts "academic freedom" with the contractual tactics necessary for "academic paydom."  Roopika Risam writes a "love letter to Twitter" as a pre-tenure academic seeking networks and publication opportunities.  David Palumbo-Liu has been one of the most prolific critics of UIUC with blog posts about Salaita at Salon, Huffington Post, and Transformation.  Former MLA President Michael Bérubé weighed in with a castigating letter to the Chancellor warning that her campus would become a "fourth-rate" institution if the decision wasn't reversed.  The Illinois state chapter of the AAUP issued a formal protest.

One thing that's worth noting about Salaita's Twitter feed is the prodigious labor that he invested in maintaining it, apparently right up until just before he received the bad news.  Although he's picked up a few thousand followers since the controversy, the size of Salaita's audience was relatively modest in comparison to other high-profile academics, in spite of the energy and affect he obviously devoted to it.  After all, he composed almost ten thousand Tweets during his five-year period of activity and followed over three thousand other people to connect and stay current.  From all this effort he attracted about four thousand followers.

For scale, Juan Cole of the blog Informed Consent has about thirty thousand more Twitter followers than Salaita.  Certainly Cole has posted a huge volume of tens of thousands of Tweets to attract such a sizable following to his feed, but many of Cole's Tweets are reposted content, and he does not engage in context-specific debate about people's individual claims -- either agreeing or disagreeing -- to the degree that the micromanaging Salaita did.

I bring up Cole's name because he had a similar experience with the hazards of a having a noticeable social media trail for those on the academic job market.  Like Salaita he was also perceived of as an intemperate activist for anti-Israeli positions, and he failed to land a tenured job at a new institution as a result.  In 2006, a story in the Yale Daily News reported that Cole -- then at the University of Michigan -- had been denied tenure at Yale "in one of the final phases of the appointment process."  According to Yale's reporting, Cole had been characterized by fellow professors who had weighed in on his case as a potentially "divisive colleague"  Shortly afterward The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a forum called "Can Blogging Derail Your Career?" and invited seven prominent academic bloggers to expound on the crisis.    

Cole's travails ultimately didn't have the legs to stay a national story, and he didn't galvanize a movement of sympathizers to agitate for greater academic freedom in more digital contexts.  I would argue that there were a number of reasons that the firestorm of controversy around Cole's case was extinguished relatively rapidly.

For one thing, Cole was doing something that only a statistically small fraction of the scholarly population did at the time: academic blogging.  Even though academic blogging was actually in its heyday,  in retrospect, this activity might have made Cole seem like an outlier.  He was pursuing an enthusiasm for a rare form of hybrid writing and propagating an alien genre of self-sponsored op-ed with pretensions both to journalism and to short-form hyperlinked scholarship.  Today, in contrast, Tweeting is an activity that many more academics do than did blogging -- and if academics don't Tweet they are at least aware that the activity happens all around them at conferences.  Moreover, short-form and very-short-form digital postings by scholars circulate to a broader audience via Facebook and other social network sites.

In the eight intervening years faculty have also become much more aware of the contingency of their own appointments.  Fewer faculty members have tenure, legislative support for state-sponsored higher education seems more arbitrary and more dependent on political whims, and institutional governance structures are being eroded by risk averse administrations afraid of unhappy donors, bad press, and lawsuits.

There's also been a sea change in public relations for universities.  Every campus worries about its YouTube channel, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and other conduits of social media presence.  Every institution compares its social media profile to those of its rival institutions.  Social media "experts" (read "idiots") are hired to manage college messaging, and these drones from the public relations hive mind may find themselves directly vying for attention in opposition to faculty, students, and staff who might seem noticeably more human and appealing to the public.  Resentments build about "unofficial" messages getting out from challengers, and online behavior is policed by those who are both digital regulators and digital content-creators.

In The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University I discuss how students' digital rights to expression are often trampled, because faculty assume that their own privileged positions when it comes to the Internet could never come under attack.

Not surprisingly, current definitions of academic freedom already provide more rights for faculty than for students when it comes to free speech, and the leveling practices of digital culture seem to have relatively little effect on challenging divisions created by existing status barriers between teacher and pupil. As both consumers of web-based content and producers of it, students generally have fewer recognized rights and protections than faculty. Administrators loath to meddle with academic freedom often say little about faculty web pages, for example. Faculty content-creation on official institutional pages includes a heterogeneous collection of material that ranges wildly from the confessional to the satirical.  On university Webpages, one can find testimonials about personal trainers with links to their gyrating bodies, narratives about dieting that show shirtless faculty, heartfelt warnings based on personal tragedy about never leaving infants unattended, step-by-step instructions for destroying marshmallow peeps with lab equipment, and obscene mock-scientific acronyms. Ironically, political blogging and electronic civil disobedience may create more serious problems for faculty perceived as radical subversives than would more obviously off-topic or off-identity material. This might seem strange given how academic freedom is often defined in terms of political tolerance and the open marketplace of ideas, but the Internet has also generated cadres of students policing political utterances by professors. Otherwise, administrators generally do little to keep the online conduct of faculty in check.

Administrators didn't police faculty behavior online, because it was largely invisible to them, but now those days of mutually assured obliviousness seem to be over.

Recently I was interviewed by Henry Jenkins, who asked about how the University of Kansas Board of Regents had imposed new restrictions on the use of social media by faculty.

In the book I argue that part of the reason that faculty have been slow to advocate for their students when it comes to their informal learning practices and online knowledge networks is that faculty have been much less coerced than students by administrative efforts to police their computer use. Faculty bloggers might come under pressure for disclosing information that colleges don’t want shared, but they have been such a tiny minority that not many people took notice. Faculty hacktivists might be threatened for acts of electronic civil disobedience, but they are an even smaller contingent.

Twitter users like David Guth at the University of Kansas, who was suspended for an anti-NRA Tweet, are also still relatively rare among academics, but faculty see Twitter being used at conferences, and they know Twitter is part of a continuum that includes Facebook, which they might use to communicate with friends and relatives, so I am hoping that the water is finally getting hot enough that the frog might finally jump out and protest in good faculty fashion.

In the boiling frog anecdote it is supposed that an amphibian might leap out of hot water sensibly --  if dropped in -- but foolishly stay in cold water that is slowly heated to the boiling point because incremental change discourages prompt action.  Let's hope that the temperature doesn't get any hotter in these digital expression cases before faculty collectives finally intervene at the policy level

Day of DH

Today for Day of DH I thought it worthwhile to write an actual blog post for the first time in many months.  Like others who have switched over to short format postings on platforms such as Twitter, most of my blogging activities have been suspended in recent years, although I still write for DML Central and a few other places.  Since becoming Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at UC San Diego during a time of devoting myself largely to conventional print publications, it has been difficult to find time for even one posting despite having written over a thousand such entries in previous years.

Of course, blogging has been important for expressing solidarity with a distinctive kind of digital politics, even if -- as Geert Lovink points out -- so often that politics only merits a "zero comments" response.  On Wednesday, Lovink presented a talk about "Wikileaks beyond Julian Assange" at UC Irvine, which raised a number of interesting questions about how anonymity and celebrity function as part of particular algorithmic rhetorics.  The talk also reminded me why I continue to argue for more "hacktivism" in the digital humanities, as I do so here in the Debates in the Digital Humanities collection.

Lovink noted that Wikileaks was made possible by the confluence of the decreasing costs of maintaining a megabyte of data and the increasing strength of technologies for anonymous encryption, such as those documented by Andy Greenberg in This Machine Kills Secrets.  However, Lovink argued that Assange had fallen prey to the "hacker as hero as trap," and that photo ops with Lady Gaga Issue detracted from online advocacy desperately needed for the pending court case against famed Wikileaks informant Bradley Manning.   Although Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler may make the argument for leniency publicly in "The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case," what Lovink calls the "global fallout" of this particularly Wikileaks case, primarily involving the release of diplomatic cables, has been featured in news coverage in India, Zimbabwe, and many other countries.  (To understand the narrative of stakeholders, Lovink recommended Wikileaks: The Secret Life of a Superpower from the BBC.)

Like any Internet meme Wikileaks has spawned many imitators.  As Lovink observed, websites with leaked documents now range from the Al Jazeera-sponsored The Palestine Papers to Porn Wikleaks, which is devoted to providing the real names of actors in adult films located from an HIV/AIDS testing database, to the GuttenPlag Wiki that locates plagiarized passages in the dissertations of German political leaders.   Some links are now defunct among Lovink's list of copycats, such as the now defunct Murdoch Leaks website.  Yet, as Lovink also pointed out, the work of Wikleaks continues with The Syria Files, even after the defection of Daniel Domscheit-Berg.  Wikileaks also clearly inspired The Afghanistan Papers, Balkan Leaks, and Global Leaks.

Although Lovink appreciated the aesthetic gesture of works like "Delivery for Mr. Assange," he was concerned that the narrative of the cyber-outlaw obfuscated the work of coalition building and the importance of how Wikileaks once functioned in a larger ecology of free software and online activism.  For example the temporary allegiance between Wikileaks and Anonymous,  Lovink argued, indicated that tensions between journalism (the supposed mission of Wikileaks) and activism (the supposed mission of Anonymous) and that leaking information and mining information to leak could involve two very different kinds of user practices.

Having taught a course on Digital Journalism, I know that major news stories often depend on affiliations with media organizations that are well-financed enough to fund lawsuits that force information to be released.  With media conglomeration and free culture norms weakening newspapers and broadcast news, investigative journalism is rapidly becoming defunded, so anonymous submission of leaked material becomes the only way to break big stories.

What does this have to do with the digital humanities?  Large corpora of documents that are not carefully curated -- such as those on leak sites -- invite intrepid digital humanists to do creative data mining, and

Rigor Mortis

More and more often when I teach blogging, I feel like I am teaching Latin.

It seems as if blogging is now considered a discourse essentially dead in its vernacular practice, but the language of blogging still holds some recognizable pedagogical virtue as a way to build students' communication skills with public audiences and as a gateway for understanding related digital practices that might appear more demonstrably alive in the present day.

Today I found out that I will be part of a roundtable discussion titled "Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other" at the Computers and Writing conference at the University of Michigan. The proposal from Steve Krause begins as follows:

In one fashion or another, the short history of blogging has always been about dismissal. Blogging has consistently been labeled a fad, discredited as little more than amateurs keeping public diaries, criticized by mainstream media for their shoddy writing (compared to the mainstream media), and so forth. And yet Rosenberg (2009) argues that blogging was “the first form of social media to be widely adopted beyond the world of technology enthusiasts,” a development that provided a “template for all the other forms that would follow” (p. 13). Blogs perforated the borders between author and audience, reporter and reader, diary and pulpit in ways that launched careers, destroyed campaigns, and illustrated, perhaps, the communal philosophy of the digital age. That said, as Facebook and Twitter have eclipsed blogs, perhaps the death of blogging has finally arrived. Perhaps the medium that showed the way has been superseded by the forms following. Or not. Or maybe it has become something else. Something other.

Of course, the news of blogging's demise is not a terribly stunning announcement. A year and a half ago, a report from the Pew Research Center announced that it was already judged an archaic practice among the young.

Yet the blogs in this quarter's digital danse macabre continue to show a certain vitality conceptually, rhetorically, stylistically, and even technically. Offerings from my students like Eat Dirt, San Diego, Greener Strides, Cinesia, Digirights, and The Social Documentary speak of students continuing desires to have their voices heard by the public. The class blog is full of suggestions for alternative lectures that I could have given with the same subject matter.

I can't imagine trying to get to know my students otherwise in a lecture hall of over two hundred souls. I may be a schoolmarm essentially drilling them on their conjugations and declensions, but at this point I don't know what else to do.

Engagement Ring

While I was in Washington D.C. for Gov 2.0 Expo, I enjoyed meeting open source and public engagement advocate Molly Moran of the State Department. At the Expo, some complained that I was too critical of State Department efforts in e-government, even though I only devoted one slide to the subject and limited my criticism to only one aspect of what I thought was a largely successful adoption of Twitter by the group, so I hope that I am setting the record straight when it comes to a branch of government that tends to attract the best and the brightest of federal employees.

As this State Department posting on Applying the Tools of 21st Century Statecraft to Public Engagement explains, the new media discussion group included Andrew Cedar, Katie Dowd, Luke Forgerson, Suzanne Hall, Darren Krape, Duncan MacInnes, Bill May, Cash McCracken, Molly Moran, Lawrence Randolph, Victor Riche, Aaron Tarver, Erica Thibault, Scott Weinhold, and Norma Williamson. I had presented on a panel about diplomacy in virtual worlds at the State of Play conference with May last year and had followed the work of many others in the group.

The blog entry summarizes the wide range of subjects addressed by the project:

Under Secretary Judith McHale recently convened a series of discussions and asked State Department colleagues to move public diplomacy forward in innovative ways. These discussions focused on several activities, including everything from student exchanges to English-language teaching programs . . . Engaging the public -- going beyond government to government communication -- has long held a place in American diplomacy, from the Marshall Plan following World War II to sports exchanges during the Cold War. Today, new tools and technologies enable us to reach more people, more quickly, more directly, than ever before, and activity in the online world is already having a tangible impact on foreign policy priorities . . . Given these examples, how would you use new media tools to engage the public on critical foreign policy topics and global issues? Let us know your ideas, and we look forward to sharing them with State Department colleagues and leadership.

My only gripe with the State Department's call for public feedback on the initiative was the illustration used as the banner image, a photo of a woman in a headscarf at a PC workstation. The image of women in headscarves interacting with technology has become a sort of stock image of Western liberalism that may be more subject to misinterpretation than Americans may imagine. It isn't always the universal signifier of female empowerment that those in public diplomacy consider it to be. As François Bar has cautioned in talks detailing his large-scale multi-year studies of public computing practices abroad, U.S. citizens should be wary of their own biases about both individual consumer technologies and the relationship between gender, space, and technology.

(For example, why does this woman have to have a man on the screen? Why isn't it more obvious that she is in a social computing setting with a numbered carrel, perhaps a cybercafe with sex-segregated hours? How would the image be different if she were shown on-the-go with her computing done on a mobile device? Why isn't she interacting with other women either as an "infomediary" or as one who benefits from their knowledge? Where is her family? Where is her community? Americans don't ask these questions, but other people in the world do.)

For more about experiments done in the State Department, you can see this Mashable article about the use of new media in diplomacy and other forms of transnational outreach by the government.

Digging (through to) China

Kudos to the UC Irvine History Department for creating The China Beat, a blog about contemporary China that is regularly updated with pithy blog posts with concise descriptions of scholarly projects, films, books, blogs, current events, digital cultural practices, and conferences about China.

Launched in early 2008, The China Beat provides context and criticism on contemporary China from China scholars and journalists. Based around a group of active contributors at the University of California, Irvine, including co-founders Kenneth Pomeranz and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the blog draws on a global group of China watchers in the U.S., China, the U.K., Australia, Japan, Canada, Taiwan, and many other locations.

With the UCI Outreach program to K-12 educators, the UC Irvine History Project, the group has also created a great resource list of blogs for classroom use.

Tempest in une théière

The first couple in France has tried to reign in bloggers according to "Rumor of Sarkozy Infidelities Sets Off a Modern French Farce." Editors at Le Journal du Dimanche disciplined two supposedly rogue bloggers at the paper, removed the blog in question, and then issued a formal apology for posting titillating gossip online without a proper sources. Under fire from pro-Sarkozy media outlets, the JDD filed a criminal complaint, which set off a police inquiry and allegations that the law had been violated by "introduction of fraudulent information into a computer system," a law which was also used against political opponents accused of dirty tricks by Sarkozy in the Clearstream trial. Nonetheless, readers of Techdirt expressed amazement at this provision in French law. As one commenter wrote:

So in France, it is illegal to enter fraudulent information into a computer system? How do test data generators or sample data work in France? If I enter a fake name when opening a Facebook account, am I a criminal?

What if I enter a fake name into my contact list on my phone?

Apparently the French head of state has ordered "an investigation by the French domestic intelligence agency" of stories being generated about each partner's possible adultery that circulated not only via the news site blogosphere but also through the Twitterverse when journalists reposted the rumors.

Blogging is For Old People

The latest Pew report on "Social Media and Young Adults" contains a number of findings that should come as little surprise to those who actually teach about digital media to those in that demographic, namely that blogging is on the decline among this population that has become more wary about adult snooping and that Twitter may be a marketer's dream but it has little appeal for teens who would rather be wired in other ways.

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.

As the report indicates, "14% of online teens now say they blog, down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006." This decline in participation is also "reflected in the lower incidence of teen commenting on blogs within social networking websites; 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006." However, the report notes that "the prevalence of blogging within the overall adult internet population has remained steady in recent years" with "one in ten online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog."

Do You Want the Bad News First? Or the Really Bad News?

A massive, multi-year, Mellon Foundation-funded study of e-scholarship has just been released by Virtualpolitik friend Diane Harley. I consider it a must read among promoters of the digital humanities who want to promulgate Web 2.0 technologies. Seeing parts of the project in draft form has informed a lot of my thinking in the new Early Adopters book.

Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication contains some grim assessments about the institutional barriers to the production and evaluation of digital scholarship, online outreach, or networked knowledge in the academy.

Age and Institutional Factors

We found no evidence to suggest that “tech-savvy” young graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors are bypassing traditional publishing practices. In fact, as arguably the most vulnerable populations in the scholarly community, one would expect them to hew to the norms of their chosen discipline, and they do. Established scholars seem to exercise significantly more freedom in the choice of publication outlet than their untenured colleagues, although, in the sciences, high-impact publications remain important for garnering research grants throughout a career. There is some indication that faculty in newer and less established departments in the humanities and social sciences may be more amenable to risk-taking in publication practices since their particular institutions support such efforts to carve out the identity of niche departments.

New Publication Genres

As noted above, institutions already have experience in judging non-text productivity in the arts and some professional schools. Some individuals and departments in humanistic disciplines are discussing or implementing amendments to tenure and promotion criteria in order to draw analogies between existing forms of scholarly publication (e.g., books and articles) and new, multimedia, dynamic forms of publication. A number of interviewees identified the need to have a more nuanced tenure and promotion system that could judge “intermediate” forms of scholarship, such as archival websites, perhaps as something in between “service to the field” and a more formal peer-reviewed publication that advances a well-developed scholarly argument.

The fact remains, however, that: (1) new forms of scholarship must be perceived as having undergone rigorous peer review, (2) few untenured scholars are presenting such publications as part of their tenure packages, and (3) the mechanisms for evaluating new genres (e.g., nonlinear narratives and multimedia publications) may be prohibitive for reviewers in terms of time and inclination. Associate professors may well be the class that will exercise more freedom in the type of publication submitted for promotion to full professor (e.g., an encyclopedia or electronic resource instead of the second book).

Advice to Young Scholars

The advice given to pre-tenure scholars was quite consistent across all fields: focus on publishing in the right venues and avoid spending too much time on public engagement, committee work, writing op-ed pieces, developing websites, blogging, and other nontraditional forms of electronic dissemination (including courseware)

Blogs

Among most of our interviewees, blogs were simply off the radar as a source of scholarship and are generally viewed as a waste of time because they are not peer reviewed. “You have to have some standards! How in the hell are you going to judge the quality of what’s on a blog?” “...who has the time! There have to be some filters!” There was, however, limited
mention of “good” blogs in economics, astrophysics, political science, archaeology, and history (that often serve simply as more sophisticated versions of the subject listserv and are used in much the same way: for finding out about new developments or events in a field and for making general announcements). But again, the particular scholars we interviewed generally said they do not spend time following them (even those who maintain their own blogs). A number of faculty mentioned reading blogs related to a topic of their research (e.g., a historian consulting a blog about a particular branch of science or a political scientist consulting a well-known economics blog in preparation for an interview with a media outlet).

Conservatism of Young Scholars

There may be a trend among young scholars in all fields, and particularly graduate students, to be especially leery of putting ideas and data out too soon for fear of theft and/or misinterpretation. Given these findings, we caution against assumptions that “millennials” will change the landscape of scholarship by virtue of their facility with technology. There is ample evidence that, once initiated into the profession, newer scholars, be they graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors, adopt the behaviors and norms of their mentors to advance their careers. Of course, teenagers eventually develop into adults. Moreover, given the complex motivations around sharing scholarly work and the importance of peer review as a quality and noise filter, we think it premature to assume that Web 2.0 platforms geared toward early public exposure of ideas or data, or open peer review, are going to spread among scholars at the most competitive institutions. These platforms may, however, become populated with materials—such as protocols or primary data—that established scholars simply want to disseminate in some formal way without undergoing unnecessary and lengthy peer review. It is also possible, based on our scan of a variety of “open peer-review” websites, that scholars in less competitive institutions (including internationally), who may experience more difficulty finding a high stature publisher for their work, will embrace these publication outlets. Time will tell.

Social networking/Web 2.0

Although graduate students and younger scholars are much more “net savvy” than their established counterparts, and engage with YouTube, have personal websites, and social networking tools, this tends to be largely (if not exclusively) for personal and leisure use, not scholarly practice. Publishers experimenting with social networking reader tools (commenting, etc.) are not seeing them taken up in large part by the readership. Some attribute this lack of uptake to conservatism, time, interest, and fear of having ideas stolen. Young scholars tend to adopt the conventional practices of their subfields and mentors, despite the perception that they will change the world.

I would consider my own path to scholarly publication with a peer-reviewed book that started as a blog as a narrative that is likely to continue to be highly anomalous. MIT Press has obviously published a number of works by well-known academic bloggers and is invested in new media disciplines that test boundaries, but I also benefited from testing out ideas at conferences, as the report recommends on page eight, and cultivating face-to-face networks of like-minded academics. And I still write far more material for established journals and edited collections from other prestige publishing houses like Routledge or Continuum than I do for peer-reviewed electronic journals or online presses.

The particularly dispiriting section on "Public Engagement" that starts on page twenty-three is also worth reading. Harley's subjects bring out important aspects of the multiple publics that constitute the frameworks for public exchanges, and it is true that members of the media or gatherings of life-long learners often don't want to hear complex arguments or nuanced interpretations.

Harley will be presenting her findings at the Digital Media and Learning conference in San Diego in February, so I would encourage all Southern Californians interested in the digital humanities to attend her session.

Like List

The popularity of the satirical blog Stuff White People Like has led to a number of imitators. Recently, Florence Chee has noted the existence of Stuff Korean Moms Like, a blog by a young Korean-American woman who includes entries on "Corningware," "Perms," "Interpreting Dreams," "Stealing Napkins and Condiments," "Their Own Cooking," and "Telling People They are Fat." It is interesting to see the enthusiasm of her readers who frequently share their own Korean mom or mother-in-law stories on the site.

Communion and Communication

Today AP is reporting on its wire service about a simple command: "Pope to priests: Go forth and blog." According to the instructions in the Pope's new religious directive, his new "Message of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for the 44th World Communications Day," the priesthood now have an obligation to master social media tools.

The theme of this year’s World Communications Day - The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word – is meant to coincide with the Church’s celebration of the Year for Priests. It focuses attention on the important and sensitive pastoral area of digital communications, in which priests can discover new possibilities for carrying out their ministry to and for the Word of God. Church communities have always used the modern media for fostering communication, engagement with society, and, increasingly, for encouraging dialogue at a wider level. Yet the recent, explosive growth and greater social impact of these media make them all the more important for a fruitful priestly ministry.

All priests have as their primary duty the proclamation of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, and the communication of his saving grace in the sacraments. Gathered and called by the Word, the Church is the sign and instrument of the communion that God creates with all people, and every priest is called to build up this communion, in Christ and with Christ. Such is the lofty dignity and beauty of the mission of the priest, which responds in a special way to the challenge raised by the Apostle Paul: “The Scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame … everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ But how can they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can people preach unless they are sent? (Rom 10:11, 13-15).

Responding adequately to this challenge amid today’s cultural shifts, to which young people are especially sensitive, necessarily involves using new communications technologies. The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul’s exclamation: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16) The increased availability of the new technologies demands greater responsibility on the part of those called to proclaim the Word, but it also requires them to become become more focused, efficient and compelling in their efforts. Priests stand at the threshold of a new era: as new technologies create deeper forms of relationship across greater distances, they are called to respond pastorally by putting the media ever more effectively at the service of the Word.

The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace. Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.

Using new communication technologies, priests can introduce people to the life of the Church and help our contemporaries to discover the face of Christ. They will best achieve this aim if they learn, from the time of their formation, how to use these technologies in a competent and appropriate way, shaped by sound theological insights and reflecting a strong priestly spirituality grounded in constant dialogue with the Lord. Yet priests present in the world of digital communications should be less notable for their media savvy than for their priestly heart, their closeness to Christ. This will not only enliven their pastoral outreach, but also will give a “soul” to the fabric of communications that makes up the “Web”.

As someone who has taught Paul's Epistles in a course on globalization, I find Pope Benedict's rhetoric not particularly surprising. After all, Siva Vaidhyanathan argues that Silicon Valley companies also embrace similar appeals to universalism and a similar missionary zeal. Given the Catholic church's suspicions of capitalism's grubby materialism and survival-of-the-fittest ethos, it may be surprising to hear the Pope talk about the "digital marketplace," and it also may be surprising to hear a religious organization devoted to the one word praise multiple "voices" of individual expression and a "menu of options," but this message to the masses indicates that the Pope is interested in growing the ranks of the faithful, even if he came into his position preaching for a less universal church.

The Family That Blogs Together Slogs Together

I know a number of his-and-hers bloggers in which both the husband and wife chronicle their lives online, usually with an appeal to different niche audiences. Now my better half has joined the club with the Brown Bag Dad blog, where he has begun to document his morning lunchbags.

The Hand That Feeds Them

As this posting about the intimidation of bloggers by the Transportation Security Administration from Business Insider indicates, travel bloggers who posted new TSA directives issued after the foiled Christmas day bombing attempt have been threatened with being placed on the no-fly list, served them with subpoenas, and confiscated computers and other electronic equipment. Bloggers associated with sites like Flying with Fish and Elliot.org, which hardly seem politically subversive, found themselves harassed by agents who came to their homes in official vehicles.

Even those who follow the TSA blog can see the difficult position that government bloggers are in when representing federal agencies that serve as both regulators and content-creators of digital media. When "Blogger Bob" isn't posting horrible holiday poety, he's issuing mea culpas for possible improper posting of documents (followed by dozens of scathing comments about the myth of transparency) or just keeping mum and deferring to his betters.

At the most obvious level, the legal issues may seem to be about protecting the confidentially of sources in tracking down the person who disseminated the memo, but there also seem to be some interesting questions about what constitutes a secret document or one of national security significance. Furthermore, in an increasingly procedural society, what does it mean for certain procedures to be secret? If bloggers were to figure them out from observing the practices of security officers and airline personnel, would publishing those observations be a security breach?

I know from my own recent flying experiences in the days since Christmas that many of these security decisions have to do with the say of pilots rather than just TSA rules. Before boarding my United flight home to Los Angeles, I met a couple whose Tel Aviv to Newark flight had an unscheduled stop in Ireland because of the pilot's security concerns about a seemingly risky passenger. Then, literally just before taking off for LA, our own captain turned our plane back to the gate in Philadelphia to remove two passengers that he seemed to consider as objectionable presences. These decisions seem to represent a policy making body of one and reporting them says little about patterns of security vigilance, however.

(By the way, I've started to earn a few snowglobes in the airport security game for iPhone, Jetset, and would recommend the game to Virtualpolitik readers.)

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus . . . And That Diaper Pail Manufacturer

In a piece called "Parental Guidance" writer Sarah Wildman exposes how mommy blogs and daddy blogs, once thought to represent an antidote to advertising-driven consumerism and a reaffirmation of the values of domesticity outside of market interests, actually have become lucrative sites for promoting particular corporate brands. She describes how "reviews" of baby products are sometimes used as a way to collect free merchandise by cash-strapped parents and how events supposedly about parenting can become crass promotional events.

I'm not surprised by what Wildman says. When I mentioned a "sippy cup" and "stroller" in a posting about a famous TSA online video that showed a mother seemingly harrassed while going through airline security, I was quickly contacted by those pushing particular baby items, who were hoping for "advertorial" space on this blog, despite the ludicrousness of using a blog about digital rhetoric in very academic contexts as a vehicle to do so.

However, I'm not sure that she is right that the "blog with integrity" pledge would be the honor code that would really fix the problem.

I treat others respectfully, attacking ideas and not people. I also welcome respectful disagreement with my own ideas.

I believe in intellectual property rights, providing links, citing sources, and crediting inspiration where appropriate.

I'm not sure that corrupt practices deserve respect and that satire isn't a legitimate tool. Nor am I sure that the present intellectual property regime should be upheld if it quashes creative production and political speech.

Links to the Outside

When the White House blog was launched, I complained about the conspicuous lack of HTML links in the text, a mistake that I often chide in my students' blogging efforts. Luckily, they soon got the hang of basic citation of sources.

Now the White House blog seems to have a much stronger sense of its own position in relation to the blogosphere. Not only are they linking to outside sources like Roll Call, but also they are appealing directly to female bloggers, as the video above indicates.

Next question: When will the White House YouTube channel allow response videos or indicate its connection to the YouTube ecology?

At least it is great to no longer see the White House relying on a default YouTube player.

Why Everyone Can Use a Digital Rhetoric Class

This week I have been looking at the results of an IRB-approved study of how students use social media after graduation from college and if explicit instruction in composing for the web or with a sensitivity to the expectations of online audiences encourages them to maintain academic literacy practices developed by blogging or creating video essays in a digital rhetoric class.

As I peruse responses, I am struck by how emphatic students are about having the university provide this kind of training and socialization as a key career skill that could translate into better e-mail and PowerPoint presentations for corporate settings that are valued in a variety of their chosen fields, which include teaching, nursing, legal services, scientific research, and even game design.

So it is unfortunate to see the Open letter from the Academic Council to the University of California community, which addresses recent protests on campus about budget cuts, fee hikes, and benefits to administrators. I know that a number of smart people worked on this document, some of whom are experts on social media, but I still feel that it makes a number of rhetorical errors.

Obviously it incensed those who felt that they were treated unfairly in the incidents, in which police were extremely aggressive with students. Since the letter was distributed, blogs and chain e-mail messages have been encouraging sympathizers to sign the following statement of support for campus that has already been signed by prominent faculty at a number of campuses.

We the undersigned declare our solidarity with University of California students, workers and staff as they defend, in the face of powerful and aggressive intimidation, the fundamental principles upon which a truly inclusive and egalitarian public-sector education system depends. We affirm their determination to confront university administrators who seem willing to exploit the current financial crisis to introduce disastrous and reactionary 'reforms' (fee-increases, lay-offs, salary cuts) to the UC system. We support their readiness to take direct action in order to block these changes. We recognise that in times of crisis, only assertive collective action – walkouts, boycotts, strikes, occupations... – offers any meaningful prospect of democratic participation. We deplore the recent militarization of the UC campuses, and call on the UC administration to acknowledge rather than discourage the resolution of their students to struggle, against the imperatives of privatization, to protect the future of their university.

State-wide calls to "Occupy California" have been featured on one blog, and my local UC Irvine campus is using the blog Defend UCI to rally the faithful. As I've said before, I'm dubious about the efficacy of on-campus protests, and I know from my own depressing experiences as an activist that what makes the televised news is often small protests with lots of footage of conflict between opposing sides rather than large peaceful protests that don't engage the viewer with what's onscreen. But this plea to recognize the "limits of protest" doesn't deal with allegations being spread on e-mail and other electronic channels that feature stirring testimony from witnesses about how quite traditional student organizations assembled to see their members tased and beaten.

In other words, the audience that needs to be convinced isn't the protestors; it the readers and spectators on the Internet who have seen the famous UCLA tasered student video of two years ago and now worry that on-campus police brutality may be being replayed on a much larger scale.

Club Reporter

My first blog posting for the Digital Media and Learning website is now live, which features my interview with civics educator Joseph Kahne at "Digital Media and Democracy: Early Returns."

As I've written before, I've had some reservations in the past about the MacArthur Foundation's seeming infatuation with the exoticism of digital youth and their absence of what I have taken to be serious critiques of the proprietary software model. But over time I have come to respect their support for important new initiatives in higher education and in civic institutions and for their funding of even-handed scholarship that may question the utopian assumptions that philanthropic organizations might otherwise tend to find very appealing.

I also feel very fortunate to be part of such an excellent team of bloggers.

In Good Company

Today is the launch on the new DML Central website, which has "a physical office at UC Irvine and a new virtual destination," where "the Center will support emerging research on digital media and learning by hosting international conferences, facilitating workshops and working groups, and bringing together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, industry leaders and others working on related projects." It is also home to "related research initiatives of the MacArthur Foundationʼs digital media and learning initiative. Harvardʼs Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the nonprofit research group FutureLab are partnering with UC Irvine on Hub activities." The news was announced today at a splashy Google event, "Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age," by U.C. Irvine's own Mimi Ito.

I am pleased to report that I am part of a top-notch team of bloggers for the site, which includes danah boyd, Howard Rheingold, Raquel Recuero, and Constance M. Yowell. I'll be posting about my favorite topics about authority, cultural institutions and traditions, and digital media: civic education, political participation, higher education, and digital parenting.

Would Rush Limbaugh Believe in Bonsai Kitty Too?

As the New York Daily News notes in "Limbaugh falls for Obama thesis hoax - but is in no Rush to apologize," the conservative talk show host obviously lacked the media literacy to spot fake content on the Internet. Apparently Limbaugh's staff fell for a satiric version of what was alleged to be President Obama's undergraduate thesis at Columbia in which a young Obama was supposed to be defending a radical redistribution of wealth. What's amazing is to see is the gusto for amateurism and swagger in the original source, "Obama College Thesis: 'Constitution is Inherently Flawed," which appeared in a publicity-hungry Blogspot blog called Jumping in Pools.

What's also striking about the story is the rifts in the conservative blogosphere that it reveals. For example, in contrast to Limbaugh's refusal to issue a retraction, bloggers at the National Review quickly acknowledged their mistake. And in a recent posting, Jumping in Pools takes on conservative mega-blog Little Green Footballs.

Talking Their Eyes Off

Associate Dean of Humanities Rodrigo Lazo has recently pointed out the work being done by UC Irvine literary journalism students in a collective class project, the UCI Budget blog. It's an interesting example of teaching in a digital rhetoric context, where students are posting transcripts of interviews with different stakeholders in the current campus financial crisis, from English professor and spending advocate Arlene Keizer to bean-counter Richard Lynch, the Associate Vice Chancellor of the Budget Office. By showcasing a range of perspectives that include financial aid officers, protest organizers, transfer students, and anxious pre-meds. It's rare to see a faculty member willing to showcase student writing in progress in this way, but I suspect that writing for public audiences greatly increases the care that students take in composing their questions and framing the interviews. Instructor Amy DePaul has placed the emphasis on posting primary sources rather than finished pieces, but the pedagogical premises behind the blog project seem to be solid for the students, as well as of use to the general public.

The silver gelatin photo is by Jason Davis, who also has posted content to the blog.

Side Winder

One of the tech columnists at rival Yahoo is expressing skepticism about the new Google SideWiki feature, which allows users to comment on any webpage, even if the site owner has blocked or has disallowed comments.

Of course, it also isn't the first web annotation system, as the writer observes:

I remember vividly a similar plan from a company (the name of which is now lost to the web) that let users leave Post-It style notes on any web page they visited, a sort of digital graffiti that let them tag pages, telling the proprietor and others exactly what they thought of the content.

It wasn't a hit. At the time -- circa 2000 -- the software faced an immense backlash from observers who felt that the software was devaluing the appearance of the web (at best) and infringed on other people's copyrights (at worst). Some felt it was the equivalent of picketing in front of a retail store.

For those who value the civility engendered by moderated comments, this sanction of what could be treated as a kind of web graffiti certainly still raises concerns. As a veteran of "stickie" services like Diigo, I will grant that I prefer the aesthetic of the sidebar's framing mechanism to cluttered adhesions on the content itself, but I'm not sure that DesignMeme is right to celebrate just yet.

Note, however, that RISD's dean John Maeda has used SideWiki and is featured in the promo video above.

TechCrunch provides more history of the idea here.