Barack to the Drawing Board

Many at the MLA discussed how the editor of College English, John Schilb, was bemoaning the lack of interest in presidential rhetoric in the academy and the absence of scholarship specifically on the rhetoric of Barack Obama. Given today's panel on "The Impact of Obama’s Rhetorical Strategies," I was sorry not to see Schilb in the audience commenting during the question and answer session. The panel was organized by Linda Adler-Kassner, who known for her work on "The Activist WPA." Her write-up of our session is here.

After Adler-Kassner's introduction, graduate student Sean Casey talked about the importance of thinking about civic education in the broadest possible terms and described a particular case study involving an assignment on the inauguration of Barack Obama. (You can see my take on the inauguration here.) He explained how the assignment allowed students to see how certain aspects of Obama's rhetoric were coercive as well as persuasive and to integrate the student newspaper into classroom activities about digital ephemera for a larger vision of what Barbara Warnick has called "the electronic public sphere." Casey discussed how one student responded with an analysis of the cutting and pasting of Aretha Franklin's hat as a trope of mobility and ornamentation in online social networks. Casey drew on several theoretical sources to argue that the definition of participation devoid of engagement with deliberation or policy formation and the staging of dialogism without interactivity should be troubling to teachers of civic education and rhetoric and composition. Among them was Danielle DeVoss's and Dickie Selfe's Technological Ecologies and Sustainability, which also discussed non-human actants like machines and spaces, in keeping with the current trend toward thinking with an "object-oriented ontology." Casey also drew on Burke to understand the ways that the inauguration assignment wanted to avoid the pitfalls experienced also by service learning assignments that generated only superficial civic engagement.

Graduate student Jeff Swift was next in looking at how Obama "blew past Howard Dean" in a "push toward social media" that also embraced Twitter, which was the focus of his Prezi talk. Although he acknowledged that Twitter makes a "terrible first impression," as TIME's Steve Johnson says, he argued that it provides what Clive Thompson has called "social proprioception" in orienting the social self with a "sixth sense." He also used many of the traditional lessons of the rhetoric and composition classroom, such as the value of ethos, and a line from Andrea Lunsford about the value of audience as well as instantaneous communication in such new online channels. In addition to discussing the value of what Malinowski (and Paul Kockelman) has called "phatic communion," Swift also talked about what Fred Wilson has called "the power of the passed link."

I gave the next presentation, which I describe in the italicized section below. Slides are here, and the Obama YouTube montage I showed by way of introduction is here.

Throughout the world, government agencies have adopted YouTube as a mode for broadcasting state-sanctioned video messages. Now many heads of state are looking to the United States and to the Obama administration to imitate the specific rhetorical techniques of the current American president. In retasking a YouTube platform generally associated with a fragmented politics of personal liberty and rhizomatic modes of resistance, Obama both borrows from the conventions of vernacular video and also adapts those conventions to established methods of standard official persuasion. In particular, Obama is situated in the domestic spaces of the White House in ways that might be familiar to YouTube viewers who are accustomed to a webcam cinema oriented around private homes.

Obama’s direct address to the YouTube viewer references the rhetorics of many other U.S. presidents. A chronological montage of clips from the White House official YouTube channel shows several allusions to his historical predecessors. Like Franklin Roosevelt Obama uses the pedagogical pose of the “fireside chat,” like Kennedy he attempts to conduct public diplomacy efforts and speak to citizens abroad in their own languages, and like Reagan he consoles the nation in times of tragedy.

However, his YouTube performances as the nation’s patriarch also draw attention to what could be called “mediated transparency.” Unlike his Republican opponent who was mocked for his use of green screen technologies that digitally effaced the physical background of a shot in favor of a virtual backdrop, the images of Obama chosen as the icons of many of his YouTube Weekly Addresses display lights, camera viewers, and computer monitors prominently.

YouTube also gives the viewer lessons about how to be an ideal computer user, but the official message coming from the White House’s visual rhetoric seems to be that to be wired is to be unpresidential. The Obama official Flickr photo stream never shows him on his famous Commander-in-Chief Blackberry. Like the cigarettes he smokes, the ubiquitous computing devices that he uses must be indulged in only secretly. A phone with a traditional cord that tethers him to his desk is clearly deemed much more presidential. On the rare occasions when he is posed in front of someone else’s computer screen for the launch of a new government website, Obama appears uncomfortable in front of the monitor, usually at a woman’s desk. Thus, a president may create content for YouTube, but – of course – he would never actually watch it. Since the White House allows text comments on its official channel, but response videos are prohibited, the inconvenient possibility that citizens might be viewed as well as view is eliminated.

These limitations on Obama’s engagement with the political feedback loop has often been highlighted in his so-called “Town Hall” performances with YouTube, which began before he took office with the CNN-YouTube Democratic Party debates in July of 2007, where Obama famously answered a question from a YouTube viewer by promising to talk directly to “foreign leaders” of countries with which the United States had no diplomatic relations. Although Obama publicized the use of “Open for Questions” derived from the Internet in one of his YouTube messages, he often avoided answering the most popular questions and instead focused on responding to specifically selected questions from webcam viewers who presented a YouTube political spectacle that was deemed more appropriate.

Often the constraints placed by networks that censor content from YouTube are assumed to exist only in totalitarian regimes that might want to block the U.S. message of democratic neoliberalism. Yet there was some irony this September when Obama created a YouTube back-to-school message intended for children in public school classrooms to inspire them to work hard and show respect for the institutions of learning, because most schools in the United States block YouTube, and even teachers cannot access such video-sharing sites on school networks when needed for obvious pedagogical uses.

As privacy advocate Christopher Soghoian points out, what is most disturbing about the official sanctioning of YouTube by the White House is that it subjects citizens who visit the website of a public institution to YouTube’s surveillance, tracking, and data mining without their knowledge or explicit consent. Although the White House has experimented with other players that do not have the proprietary software or policies on copyright that advocates for public property might find repugnant, YouTube continues to be the chosen third-party video player. As the language of different privacy policies is finessed, the company itself is never named. Furthermore, the close personal and financial relationship between the interests of Obama and the CEO of YouTube’s parent company, Google’s Eric Schmidt, is also certainly a cause for concern, given that American presidents since Teddy Roosevelt have been expected to break up corporate monopolies not legitimate them.

The use of YouTube by official agencies that are pursuing e-government agendas for the United States demonstrates the distinctive way that state authority is represented in distributed digital video in modes that mimic one-to-one communication and yet reinforce the one-to-many structure by which liberal representative democracies have traditionally functioned in the mass media era. With the expanding use of commercial Web 2.0 technologies by government agencies, critics and activists are finally expressing concern that in the name of “participatory culture” the government may risk compelling its citizens to participate in particular copyright regimes that constrain speech, to submit to corporate user agreements that rewrite the social contract, and to divulge private information to commercial vendors without their consent.

The session closed with a joint talk by Writing Program Administrator Dominic Delli Carpini and his brother Annenberg School dean and well-known writer on political communication Michael Delli Carpini. On the general principle that writing programs have an obligation to teach both new media and civic engagement and that this is an interdisciplinary venture, the two Carpinis argued that a compelling series of writing assignments could be constructed around the Barack Obama Organizing for America website to encourage critical thinking about its monologism and tendancy to rely on the rhetoric of a mandate.

Like others on the panel, they felt that their optimism about the civic engagement promised by the new administration had become tempered by the realities of the fact that no technology is neutral. They also argued that it was important to encourage critical thinking about a democratic plebicite that may be constituted numerically rather than cognitively and to consider the issues raised by Simone Chambers about "Rhetoric and the Public Sphere" about how dialectical democracy may not be promoted by certain forms of mass culture. In other words, if deliberation does similar work to the work of the writing classroom with exposing weak arguments, unacceptable premises, etc., then would assignments asking students to do extended rhetorical analysis of such websites or to study of shifts in the geography of URLs get students outside existing double binds. They urged adoption of a pedagogy about building new pathways through such websites and exploring "expropriations and workarounds" as well.

Update: For more on the panel, check out this story about the session from Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.

A Seat for Elijah

With my cross-country schedule for the week, I will not be able to attend the panel with my colleagues at UC Irvine on assessment at Computers and Writing. So I will be a virtual presenter via the online video above. (I will be there for the final Town Hall, however.)

The More the Merrier

Often online exhibits from a library’s special collections emphasize discrete “gems” or “treasures” and recreate a display-case culture of spectatorship for those who visit websites that display historical materials rather than the nitty-gritty discovery activities known to those who open actual Hollinger boxes full of files to answer complicated research questions in archival detective work.

A different approach was emphasized in today’s panel on “digitizing entire collections” at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. Presenters emphasized case studies in which entire collections were put online, although doing this cost-effectively often meant making sacrifices by only providing minimal metadata to keep costs at around the dollar-a-page mark to which many institutions aspire. “EAD” or “encoded archival description” was one of the most commonly used acronyms at the panel and at the conference in general. The other big acronym bandied about at the table was for the funding agency NHPRC or National Historical Publication and Records Commission.

Unfortunately, with Google searches that may land Internet users into the center of an archive with no context or navigation back to content descriptions or finding aids, such minimal metadata strategies also risk reinforcing the fragmentation already experienced by those haphazardly searching for documents in a web search. Furthermore, all three collections that were showcased on the panel consisted largely of hand-written materials that had not been transcribed and were therefore not extensively searchable.

Civil War documents from the Archives of Michigan posed a number of challenges to digitizers, particularly since they vary in size. Although the process of digitization is often depicted as an “automagical” transubstantiation, Mark E. Harvey’s in absentia presentation, “Thank God for Michigan” acknowledged a number of complications in the process from worker equipment to protect against possible environmental hazards to vendors complaining about set contracts when projects become over budget. Luckily, the Civil War project has benefited from an active user community, which included the Ann Arbor Civil War Roundtable, and expressed a willingness to solicit constructive criticism from the archivists present, who pointed out that “civil war” didn’t specific the country and that other metadata samples didn’t specify the state. As part of the “Seeking Michigan” website redesign, which Harvey had jocularly renamed “Desperately Seeking Michigan,” the project is hoping to eventually expand to include private records, such as diaries and letters from individuals who were engaged in combat. The Archives of Michigan also maintains a Flickr page, although it has less than a thousand documents.

Blogs have become a tool for recording progress and publicizing lessons learned in many of these cases. Michigan has its blog at "Thank God for Michigan." However, the subsequent presenter, Kaye L. Minchew, who was also author of specialized state electronic encyclopedia pages, such as "Franklin D. Roosevelt in Georgia," complained that her own contributions to "Troup County Court Record Scanning Project" too often felt like a failed diary entry.

Final presenter David Null explained how ownership of the physical papers of an early environmentalist at the Aldo Leopold Archives and ownership of the intellectual property rights by the separate Aldo Leopold Foundation could create possible conflicts of interest. In addition, since visitors could enter the archive from either portal, those who land in the middle of it after a Google search might not have a clear way out to a definitive home page.

Home Has No Atmosphere

It's true that there may be a glut of World of Warcraft research being done in academia right now, despite the fact that it is the most heavily populated virtual world on the planet and one in which an actual academic conference is scheduled to take place, but UC Irvine Ph.D. candidate Silvia Lindtner's talk brought some fresh perspective to the subject, based on her field work in China that looked at "mixed realities," "hybrid reality spaces," and "assemblies" at work in the public places where people play computer games with the aid of cellular telephones, ubiquitous computing devices, and other channels for live chat and interaction. She also emphasized the importance of design issues that give users choice and attention to subtle forms of political repression that can be manifested in the regulation of games, such as the removal of skeletons from World of Warcraft in the interest of promoting the dominant ideology of "harmony."

I met Lindtner at a CalIT2 workshop for graduate students on interdisciplinarity. The title comes from a statement by one of her informants.

Corporations, Regulations, and The American Dream in Virtual Worlds

The next panel I attended at the Culture of Virtual World's conference, which was moderated by Paul Dourish, focused on how real-world laws, corporate culture, and popular mainstream Horatio Alger-type mythologies become factors in virtual environments.

Presenters Wendy Ark and Melissa Cefkin of the Almaden Reseach Center discussed how the training of employees in geographically dispersed offices could be managed by expert facilitators using the platform of a virtual world. In the case of a global corporation like IBM, this kind of knowledge about the proper handling of collaboration and corporate identity can be particularly advantageous since 40% of their employees work from home. Ark and Cefkin specialize in "business process rehearsal" and count government agencies among their clients. As someone who studies risk communication, I was interested to see that one crisis management scenario involved California's emergency medical services under the duress of a bio-warfare attack and that the IBM duo credit "social warning theory" as one inspiration for their work. The duo broke down the basic components of the deliverables they provide for their staging activities into the following inventory: observation (apprenticeship), costumes (roles), script (story), props (context), cameras (review), and intelligent objects (facilitation and data and assets). Another case study emphasized procedures in a transnational automobile manufacturer, where supplies may come from China but the parts are assembled in Mexico. Yet the online training of this "lynchpin" company certainly had what corporations euphemistically call "lessons learned." Of the original twenty participants, only three remained by the end. As one informant said, "I thought I could multi-task when playing the game, but this required a lot of effort." (For more about how workers involved in courses of online training may "cheat" or take advantage of desktop distractions, see the overview chapter on "digital rhetoric" in the forthcoming Virtualpolitik book.)

Next Greg Lastowka, Rutgers law professor and co-founder of the blog Terra Nova, gave a talk on law in virtual worlds that may have been more ambitious in scope than the time allowed. Nonetheless, Lastowka managed to cover a lot of material before he got to his main topic, "virtual jurisdiction." Lastowka emphasized the potential economic importance of virtual worlds, given the hundred of millions of dollars at stake in real-money trades and the importance of virtual assets to subscribers who pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the corporate entities that own and run the games with draconian end-license user agreements. He raised a number of tantalizing questions in his talk. Should valuable in-game items earned in World of Warcraft by reported on income taxes? Could the unauthorized seizure of a castle in Ultima Online be analogous to a real world vehicle theft? As he pointed out the "widget factory" model doesn't work to describe virtual property, although it signifies more than "an entry in a database" to those who make meaning from activities involving its circulation. Lastowka discussed how Dutch police had busted Habbo Hotel furniture thieves, and how the benign neglect of virtual wrongdoing by local Chinese authorities could have real-world consequences in the case of the theft of a virtual sword in Legend of Mir III. He also argued that there could be both first amendment and intellectual property grounds upon which to challenge the legitimacy of click-through end-license user agreements, as in the case of those creating software to automate play in parts of World of Warcraft. However, he also cautioned against being too literal minded, given that a critical part of a game like EVE Online is to defraud and cheat other people. By making an analogy to the rules about assault that apply on an athletic field in which sometimes violent physical activity can be expected to take place, Kastowka emphasized how virtual jurisdiction could be understood in the post-Westphalian order of current-day critical legal theory.

Last up on the panel, Jeffrey Snodgrass and his students from Colorado State presented on their field study of World of Warcraft in a paper on "Internet Addiction or Restorative 'Magic Flight.'" Using Nick Yee's schema of six factors that motivate players in online MMO play, Snodgrass and his students played World of Warcraft and studied how "achievement" and "socializing" often trumped motivators such as "exploration," "immersion," "escape," and "manipulation" for both good and bad ends. His team argued that the "American dream" that emphasized acquiring capital -- in the form of both wealth and reputation -- and securing personal relationships worth bragging about could produce both pro-social and anti-social results. At a time when legislators are increasingly likely to regulate game play on the assumption that it encourages pathological addiction, while those same legislators are using it in both military training and K-12 education, this reseach could prove to be particularly relevant. At other times after his session, Snodgrass, an expert on India, reminded those in the conference of the origins of the word "avatar"in Sanskrit and the social function of puppetry in countries outside the United States.

Trying Not to Be Cute

Speaking of conferences, I feel that I have to say something about the weirdest conference call from the ACM I've gotten all year, the Workshop on Designing Cute Interactive Media. I've taken enough Japanese to be familiar with the concept of "kawaii," but I'm not sure that I'm ready to produce a real philosophical meditation on the subject.

Let's see: "The Sublime, The Beautiful, and The Cute." Maybe there could be a grand theory of cuteness that rises to the level of Burke, Kant, or Schopenhauer. The call reads as follows:

Cuteness has an effective design philosophy that can be used in many areas to make emotionally engaging user interactive systems, as well as evaluate existing systems. Cuteness can also be included as an engineering design framework that can assist designers and engineers when creating engaging interactive systems that motivate the user in a happy, positive manner.

In contrast, I write about government discourses and the work of social activists on the World Wide Web. I often feel that the foisting of cuteness on the public in children's websites is often counterproductive for information literacy. Parodies, hoaxes, remixes, and mashups maybe might grab my scholarly attention, but not cuteness per se.

This workshop will be held in conjunction with the SIG-CHI conference on Designing Interactive Media in South Africa.

Update: Since posting, I have discovered cuteoverload.com, which is actually a remarkably compelling website. Link via the blog of Felicia Day, writer and star of the web show The Guild.