in search of glue.

I really want to be sleeping but my brain has been humming for too many hours and now I can't shut it off.

contents of the hum:

I've been putting some pressure on myself these days -- a bit of it is due, and a bit of it is undue--and I guess I'm trying to sort out how to attend to the due parts (the undue will always persist regardless of how much attention I throw its way, and really, I should be focusing on why I put undue pressure on myself, not what that nagging, vague force is compelling me to do).

You see, this program I'm in resembles, in some ways, scattershot pellets shot into a dark night from a well-intentioned rifle (where pellets = my academic courses of study and dark night = my future). This is the nature of interdisciplinarity, and I get that. Not only do I get it, but I also signed up for it and it's a little late in the game to be complaining about it.

However, now in my last semester, I'm craving a way to tie it all together. I want to weave the last four semesters into a pretty french braid. As a useful corollary, it's Week 6 of my classes which means I'm supposed to be thinking about what I want to work on for my final projects. But all I can come up with are loosely linked concepts that I care deeply about and want to cohere into a larger idea that makes my motor rev. (Oh, how I want, so desperately, to rev.)

Here, in no particular order, are the aforementioned half-baked concepts:

• collective action -- the power of mobs
• social capital as a byproduct of virtual activism (in other words, just because we can't always quantify the benefits of online political movements doesn't mean that their effects are moot)
  
• the (un)importance of transparency/authenticity in building trust

In other news, I realized that I am addicted to spinach. see also: caffeine and songs about robots.

trusting the lipless.

This semester I'm taking a class called Globalization, New Media and Social Activism. Its title reflects the audacious ambition of its syllabus. We're only 3 weeks into it and already, I'm tempted to skim the reading and soothe myself by humming a quaint "It's a Small World" lullaby.

I think part of the reason I've bristled at the reading/in-class discussions is that I wonder why we're discussing these issues as if technology is the panacea to all our ills. The source of my skepticism isn't apathy (did that sound defensive? probably). I actually do care a great deal about the inequities of money and resources and fucking time that exist among the people on this planet. But it seems to me that our goals for improvement are moot without the presence of trust.

So what if new media has produced ways to communicate that we never before imagined? If a Facebook group forms in the woods, and no one is around to join it...

Wait: back to my point about trust. And how to generate that on the Internet. And how to translate that online trust into embodied activism.

By (dis)trust, I don't mean the type of identity-thievery we see in those Citimortgage credit card ads. I mean the type of trust popularized by Robert Putnam’s discussion of social capital.

Definitions of social capital vary widely, but here are a few I've been mulling over as I do my reading for this class.

‘the process by which social actors create and mobilize their network connections within and between organizations to gain access to other social actors’ resources’ (Knoke 1999, p. 18).

‘the web of cooperative relationships between citizens that facilitate resolution of collective action problems’ (Brehm and Rahn 1997, p. 999).

‘features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit’ (Putnam 1995, p. 67).

Is activism more/less effective if it is embodied? e.g. are in-person protests more likely to get a response than online petitions? And: does this matter? If an online petition doesn't achieve its desired persuasive outcome (encouraging a congressperson to vote a particular way, expressing displeasure at a new Wal-Mart practice), then has it still succeeded at generating an intangible, unquantifiable amount of trust that can be used for future activism or stored in a giant community bank? (full disclosure of my position: yes).

In order to focus my wayward thoughts in this class, I'm choosing to concentrate on this notion of trust because I think its presence can help to narrow the gap between the virtual and the embodied.

We spend so much time arguing about technology in polarized terms. The object/tool in the argument du jour is either feared or revered. Let's just shoot our load on this one and admit that technology will no more solve all our problems than it will create them.

So: trust: how do we produce it, maintain it, and capitalize on it?

Play

Lately, I've been thinking about the nature of play. We agree to some extent that play is a part of our nature. We think abstractly. We tinker. We devise more efficient ways of accomplishing tasks. Sometimes we simply devise different ways of doing the same tasks over and over again.

Yet my classes treat the concept of play as if all humans hold the same privilege to access it. I buy the premise of the importance of play (though I would maintain that all mammals possess our capacity/inclination for it). My objection is subtle, but it nags at me whenever a class discussion turns to the subject. Play takes place all the time, and yet, it seems undeniable that people who have access to more leisure time in general also have more access to the time and space in which to tinker, to do puzzles and crack codes.

I went to a lecture today about the marriage of collective social action and communication technologies. An example is the 2003 presidential election in Spain during which a massive student protest was organized via text message. Not only did thousands of students descend on the same square at the same time (all wearing black shirts), but their movement arguably turned the tide of the election.

Online collective projects of today -- Wikipedia, Linux, etc. -- tap into this human inclination for play. People steal moments during their workday or before they go to sleep in order to work on these social puzzles. When we study these movements in school, we pretend like anyone can join in. All it takes, after all, is access to a computer, and a few minutes in your schedule. But how many people are left out of that scenario? A lot.

We study how these initiatives are reshaping the production/consumption cycle in our society, and how wonderful it is that so many people can contribute to so many different areas of discourse that used to belong solely to the white guys at the top. But I guess I'm just more interested in the people who get left behind. They're the same ones who get left behind in most technology narratives... but for some reason, this one bothers me an awful lot more.