Teaching Civility: Two Daring Assignments
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
- there was a massive campaign of neighborhood destruction from post-WW2 era to perhaps the mid 1990s, resulting in atomization, suburbanization, and quasi-military occupation of the remainder. There is a robust hypothesis that city living is at the root of civic engagment and that, eg, the Great Migrations explain the timing of the civil rights movement. Suburbanization is basically that in reverse. The atomization that happens when you geniunely can't trust your neighbors is as well.
- "civic engagement" of a kind retrospectively judged to be "wrong" now goes on your Permanent Record. It's potentially unsafe to organize to do many meaningful things.
- major institutions have lost their ability to be as exclusionist as they historically felt necessary to prevent entryism that fundamentally changes the nature of the institution. Instutions historically leading "civic engagment" become ineffective or lose their original purpose.
- relentless focus on vacant aggregation-friendly metrics amongst our elite. You can put "volunteer hours" on a spreadsheet, thus, you get the optimal number of "volunteer hours", rather than civic engagment per se. Elite high school & college-age populations simply lack time for meaningful civic engagement, most of which is indistinguishable on a spreadsheet from "hanging out" - ironically, "chilling on the agora" is essentially what civic engagement breaks down to.
... driven by the fact most people who lived in cities, pre-WWII, didn't live in nice gentrified neighborhoods with fixed-up brownstones and Local Character. They lived in slums with crappy, run-down tenements and whatever you call what happens when you shove as many people as possible into as little room as you can bribe someone to let you get away with. Crime and disease, that's it.
Having a GI Bill education, a car which let you move even if the trolley schedule said you stayed put, and a house with a yard where your kids don't end up in roving gangs sounded pretty damn good. It sounded like the American Dream.
> There is a robust hypothesis that city living is at the root of civic engagment and that, eg, the Great Migrations explain the timing of the civil rights movement.
To be clear, I agree with all this. My point is that it's important to maintain historical perspective, lest we fall into the trap of imagining that people from the past weren't reacting to comprehensible forces. Yes, some of those forces came down to frank racism, but others were as I mentioned above, and ignoring the good reasons while emphasizing the bad ones is not only an insult to history, it's a stumbling block to understanding the present.
> major institutions have lost their ability to be as exclusionist as they historically felt necessary to prevent entryism that fundamentally changes the nature of the institution.
So... social clubs have to let in blacks, now? Is that what you're saying?
> relentless focus on vacant aggregation-friendly metrics amongst our elite. You can put "volunteer hours" on a spreadsheet, thus, you get the optimal number of "volunteer hours", rather than civic engagment per se.
If you don't have rules, you have favoritism.
If you do have rules, you have rules lawyering.
If you have rules which are up to interpretation, you don't have rules.
Ironically, this kind of baiting is exactly one of the contributors to social dissolution I'm talking about. Speaking at the PTA? Better hope one of your "neighbors" doesn't decide it's politically convenient to crucify you as having said something Wrong and put it on your Permanent Record.
To give you a concrete for-instance of "entryism", the Campus Christian Club being forbidden to discriminate based on religion. Or, ongoing conflicts between the lesbian community and trans people who wish to participate in it, and between the broader feminist community and its lesbian contingent. Or, the institutional weakness of political parties in the US due to inability to restrict their memberships by ideology, and consequent flow of power to more unaccountable groups.
It's probably not a huge contributor to social dissolution, all things considered, but there is a reason why it is said that "good fences make good neighbors".
I'm not necessarily suggesting we should go back, after all those changes were made for good reasons. But it could be that those changes also had serious negative effects that have to be factored into social planning.
On the other hand, I could be mixing up cause and effect.
I know petty things happen when nothing is on the line, but your idea of the average PTA is ludicrous. There is no permanent record; People forget even controversial ideas quickly in such a situation. You have to act like a total douchebag to make a permanent negative impression on something like a PTA.
Finding it meaningful depends on the fidelity of the technology. As the tech keeps improving, the circle of people who experience real community online keeps expanding.
There was a time when only perceived-maladjusted uber-geeks found community through digital networks. Now the average young person does. Eventually everyone will, it's blindingly obvious that that's where the tech is going.
I think most people lack an appreciation of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system.
1. We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there.
2. More importantly, the web gives us a great way to find people like us. In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities, and there are serious downsides to this. (This is not explicitly brought up in the article, but is I think underlying several of his concerns.)
Also:
> Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system.
This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology.
The distinction is an artifact of our tech still being pretty immature. There's no reason you couldn't experience remote and physically-present people simultaneously on even footing. We keep our digital world locked behind screens, but only for now.
> In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities,
That generalizes even further: the more freedom and choice you give people, the more they sort themselves. I understand why that freaks some people out, but I find it hard to get worked up over more people getting more of what they want. There are better ways to keep the peace between disparate groups than by forcing them share close quarters.
> This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology.
I think it's pretty uncontroversial. Short of proposing a soul or some weird quantum-based source of consciousness, we all just process inputs, and we can't tell the difference between the original signal and once that's been digitally sampled at sufficiently high frequency and reconstructed.
Specifically in response to
> That generalizes even further: the more freedom and choice you give people, the more they sort themselves. I understand why that freaks some people out, but I find it hard to get worked up over more people getting more of what they want. There are better ways to keep the peace between disparate groups than by forcing them share close quarters.
You've hit my concern on the head. You may be right that this won't create big problems. I'm quite worried that it will, but I admit my confidence in that assessment is low.
Is there evidence that is the case? Things like "gamergate" - which could almost be summarised as technology-mediated crowdsourced rudeness - seem to indicate the vulnerability online communities have to uncivil behaviours.
You can use this argument once we have sufficiently advanced digital systems. Until then it's a non-sequitur.
> As the tech keeps improving, the circle of people who experience real community online keeps expanding.
This is obviously true. There are clearly both positives and negatives to this.
Positive: If I like MLP: FIM & Dr. Who crossover fanfics, I can easily find hundreds of people who also do. This allows for even more niche communities than large cities did.
Negative: Echo chamber. Digital communities make diversity possible, but they, perhaps counterintuitively, tend to have the opposite effect. People are more comfortable in a largely homogeneous social environment, and as technology advances it becomes easier to attain this.
A lack of civility has frequently been a problem in most online communities I'm aware of.
It's true that the author seemed to find the use of technology uncivil. But I'm not sure he was wrong in this: in the context he mentioned (during his class, and bumping into people between class) the actions caused by the use of technology (inattention, and physical contact) are usually regarded as rude no matter what the cause.
How do you experience smells in a digital system, without reverting to sci-fi magic?
Edit: to be clearer, a lot of human communication involves non-verbal cues, often made unconsciously.
I agree that haptics and smell are much longer-term technologies. But making you smell a certain smell is "just" a question of poking the right neuron. It doesn't require any magic, just a lot of engineering.
I would also disagree about 'most' unconscious nonverbal cues. People behave differently talking to a camera, and pick up a lot more in person.
I question the hypothesis that the internet is uniquely responsible for the formation of filter bubbles – "cultural or ideological bubbles" can be formed a variety of ways, and have been forming for all of human history. Having said that, technology may accelerate this process, or lower the barriers required to connect with like-minded people, for better or worse.
I would argue that even if the internet didn't start the trend, online communication has been an enormously more efficient technology for one-dimensional community.
If anything, it seems like a better situation overall, and I'd rather emphasize the fact that large-scale telecommunications has made it much more possible to escape the "filter bubble" of the people you live and interact with on a daily basis. Even if you're just escaping into a new bubble of your own, that bubble is naturally much more permeable due to its smaller size and greater number of neighbor-bubbles, leading to more effective diffusion of ideas throughout the foam as a whole. I speculate that this is an important positive long-term effect but comes with a lot of short-term pains.
I guess the comparison is fair if it's based on the social interaction without face-to-face engagement. People would have been on the phone for hours but that used to be prohibitively expensive. Other people from school hung out on the basketball court and smoked weed, not really a great alternative either. I know it's a false dichotomy but those were my relevant options at the time.
Social rules change as the means of communication change. Attempting to preserve social rules at one period of time, whether it's 1890 or 1990 is foolhardy.
I find it equally irritating if people are messing with their phones in a movie theater. It's not that I want to limit their use of the internet, as that I don't want to be distracted by flashing objects in my peripheral vision when I'm trying to focus on a screen. If you want to text at the same time you're watching the movie then go sit in the back row where it won't impose upon other people.
Civility is not a matter of one technology being better than another, but of not being an ass towards the people in your immediate vicinity.
I don't see how it does that at all. If the students were being loud or otherwise actively disruptive, I'd get your point. But if my neighbor has her nose buried in her cellphone, I fail to see how that impedes my ability to engage with the professor by taking notes, asking questions, etc.
From the student/neighbor perspective I personally do find it distracting to have people around me doing irrelevant stuff in a context like that, but I have a pretty bad ADD so I know that's not typical of others' experience.
Most college students only care about getting the piece of paper that says "college degree".
Any effort above and beyond the minimum required is considered to be wasted effort.
But I'll Assume that it's still only a minor effect.
The part which would bug me is someone using a laptop or device to visibly do something else in class- because it's just far more visible and distracting.
Also "sneering condescension" for enforcing rules in his classroom?
The professor has a responsibility to teach his students. Not just an ethical one, but a financial one too. If he can't teach effectively with people texting/emailing then he has a responsibility to restrict those activities such that all his students are getting what they paid for.
I might suggest that a student failing to heed his classroom rules might constitute a breach of civility. He could easily have made getting caught equate to failing the class (this is a class on civility after all!) but he didn't, which indicates to me that he has some understanding of what civility is. He merely asked her to leave.
The right place to start is with equanimity and respect for society. Equanimity because interacting with people in real life is sometimes rather painful, and you can't take things back. Respect for society is similar to respect for the parents: this crazy, evil, dysfunctional society sort-of raised you (and your parents). Society is responsible for providing you with literally everything you know - even the basis for the views you have that loath society. This requires a kind of humility that is very difficult to impart. Usually it comes (if it comes) after a person has been self-sufficient and recognizes the very real trade-offs they might have to make in order to achieve even a fraction of their goals (which is precisely what happened to their parents, most likely).
Of course, all of this is far too much to ask of a single class. He sort of jumped at the students from one, relatively random direction (there are lots of other problems that weakness and disrespect engender, like lack of self-control, depression, etc) and certainly there are not shortage of well-meaning people honing in on some narrow error mode that is really a symptom of something much deeper that takes years of effort to overcome. In any event, a teacher who grows so easily angry when his students demonstrate ignorance of the very thing he's trying to teach might consider the real possibility that he's not fit to be teaching.