
Teaching Civility: Two Daring Assignments - nkzednan
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/teaching-civility-two-daring-assignments/2014/10/30/6c71682e-4b3c-11e4-a046-120a8a855cca_story.html
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fiatmoney
Why has "community engagement" broken down? The author phrases it in terms of
"omg kids and their cell phones, lol" but it's at least worth contemplating:

\- 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.

~~~
cbd1984
> there was a massive campaign of neighborhood destruction

... 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.

~~~
fiatmoney
"So... social clubs have to let in blacks, now? Is that what you're saying?"

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".

~~~
navait
>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.

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.

~~~
lil_cain
Unless someone writes an annoyed blog post about it. When it does end up
permanently googlable.

------
ef4
The whole thesis falls apart if you accept that digitally-mediated
communication can be as meaningful as in meatspace. And it should be obvious
that many people already treat it as meaningful in their own lives.

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.

~~~
alexbecker
I don't think the author's main problem is that communication is shifting to
the digital, but rather some of the side-effects of that.

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.

~~~
ef4
> 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.

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.

~~~
nl
_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._

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.

~~~
tankenmate
The vulnerability of the community is inversely proportional to the
invulnerability of the individuals? This almost sounds like it should be a
social law (up there with Goodwin's etc)

------
qsymmachus
Interesting article, though it's essentially a extension of the the concept of
"filter bubbles" into the social sphere
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble)).

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.

~~~
randallsquared
So you agree with the article that "[...] the Internet isn’t the main culprit
(the trend began in the 1960s), [...]"?

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.

~~~
qsymmachus
Ah, I missed that line. That only pushes the timeline back 40 years though. I
still chafe at the idea that this is a uniquely modern problem.

~~~
mokus
I completely agree, but is it really the point being argued? Perhaps the issue
is not that there are bubbles at all, but that where there were previously
larger bubbles shared by multiple people, there now tends to be one bubble per
person, nucleated around the work of an external entity (a search engine's
statistical analysis) poorly understood by the individuals it's affecting. Not
that I would concede that it's a worse situation than preceded it, just that
it may be the qualitative difference of the bubbles being personal that people
are referring to.

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.

------
heyhi
rant{ how do you compare texting, tweeting, and video games. HOW. texting and
tweeting are meant as a means of communication. Video games are not. They are
done by people who want to engage with a particular medium, like reading. They
may HAVE communication such as, I don't know, shopping. Whatever argument you
want to make about our new culture that we've developed as a result of
assimilating new technology, fine. But do not lump unrelated activities that
may look similar from the outside as a means to prove your point. If you argue
that video games shut people off then you have to admit that books, and to
some extent movies, do the same. Video games are ENTERTAINMENT that one might
(and probably does) require full focus on and solitude with which to focus.
Texting and Tweeting are things that require very small, quick amounts of
attention and it is not a focused effort with the goal of getting something
out; you just want to communicate. Which makes it easy to make our presence in
the community inconsistent.}

~~~
dllthomas
A lot of people use video games as a social activity.

~~~
greenpresident
When I was in middle school, Battle.net was our main tool of communication. I
hung out in channels with my friends from school and we chatted and played
together. Diablo and ICQ were our way of texting.

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.

------
quanticle
Has the good professor considered the fact that the sneering condescension of
his hard no texting/no e-mailing rules encourages the very breakdown in
civility that he's studying? At one point the landline telephone was the cause
of the very same moral panic that people are having about texting and cell
phones. It was thought that having instantaneous voice communication would
erode the "civility" of letter writing.

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.

~~~
anigbrowl
He's not saying that texting and emailing are problematic in themselves, but
that he has a problem with people constantly fiddling with their mobile
devices _while in his lecture_. That impedes his ability to do his job, and
short-changes the students who do want to engage with him.

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.

~~~
quanticle
>short-changes the students who do want to engage with him

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.

~~~
vacri
Talk to some teachers, because it affects them. Teaching a group of
uninterested people takes its toll. Why bother making your class a good one if
no-one cares? May as well just phone it in. Sure, you could argue "just do it
for the ones that do care", but that's easier said than done. And if the
teacher is phoning it in, that does affect you.

~~~
groby_b
Of course, we might want to dig deeper on that question. OK, so teaching an
uninterested group of people does affect the teacher - why are those people
uninterested in the first place? If they are uninterested, do they have the
option to not attend?

~~~
bsder
> If they are uninterested, do they have the option to not attend?

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.

~~~
groby_b
I don't disagree. I'm saying that this is not an issue of civility, but of
misaligned incentives.

