Wikipedia Wins!

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Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology at the Brooklyn Museum, told a story about how social networking can benefit a cultural institution. The museum posted some images from its collection on The Commons, a space on the photo-sharing site Flickr dedicated to public photo collections. Not much happened at first, she said, and the museum was about to abandon the experiment until a group of devoted Flickr users began to make use of the material. One was so taken by the museum’s photos of the 1893 Chicago Exposition that he started adding tags to identify different buildings. Like a good curator or archivist, he even provided sources. “Now we see people who have a real investment in these materials looking at them and helping us,” Ms. Bernstein said.

Switch-Tasking and Twittering Into the Future at Library and Museum Meeting, Jennifer Howard, March 2, 2009

I have to admit that despite my love of technology I’m skeptical about certain trends. There’s a fine line between innovation and planned obsolescence. Everyone likes a new shiny toy but not every new toy is worth the cost. I get tired, too, of the bias against Wikipedia, which is too often based in ignorance.

I might change my mind, but to me Twitter embodies the senseless pursuit of change and fun. It’s the very definition of tedious and silly, the pet-rock of communication. Nero tweats while Rome burns. Wikipedia in particular, and wikis in general, though, are innovations that continue to drive substantive change.

Collaborative writing technologies are going to transform learning in ways that are almost impossible to predict. I think the only certainty is that these changes are all going to recall the Wikipedia model of a organic, living body of knowledge created through conversation and debate. Twitter can’t touch that.

Posted in: Language, Miscellaneous, Professional, Writing

Facts and Myths

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As to the economics, remember that when it comes to deficits and debt, the real issues over the long term are (1) the ratio of debt to GDP (we’re still under 50 percent, which ain’t bad, considering all the spending that’s been going on; at the end of World War II it was substantially above 120 percent). And (2) whether and when we’re back to growing the GDP, which is the most reliable way of improving the ratio.

“Obama’s Goal: Halving the Budget Deficit by 2012. Really?” Monday, February 23, 2009, Robert Reich

If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

“The Big Test,” February 23, 2009, David Brooks

The next several months– much of the summer too, no doubt– is going to be party-time for the right wing, wacky to relatively reasonable, as the debate over the Obama changes begins to build up steam. I think some careful educational reading is in order.

I don’t think it’s quite true, as Brooks claims, that the Obama administration is inventing a plan whole-cloth alone in an office. I don’t know the history of each of these ideas, but certainly everything from deficit spending to green energy investing has a rich and varied history they can use.

Brooks’ fears about bureaucrats is a gentile version of the Reagan hypocrisy. The right’s myth says one thing– big government is bad, the market is good– and then does something else. Expand the government by expanding the defense budget; ignore the market when your pals want a no-bid process.

I think there is psychological truth to the paranoid sounding notion that the right would like to cripple government by bankrupting it both ideologically and financially. I can’t think of any other reason why they (in the guise of Bobby Jindal) would propose a simplistic repetition of bad policy.

I think Robert Reich is a good guide to the stimulus plans and budget, although I think his lack of confidence in the economic recovery might be overstated, perhaps purposefully. We also have a lot of data that will help flush out the myths; I like the Swivel Site for the visuals, which help me keep track of things.

Posted in: Language, Writing

American Watch

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US labor law currently permits a wide range of employer conduct that interferes with worker organizing. Enforcement delays are endemic, regularly denying aggrieved workers their right to an “effective remedy.” Sanctions for illegal conduct are too feeble to adequately discourage employer law breaking, breaching the international law requirement that penalties be “sufficiently dissuasive” to deter violations.

Unfair union election rules allow employers to engage in one-sided, aggressive anti-union campaigning while denying union advocates a similar chance to respond and banning union organizers from the workplace or even from distributing information on company property. If confronted with clear evidence of employee support for a union, employers can force a formal election and manipulate the often lengthy pre-election period to pound their anti-union drumbeat and, in many cases, violate US labor laws, confident that any penalties will be minimal and long delayed.

Workers who overcome these obstacles and successfully form a union may still be unable to conclude a collective agreement, in large part because weak US labor law provisions fail to meaningfully punish illegal employer bad-faith negotiating or to adequately define good-faith bargaining requirements.

Human Rights Watch: The Employee Free Choice Act, A Human Rights Imperative

Nothing spooks the U.S. managerial cadres more than unions. I have always been surprised, for example, at the money universities spend to prevent unionization or to fight an existing union. Administrators would cut their own salaries before they would stop paying a retainer to their union fighting law firm.

If you have never been around contract negotiations, or an organizing drive, you probably think this is just one of those lefty myths about the big bad Capital wolf waiting at our door. If you want a feel for the reality of the paranoia, though, you just have to do a quick search on the act. It’s very real.

What’s so interesting is that all of the fear assumes that people don’t really want unions. The law, then, won’t make it easier for people to make a decision about unions, it will make it easier for unions to manipulate people. Because, of course, no one in their right mind wants a union. I bet those law firms know better.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, Union, War, Writing

The “S” Word

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Paul Krugman has launched a determined ideological campaign for the return of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes as the best and most effective framework, for both economic theory and policy, to address the rapidly spreading global financial and economic crisis. For public policy this campaign implies “very significant” public investments in jobs, income, infrastructure, education. By significant is meant surpassing in size, per year, – if you want to return to something greater than zero growth – the expected contraction in the economy from Dec, 2007, the official start of the current Recession, until it ends. The forecasters with the most accurate record in this crisis expect a 4-6 percent contraction lasting 5-6 additional fiscal quarters. The number of economists predicting double-digit official unemployment rates is swelling. Nonetheless, one should be cautious interpreting any forecasted numbers…economic forecasting is no less difficult or uncertain than weather forecasting.

Paul Krugman’s Ideological Campaign for the Return of “Depression Economics,” John Case, Political Affairs Magazine

It all seems so long ago, but there was a particularly surreal moment in the Presidential campaign when McCain (via his minions) began accusing Obama of being a socialist. Seemingly out of nowhere a friend asked me to define socialism, and it took me a bit before I could come up a more or less standard definition: “democratic ownership of the means of production.”

That’s a very rough definition, and it’s more than a little revisionist in terminology if not in intent. Socialist were certainly more democratic in spirit than, say, Communists, but they did not always put it that way. In any case, it’s got me thinking about how much public economic discourse might change in the post-market era.

Cesear Chavez advocates “Socialism for the 21st Century,” of course, and in England they have never been shy about the need to nationalize banks, given the current crisis. I can’t see the development of a New American Socialist Party, but it would be great if the old Cold War fears didn’t block the debate over the need for investment in infrastructure and national health care.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing