Category Archives: Writing

The goal of capitalist economics is finding ways to increase the profitability of capital. A socialist or humanist economics, in contrast, has improving the quality of human life as it’s main goal. Similarly, a capitalist sociology is focused on research that facilitates capital accumulation and profits. There’s a lot to recomend in James Manyika, Kara Sprague and Lareina Yee’s recent piece, “Using technology to improve workforce collaboration,” but in the end, it’s limited by it’s capitalist focus.

Even in the most superficial sense, for example, the writer’s class biases are obvious. Their definition of a ‘knowledge worker’ for example, seems very focused on the middle to upper professional classes, rather than on, say, nurse, police officers or firefighters (to cite the most obvious examples) less often associated with intellectual work, collaboration, and writing. Similarly, the goal of the research is explicitly oriented towards increasing productivity and so profits.

Perhaps less obviously, the lack of collaboration noted by the researchers might simply be another example of the low-grade resistance to exploitation that you might expect to find in any workplace. In that sense, it’s more related to workers taking long lunches and leaving early on Friday. Given the insecurities of professionals, and the internecine competition if not warfare encouraged in a market economy, we shouldn’t be surprised to find collaboration stunted, at the very least.

In the end, too, we have to ask for whose benefit are we improving collaboration? “Imagine the economic benefits for organizations,” he author’s write, “able to double the number of inspired employees or triple the volume of new product releases.” Imagine the social benefits, we might counter, of a workplace where people do work that matters to themselves and their community. Imagines workers who decide that another consumer project is a waste of time and energy.

Even as the recession technically ends, U.S. universities, a lumbering battleship that’s almost impossible to turn, show signs of some slow changes, perhaps for the better, that might help to make education more accessible. We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, though. On the one hand we can make education more accessible via new communication technologies. On the other hand, distance education risks denaturing learning, further alienating students who mistrust schools.

“Reform has more do with rethinking the way we design and deliver learning opportunities… ” J. David Armstrong, Jr. president of Broward College writes, “and understanding the nature of today’s learner, who wants to be engaged, yet needs convenient access.” And increasing access increasingly means reaching non-traditional students: “Reform must include new strategies to support students completing their degrees, and attracting adults back into our educational system to complete their education” (“Online learning opens doors wider for students in tough economy”).

Armstrong’s argument sounds fancy but it’s really simple. U.S. education can use their existing facilities more effectively and so lower the costs of education by using distance education. Your physical plant stays the same (offices and classrooms basically) but the number of students increases exponentially. The key term is “engaged.” That is, how can you make online education feel as personal, as involved, as the traditional classroom? Here’s where the rock meets the hard place of making education cheaper.

Even after decades of replacing full time faculty with adjuncts, and splitting U.S. higher education into a shrinking pool of tenured haves and non-tenured have not’s, administrators are not done cutting costs. Enter Twitter and Facebook. “95 percent of students ages 18 to 24 use social-networking tools,” according to a recent study, “including instant messages and texting, 64 percent multiple times a day. Yet just 18 percent do so for schoolwork, and 27 percent never do. Just 5 percent never use social networks (“Social networks not just for chatting anymore“).

There are lots of ways that schools can make learning more engaging. Pay teachers well, and keep their workload low; keep classes small; eliminate students loans and fund education through generous grants. All of these things would create the impression that school is a welcoming place, a time to reflect and rethink and then go back to your life with a new perspective and some new skills. But administrators see those numbers that show so many people using social networking and they think: Twitter costs almost nothing …

Only in academia could not paying attention and gossiping– often nasty gossiping– be dignified with the official sounding label “back channel communication.” Marc Parry (“Conference Humiliation: They’re Tweeting Behind Your Back”) told one story in the Chronicle of Higher Education last month, and then Joe McCarthy (“The Dark Side of Digital Backchannels in Shared Physical Spaces“) went into much more detail on his blog a few days ago.

I was particularly struck by McCarthy’s piece, in which he lists his unhappiness with back channels at conferences in this way: “the non-democratization of attention; our addiction to gossip; the unhealthy cycle of manipulation for stimulation; and the prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, and power promulgated by homophily in networks … to name a few.” What so funny (not in a ha ha way) is that this list describes the dark side of academia in general, made manifest via tweets.

It’s the dark side of our culture, too, and the crassness promulgated in several segments of commercial culture, a kind of narcissistic crudeness that seems to substitute for what was once thought to be wit and charm. It’s the Coulterization of public debate; ugliness for money, and your chicks for free. It’s fascinating that academic culture, once so fiercely independent, should reflect such a profoundly unreflective engagement with commercial culture and discourse.