DISsent

In a recent meeting, I heard John Snow, the dean of Meteorology at OU, use a mutilated proverb: One man's noise is another man's signal. I am a big fan of mixed metaphors and corrupted sayings - An apple a day makes 365 a year; Wake up and smell the early bird; Beauty is in the eyes of the beer holder.

The source of entertainment in mixed metaphors comes from associations, patterns, predictions that are violated - a mismatch between your internal semantic map and what you hear. And the joy of science and education, on the other hand, comes from discovering patterns and connections and associations - after all, it seems like our brains are capable of no other data processing mechanism than comparing patterns.

So in science, the same rule applies - different strokes for different folks - you pick the type of patterns that amuse you and call it a degree or a career. I personally find two types of patterns particularly engaging. The first type is about the natural structures that exhibit emergent qualities - water atoms creating the pattern of a snowflake, an ecosystem of cheetahs and gazelles balancing at an optimal size, a chain of chemical reactions enabling DNA replication. The second type of patterns that I enjoy are symbolic in nature. In that respect they are different from the first type (not created by humans and not dependent on them). These patterns generate a mind-boggling array of challenges - translation, culture, identity, linguistic change, language acquisition are just some of the problems on that list.

And yet they have a lot in common with the patterns of the first type. Just like snow flakes emerge from the interactions between individual atoms, language changes occur thanks to the actions of thousands or sometimes millions of language users; the changes are dynamic, bottom-up, spontaneous. The spontaneity and the lack of top-down control is what makes them fascinating. Introduce top-down control and the adaptive capacity of the system diminishes or dies.

To me, there are several disciplines too fascinated with the top-down control to be interesting - political science, law, and to some extent history. Rather than start with complexity and emergent qualities of individual agents, they tend to focus on upper level top-down phenomena - social institutions (whose structure is predetermined by a finite set of codified instructions); laws (another rigid symbolic structure) and attempts at post-mortem re-evaluations of social institutions and laws to fit the extant power structure (I am talking about history now).

I have had a web site since 2000. For most of the time, my web efforts have been unnoticed by the web community. Nobody gave a damn. Nobody read my stuff. Nobody looked at my pictures. There were a few hits here and there, but it was still painfully close to an ego-crushing nobody.

So this whole time I was thinking - what does it take to be noticed? Over time, I have come up with three solutions - each new one better and more accurate than the previous one.

First I thought it was all about form - good design, readability, use of color, fancy web technology. Nobody wants to see a site that looks like it was made in the ancient times when people used Netscape and Pentiums running at 100MHz were scary fast. No one wants to see yellow text on an orange background.

Then I figured out that form was nothing - content is everything. Without good content, even the best design only gets viewed once for its artistic value and people never come back to it. Good content means having unique information - or not so unique information grouped in a unique way, adding value to the commonly available resources that are not so easy to use in other places.

Now I am thinking that content is nothing, too. You are only as good as your audience. You can't hope to create enough cool content yourself - you have to have audience feedback built in. That way the resource will grow faster and it will reflect the readers' needs. Without comments, ratings, user submissions, discussions, etc., the best content in the best form is as dead as a doornail. You might get linked to from facebook or another place where people can actually refer to your content and discuss it.

The final solution - unique content presented in a readable form in a way that would generate audience feedback. That's why sometimes the most obnoxious bloggers that make no damn sense attract tons of readers eager to point out their shortcomings and perfectly rational bloggers with mathematically precise arguments, beautiful metaphors, and the highest respect for other people's opinions get a yawn at best - or nothing at all.

Nine times out of ten, when I step out of a cinema theater after seeing a Hollywood movie, I say to myself, why the hell didn't I stay at home? On that night, too, I had that reaction - me and two other PhD students have just watched Hidalgo - a tale of a cowboy winning a horse race in the Orient. Every essentializing colonial stereotype of the East was there, carefully mixed with the Western elements to produce a story that made The Return of the Jedi look like a realistic tale. Yet as we stepped out of the theater, one of my companions happily pronounced, This was a great intercultural movie!

I have always resisted the idea that multiculturalism is here already - inescapable, ubiquitous, imminent. You can only believe that if you watch nonsense like Hidalgo. Or if you think that being able to look up a recipe of an exotic dish online lets you "experience their culture". Or if you think that if token people like Yo Yo Ma have acquired a cosmopolitan glow, so will everyone else eventually who decides to cross borders and cultures.

There are success stories, to be sure, but they are usually the only ones that get told - sometimes simply because the people who have other stories to tell don't have the voice to tell them, or don't even speak a language in which anybody would listen to them. And the complacent happy people who repeat the multiculturalism mantra must listen carefully to these painful, dirty, yet beautiful stories.

I no longer get upset because of sucky Hollywood movies - I just stay at home and let Netflix bring the real cinematography to my laptop screen. The last rental was Dirty pretty things - which, my friend, is indeed a great intercultural film. It is about the side of life people don't want to see or hear about - the life of misery that is as much of a story of crossing borders as is Yo Yo Ma and the Olympic Games. It is the story of invisible, voiceless, powerless people. At the end of the film, there is a rare moment when one of these people gets to talk to a wealthy doctor - the Underworld talks to "the World":

The doctor: How come I've never seen you people before?
Okwe: Because we are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. And suck your cocks.

All you multicultural prophets, go rent that film and please shut up about the brave new world already.

One thing I can't stand among academics is mistaking quantity for quality. This behavior takes many forms - assigning 15 books to read in a class when carefully picked snippets from 5 would do, putting a hundred questions on a test when 20 would do, conducting a hundred interviews when data would saturate after 30. Another form of academic nazism is paying too much attention to the protocol at the expense of the content. Here we have people taking off 10 points for 1.1 inch margins instead of 1.0 inch margins prescribed by APA, but letting through bad arguments and not rewarding great ideas; respecting peer-reviewed journals but turning up their noses at non peer reviewed ones; talking ad nauseam about Research 1 universities and then giving sucky lectures and getting horrible evaluations.

There is one particularly disturbing form of academic snobbism - Wikibashing, bitching about Wikipedia - how it is unreliable, incomplete, biased, wrong - an untouchable for a 'true academic'. I couldn't disagree more. It is sheer blindness to believe that everything on the Internet is good information; but it is also myopic to dismiss a resource only because it is an online collaborative project.

I will start with a far-fetched example. In my home town, we have a big park right next to our house. I had to cross it on my way to school for ten years, and then every day on my way to the university for another five. The park has paved paths and boulevards; but it also has well-trodden trails that criss-cross it in every direction. They are made by the people scurrying to work, to the shop, to the bus stop; they are usually the most efficient ways to get from place to place. Landscape workers fight these every now and then by planting shrubs across them, digging ditches, putting lines - but the people always win, and the trails return.

The park planners knew what they were doing when they laid out the paved roads; but they can't beat the efficiency that comes out of the collective wisdom of thousands of people, thousands of trials, day after day. In the same way, collective knowledge accumulates in truly collaborative projects like Wikipedia and without any top-down control (given enough time) distills to levels unthinkable in any managed top-down environment.

The established reputable sources can still be unreliable. I still remember looking up Mt. Elbrus in Britannica - only to find the most God awful picture of it I have ever seen - shot from the Baksan valley, with lower mountains in the forefront blocking the bottom two thirds of the mountain and the top third covered in clouds. This is not at all what Elbrus looks like. It is a gorgeous mountain, especially from the North, and from the South, too - provided you can get high enough to get an unobstructed view. Worse still, the picture is still there - even in the online Britannica - see for yourself.

Every now and then a university professor has to become a con artist. Every now and then you have to teach something you don't believe in - because that is a part of the required course, because the dean said so, or because saying otherwise would be true but not PC enough. It is not a pleasant thing to do - one of the biggest reliefs for me of not teaching for the last two years was this liberation from con artistry.

I haven't taught long enough in countries other than the US; but I have seen it happen here for sure. And then it also seems that the amount of wishful thinking in education varies from discipline to discipline, from department to department.

Communication is a fertile ground for educational hoodwinking. Everything is communication, and depending on the skill of the teacher it is either the biggest treasure for the student or the biggest soap bubble waiting to burst. Communication is a vital skill, yet an auxiliary one - you cannot make a living just communicating - even though paradoxically that may be all you end up doing. It is a tool not a trade.

On the academic side, it is an embarrassment of a discipline. It constantly has to justify its existence by differentiating itself from media studies, journalism, linguistics, rhetoric. It constantly has to explain itself - this is what we do, and this is why it is important. The most uncomfortable thing is to explain why the laymen don't see that there is a place for this "science" - you have to fall back on the elephant-in-the-room type arguments - we are so ubiquitous you can't see us. This is like McCarthy era conspiracies about not being to detect the Soviet missile system - we have no evidence of their existence because they are so sophisticated we can't see them, hence they exist. And that is even before you have to explain how come no one in Europe studies communication (except for the Dutch, who really study argumentation). And before the fact that no one gives a hoot about communication in Ivy League schools (not that they should be seen as an example in anything). Before you get to see the I-want-to-be-an-experimental-psychologist-but-suck-at-statistics inferiority complex of some communication "science lovers".

Is it really that bad? Yes and no. They are communication departments made up of talented, motivated, engaged scholars that produce real work. I have seen one myself. But unfortunately the vagueness of disciplinary boundaries also creates loopholes for unimaginative, anti-intellectual, tradesman-style time waste masquerading as scholarship.

I have a rule for calling my parents - never call when sad. I should make another communication rule for myself - never right angry blog posts.

The transparency of codes is an illusion. No system of expression is accurate, unbiased, objective - everything comes with its unique flavor, a unique mold, a unique set of opportunities and restrictions. Just like SQL rules structure relational databases so do relational databases structure the way data is processed and presented on the Internet.

Another example of a non-transparent code is APA style. Charles Bazerman, writing for a collection of papers on the rhetoric of inquiry, presents a beautiful argument about how this works. His ideas explain a lot about the lives of wannabe psychologists (which are quite abundant in communication departments) - and about the reality of publishing and perishing. He traces the prescriptions embedded in the APA manual to the behaviorist tradition in psychology:

Instead of a reasoner about the mind, the author is a doer of experiments, maker of calculations, and presenter of results. The author does not need to reason through an intellectual or theoretical problem to justify or design an experiment, nor in most cases does he or she need to identify and take positions on arguments in literature. To produce new results, the author must identify behavior that has been inadequately described and design an experiment to exhibit it (p. 138).

With the article primarily presenting results, constrained and formatted prescription, authors become followers of rules to gain the reward of acceptance and to avoid the punishment of nonpublication (p. 139).

Finally, readers are no longer cast in the role of people trying to understand or solve some problem. Rather, they are presumed to be looking for additional bits of knowledge to fit in with their previous bits (p. 140).

Within this rhetorical world, the chaos of intellectual difference is eliminated. Individuals accumulate bits, follow rules, check each other out, and add their bits to an encyclopedia of the behavior of the subjects without subjectivity. There is not much room for thinking or venturing here, but much for behaving and adhering to prescriptions (p. 141).

Here's a reference to the source from which these came - in no other format than proper APA, of course (well, almost - I always violate APA style by listing full first names instead of initials - otherwise there is no way to convert to MLA later):

Bazerman, Charles. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. In John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, & Donald N. McCloskey (Eds.), The rhetoric of the human sciences: Language and argument in scholarship and public affairs (pp. 125-144). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Coming back from a conference in El Paso (the American Translation and Interpreting Association biannual meeting), I was greeted in the OKC airport by a big crimson sign advertising how OU ranks first in this and that, accompanied by the slogan "Excellence in action".

Three days before that, I listened to the welcoming remarks from the UTEP president, Dr. Diana Natalicio, who talked about her 20+ years experience of running the university. And based on what she said, it looks like the administration of UTEP understands some things better than OU does.

She said that when she came to UTEP many years ago, it was common to see bumper stickers that said "Harvard on the border". She said that she knew that such thinking had to go. Nothing can complicate matters more than ill chosen priorities. Instead of beating Ivy League, UTEP concentrated on serving the local community and matching the demographics of the student body to the demographics of the local population. By now, those goals have been achieved.

At OU, not wanting to be among top schools is blasphemy. You could say that setting goals high makes people work harder and show everyone what they are capable of - after all, Excellence is no secret. But setting impossibly high goals contaminates people's mind with wrong priorities. Just like UTEP won't and shouldn't be the Harvard on the Border, nor will OU ever be the Harvard in the Prairies. There is nothing wrong with being a quality regional university with a great potential and a great educational value. One simply couldn't ask for more. As the French will tell you, the best is the enemy of the good. Or, in American speak, if it ain't broken, don't fix it - no matter how cool you may look fixing it.