Progress Report

I’m disappointed with Obama’s first year, but not necessarily with Obama. It’s not the same thing. The economy is such a complex and formidable problem, that the most capable leadership in history may not be sufficient to cope with it over an entire decade, never mind a year. As I complained before the election, and will not get over, my biggest fear then and now is that the legacy of the Bush administration will be insurmountable. Obama, however, took on that challenge willingly, and for better or worse, if he fails to deliver recovery, or at least the perception of it, then he gets the credit. Bush got out from under it with a few boos at the inauguration ceremony. Historic, but pretty cheap as far as I’m concerned, considering what he didn’t do for the nation.

A new book confirms another one of my favorite peeves, that the Republicans played into the terrorist trap by distracting us with the enormous expenditure of resources and effort invested in assassinating Bill Clinton’s presidency. How can any sane person think that was somehow a good idea? Where is the evidence? As the economy has demonstrated, the benefit quite clearly accrued to captains of defense, drug, and petroleum industries, and somebody had to pay the price. There is an argument for goating of the banks and automotive industry, but as usual, the costs will trickle down, and the true victims are us. If, like the NRA and Tea Party politics, you are happy to sacrifice for the sake of General Dynamics, Merck, and Exxon, maybe that will work for you, but don’t kid yourself that General Dynamics are us.

Also as usual, Obama’s big failure is probably as much perceptual as performance. The stalling of the health care initiative affects virtually nothing in a practical way. Those with health insurance still have provider networks. Those without health insurance still have the emergency room. That’s a system of sorts, and it helps keep costs high, but once again, the economic benefits accrue to a select management, insurance, and investment group. Maybe we should consider under-insurance to be the real force behind our emergency services system. With health insurance, routine medical treatment would be returned to relatively low-cost routine medical facilities. All those around-the-clock, publicly financed, flu and sprain centers could be scaled back to trauma and life-threatening conditions. Would that solve the crisis of health care costs? Probably not, but we need some token concessions to common sense.

No, the problem with the Obama health care initiative is just what a lot of people other than me are thinking, that the time is not right. Health care is a concern. It’s a huge concern, and we see what he was thinking. Going in with a lot of momentum from the election. Get health care through on the momentum, then build economic activity around the health care initiative. It makes sense, and only those same insane exceptions could consider universal health care a bad thing, except that we neither see health care as being closely related to the economy, or as the foremost issue. The economy is the scary thing. Health care was too complicated and too vague and too esoteric. What would the health care bill have done for me? To tell you the honest to gawd truth, aside from the simple principle of caring for each other, I have no idea.

What I do know, is that housing values are still precarious. Construction is still down. The red-hot jobs market isn’t. The stock market got a little juke and has been creeping up since then, but the emphasis seems to be on creep, and the banks are siphoning off the benefit of any general improvement. The market highs of the housing bubble are charred hulks after a forest fire, an awe-inspiring tribute to a fertile past, now only pathetic, remote, and mythical. The priority, therefore, in the disturbed minds of the voters who put Obama so firmly into office, was not health care. It was economics. Reagan and the Bush boys succeeded in totally derailing us from any social course of fiscal responsibility determined by the Great Depression and returned us to the Jurassic economy of the deregulated free market (redundant?). There seems to be little dispute of that, even from the most conservative, Bill-O’Reilly-variety of financial critics, because the train wreck is sort of hard to ignore. The only question is how to shift the blame to Obama, and if he helps them enough by investing too much time and effort in health care issues that are important but nobody understands, they may be able to pull it off.

Here's Thinking for You,

Iffy

What Educators Do Best

One of the obvious joys of blogging is the opportunity to be an expert on everything, even if only in my own mind, and in my case, that's where my joy has been pretty much confined to. Playing with what I can only consider to be an educational blog (because it has no other apparent useful value), I started thinking that I might eventually want to actually connect with some kind of audience. Originally I took it that making connections would depend on assigning the right key words to insure attention from like-minded intellectuals searching for information. Eventually I determined that perhaps there were no such key words, or no such intellectuals, at least who would admit it, or that what I was producing didn’t qualify as intellectual, or maybe even as information.

Based on this positive attitude, by trial and error I eventually came up with the idea that perhaps I could more productively apply the effort to looking at some blogs and blogging strategy instead of thinking I knew how online searching worked. After skimming through a few educational blogs, however, I quickly realized something else. There are numerous suggestions for great ideas, resources, and connections, but probably 95% of posted material, like blogs for a lot of subjects, either repeats what has been posted other places or rediscovers things that have been produced by somebody else, adding captions to screen captures from Second Life as cartoon graphics, for instance.

Some of the responses make sarcastic comments about redundancy, some attribute social networking to political conspiracy or alien intervention, and some include links to Pamela Anderson's latest sex tape (...which is really about animal rights. How would I know? Research.) but the authors are not discouraged, and in the end, does it matter? Blogging communities are more insular than global information access seems to suggest, and we spend a lot of time chasing our own tails, but is that really any different than talking to somebody you know about something cool you found out about on the internet? Probably not, neither.

And does that mean blogging for education is a bad idea? No, it just means that the problem isn’t information. The problem is access. Educators spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel, but then, maybe that’s what they do best.

Here's Thinking for You

Iffy

Google Does Right

If nothing else, the relationship of Google and China illustrates that neoliberal global capitalism has not conclusively marginalized the effects of national identity and national sovereignty. Despite global economic involvement by China, the Chinese have not been effectively reduced to the ideological status of an obedient citizen in an economically unified global nation. The Chinese have their own agenda, and it does not necessarily conform to capitalist economic expectations.

To an extent, the results are unsurprising. Google sold itself by making concessions to Chinese demands for accommodations in operating policy and restrictions. For some people Google’s concessions suggested an immediate conflict of interest, but that in itself is normal or at least not unusual in a market economy and is not necessarily evil. Consider it a variation of luring customers with a low-price introductory offer. Perhaps Google failed to appreciate the Chinese Government’s perception of the transaction, however.

The world has labeled China as the most promising and lucrative market on the planet. The Chinese have been encouraged to consider their economy as a desirable commodity in many respects. Having purchased Google with access to their markets, Google is, in the Chinese view, bought and paid for, a product they own. By what authority did Google restrict Chinese government access to information? Apparently Google agreed to restrict access for government opposition activists. Why would the Chinese government think using Google for additional surveillance would be a violation of their right to possession? Did they want anybody else to know what they were doing? Of course not. Does the CIA post notification of every attempt they make to infiltrate a terrorist group? I hope not.

I’m not suggesting that the Chinese government rightfully went into the control levels of Google’s systems and took protected information, but I am suggesting that Google dealt with China as if China was merely a typical business customer in a capitalist supply and demand economy, so why should Google be surprised that the Chinese government behaved as a typical capitalist customer and considered the purchased product to be used for whatever purposes suited them? One of the popular platitudes of technology is that people will find ways to use it that nobody anticipated. Google’s relationship with China seems at best naïve, and at worst blindly opportunistic, a technological attempt to colonize a foreign culture that backfired.

What Google should have sold the Chinese government was not a product tailored to meet the demands of their ideology by applying restrictions to content, but a product with functionality limited to the absolute minimum necessary to meet that content level. There are different ways to configure a trial version. Would the Chinese have refused to consider Google without access to personalization that includes confidential information? Maybe they would have refused, and maybe that would have told Google something either way. What would have happened if Chinese users themselves demanded that functionality? Would Google have been in a better position to negotiate the security of the information?

Let’s say Google took a chance thinking there wasn’t anything to lose if it didn’t work out. Maybe they are right, and they can simply start over from a better informed negotiating position. On the other hand, what they may have confirmed is the ability of the Chinese government to control both the technology and the application, to use it as it suits them. In a competitive market, the ideology of the technology then becomes a factor in successful adoption. Not only does Google have to compete on a functional level, but the competition becomes one of the nations and political systems from which the technology has been derived. The search capability of the Chinese state then becomes competitive, and the comparison extends to national origin. In the interests of global reconciliation, I hope Google is right, at least partly.

Here's Thinking for You.

Iffy

A Regulated Madness, Part One

When my mother had a heart attack, I became intimately acquainted with the intensive care unit of the hospital and the perception of people as regulated combinations of information, so I did some thinking about what that means as a reflection of the contemporary information industry and knowledge work and the effects of modernity. If you are easily discouraged by academic commentary, you might be more interested in prior comments about Avatar.

Modernity is the time and the mentality of industry and rational science. Characteristics and consequences of Modernity include manufacturing, scientific study and development, colonial imperialism and exploitation, modern and surrealist art, and Disneyland.

The characteristics and consequences are reflexive. Modernity is itself a consequence of the Renaissance, the printing press, and rationality, an Aristotelian idea of knowable, predictable, and reliable cause and effect. Somewhat paradoxically, Aristotle has been both an obstacle to rational progress as a theologically approved intellectual standard conceptualization of the universe with the earth at the center, (the Galileo problem, and probably not what Aristotle himself originally envisioned), and as the inspiration for an intellectually curious and systematic investigation of nature (probably more along the lines of Aristotle's objectives).

Essentially, the effect of modernity is “valorization” of Western European ideas of knowledge accumulation and application established through adoption of Greek and Roman intellectual culture, partly as an effect of Christianity and partly as an effect of technology as an intellectual enterprise (distinguished from the more personal or mundane as art, craft, and individual functions, a mentality that inspires attitudes of cultural superiority inherited rhetorically from such notable predecessors as Homer, Alexander, Herodotus, and Julius Ceasar, as well as the intellectual heritage of Plato and Socrates). The exact intellectual or social process of technological development and advance is not completely understood. For Auguste Le Comte, John Stuart Mill, and others involved in the initiation of European science, it was an accumulation of knowledge necessary to answer the challenging questions posed by nature. For Thomas Kuhn, it is a series of revisions in paradigms, changes in fundamental ways of thinking about essential concepts brought about by recognition of irreconcilable exceptions, with intervening periods of methodically integrating information into existing concepts. For others, such as Donna Haraway, it is a competition between paradigms as well, or it depends on the contributions of exceptionally capable individuals, on the coincidence or condensation of essential information, or simply on the exclusive ability to ask the right questions. As Kuhn proposes, probably all of these are reflexive and none completely correct, including his.

John Misa describes instances of intellectual technology that are generally acknowledged to represent an acceleration or triumph of progress, production, and the way information has been applied and utilized, such as the advent of the printing press and the steam engine. The printing press contributed, not just to the proliferation of literature, but to religious conflicts, establishment of modern nations, capitalist economics, and the systematic investigation of nature, all depending on efficient and standardized exchange of information. The steam engine brought about both modification in the ways human labor applies to production and in the mobility of individuals through the availability of improved propulsion that ultimately affected a variety of transportation modes on the sea, on the land, and even in the air, when the project of self-contained engines that steam represented progressed to the point of internal combustion.

Electricity affected a wider variety of technical applications than any energy source in history since raw sunlight and fire, including everything from interpersonal communication to giant transportation vehicles. The transistor and the internet concentrated the application of electrical energy in an equally diffusive repurposing for comprehensive communication. In this way, intellectual technology has achieved the potential to involve every human being in direct ways, although the direct effects remain vastly under-developed and elusive.