To allow oneself to be physically re-arranged by another is much like allowing oneself to be mentally re-arranged by another. Both require compliance and conformity, and I guess both require deference to the “power” or “expertise” of another.
Physical rearrangement has its attraction.
For example when The Magnet and I became "a living topiary" for a Wreathed Hornbill, a Malay-Eagle Owl, a Chestnut-bellied Hawk Eagle, a Sulfur Crested Cockatoo and a couple of Macaws of the Scarlet and the Blue & Yellow varieties, in the Feathered Friends Photo Booth at the KL Bird Park - we sat where required, raised limbs as required and were perched upon as required. The photo booth attendants had an expertise with arranging birds and making people into perches that was difficult to fault. The marketing of this expertise was clearly signposted in the “use your own camera” or “instant photo” charges at the front of the photo booth. The outcome and the compliance required transparent.
I am less certain about the attraction in mental re-arrangement by another. It is more usual to frame compliance and conformity of thought as indoctrination or an “extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, or as a consequence of Keen's “the cult of the amateur” .
Our New Zealand Ministry of Education funded by far the largest number of educators to The International Conference on Thinking, ICOT09, in Malaysia this July – reports from conference organisers put the figure at one hundred and sixty plus educators from "the wobbly isles". In truth it was hard to escape the wobbly isle educators dusted over corridors, and conference rooms – all trying to find stuff to make sense of the New Zealand Curriculum Key Competency “Thinking” - and to find educators to network with from other places.
On offer at ICOT09 was a continuum of mental re-arrangement expertise - academic expertise, edu_consultant expertise, edu_marketing expertise and the amateurs offering classroom educator expertise. Though the schools’ “thinking journeys” were often an edu_road-trip better described as a support act for the professional elite than an amateur’s attempt to make meaning .
What surprised me and others when we discussed the days programme over Tiger Beer at the end of each day was the sense that “everyone had something to sell”
It is not that I am unused to applying Paul (1972)’s key questions to evaluate the claims made at educational conferences. For example this is one of my favourites ...
Does the acceptance of this information advance the vested interest of the person or group asserting it?
It is a good question to ask about anything you read – offline or blogged online - by amateur, consultant or academic.
It is the question that usually allows me to discriminate between the conference claims made by educational consultants and marketers and the claims made by academics.
However, in the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, during ICOT09, the question didn’t work so well. Many of the celebrity academics were conterminous with educational consultants – both professional elites appeared to be networking to extend their power and status – lobbying for invites to the next ICOT conference in Belfast, and waving their latest book. Some even offered autographs. On some days it seemed more like a trade fair than a conference.
I was startled by the celebrity academics who chose to use chunks of their allotted speaking time for self promotional marketing and I was reminded of the BBC “Yes Minister” series and its cynical take on academics
“The surprising thing about academics is not that they have their price, but how low that price is.”
“No one really understands the true nature of fawning servility until he sees an academic who has glimpsed the prospect of money or personal publicity.”
By the end of the week any difference between the ICOT09 conference and the Petaling St Chinatown marketplace was largely a matter of the air-conditioning.
And all of it made me wonder;
Is the marketing of academia something new or just something I had failed to notice before because in other edu_conferences in New Zealand I have been distracted by the marketing of ICTs?
Is the celebrity academic at ICOT09 an indicator of the end of “freedom of access to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a nonprofit way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.” Stephen Downes The Future of Education cited in Unesco Chair Blogs
Is the validity and reliability of academic research compromised when we make revenue seeking celebrities of the academics themselves rather than ensuring free access to their research findings?
And although it seems that nowadays, at least in New Zealand’s popular media, Paglia is eminently “ Always loved that” baggable ...
As a bonus, here's the famous 1993 Julie Burchill-Paglia "fax war", in which Paglia comes off as humourless and smug, and Burchill signs off with the immortal:
Dear Professor Paglia,
Fuck off you crazy old dyke.
Always,
Julie Burchill
Always loved that.
My experience at ICOT09 means I cannot help but think that in “Sex Art and American Culture” Paglia buttoned what I observed seventeen years later
“The huge post 60s proliferation of conferences, produced a diversion of professional energy away from study and towards performance, networking, advertisement, cruising, hustling, glad handing, back scratching, chit chat, group think.” Paglia in Sex, Art and American Culture 1992 p 221
All of which makes me wonder - will the future with its increasing digitisation of content make performance over study even more attractive for academics?
Virginia Postrel’s NYTimes Review of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” by Chris Anderson has a passage that explains why this may well be the case.
Postrel writes
Faced with collapsing business models, today’s journalists-in-denial rail against Anderson’s message. Free content cannot be the future, they say, because content is valuable. Fixed costs must be covered. We have bills to pay. The problem, they argue, is that we’re giving our work away.
As Anderson himself says, “I’ve got a lot of kids and college isn’t getting any cheaper.” His own strategy, one outlined by Dyson way back when, is to charge little or nothing for his writing and use it to generate lucrative speaking gigs. “You can read a copy of this book online (abundant, commodity information) for free,” he writes (not noting that the free offer expires shortly after the printed book’s publication), “but if you want me to fly to your city and prepare a custom talk on Free as it applies to your business, I’ll be happy to, but you’re going to have to pay me for my (scarce) time.”
So it seems when the internet increasingly allows everything to be free, the future will be all about the value we can leverage from time.
And when time is the new money, the pockets will change
Illich, prescient as ever, identified the role of “time” and “scarcity” with respect to consumption a while back [In “Towards a history of needs.” 1977 – p33]
Time scarcity may soon turn into the major obstacle to the consumption of prescribed and often publicly financed, services.
Postrel puts it this way
“Unlike tangible commodities like T-shirts or plastics, most digital content doesn’t generate much new demand as its price falls toward zero. Even with no admission fee, videos, blog posts and online games soak up users’ time, and time has a hard limit. So as the supply of cheap content expands, it can’t simply fill ever-growing closets (or garbage dumps). Instead, the competition for time and attention becomes ever fiercer, and the market ever more fragmented. Any given producer will find profits elusive, especially since it’s so easy for amateurs to enter the market.”
When Gertrude Stein claimed “The money is always there, but the pockets change” she wasn’t necessarily thinking about freedom of access to public goods. But it is worth noting that when we make celebrities of academics, we change the location of the pockets and when we change the location of the pockets we stand to lose an important freedom.
We stand to lose what Downes describes as the “freedom of
access to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a
nonprofit way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.”
Recent Comments