The Note on my Door

Pedal power

2011-12-02T08:17:00.001-06:00

On anniversaries, in the media and in our lives

2011-09-12T06:01:00.001-05:00

(Originally I posted this to my collective departmental blog, but it's more appropriate on a site that I take full responsibility for myself, I think.)

Like many of you, I've paid close attention to some of the media retrospectives on the ten year anniversary of the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and I've intentionally ignored others. I've managed to avoid seeing those film clips of the twin towers falling again, but somehow I keep hearing replays of the aftermath sound bites from then-President George W. Bush. I listened to a bit of the NPR coverage this Sunday morning, and skimmed most of a New York Review of Books essay, but I declined to take a free copy of my hometown Wisconsin State Journal, with its commemorative cover page. For me, I guess, 9/11 is less something that happened ten years ago, and more something that is still happening today — in the form of an economic crisis across the globe, two frustratingly complicated wars that have yet to end, and ongoing news reports, almost weekly, of anti-Islam, or anti-Middle Eastern, or anti-Arab, or anti-anybody-who-looks-like-my-Hollywood-movie-idea-of-a-terrorist prejudice here in the US.

We all personalize such global media events, I think. (And I mean no disrespect in calling 9/11 and its ongoing aftermath a "global media event" — after all, terrorism is by definition meant to grab headlines, soundbites, and video clips, in order to inspire fear and provoke a response; wars against terrorism, whether noble, misguided, or both, are inevitably waged with marketing campaigns alongside, and seem to wind down only when public-opinion polls turn negative.) This anniversary is all the more difficult for me because, like many of my friends at UW-Madison, it is also the tenth anniversary of my first semester on campus as a teacher and researcher. September 2001 was the first month of my first "real" faculty job, in the new career in public service education that I had chosen several years earlier (and not without a great amount of anxiety) over the private corporate ladder.

The academic decisions that I made in the hours, days, weeks, and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — with much assistance, advice, and inspiration from my colleagues — still stay with me. Do we continue teaching courses on the day of the disaster? (We did, but we allowed students to go home to be with friends and family.) Do we work these events into our syllabi that semester, even in courses without a direct connection to the topic? (Absolutely, though hopefully we did so without dogma and prejudice.) Do we return to the event each year or do we let it fade from memory? (We keep it alive, though with each new class comes the realization that our students were younger and younger on that horrible day.)

The events before, during, and after September 11 became a regular part of my syllabus for "Introduction to mass communication," in a series of lectures and readings that slowly morphed from "Media responses to tragedy" to "Media engagement with war". The research project that I was working on for most of this period, an historical study of the human/machine practice of automated stenography, ended up being grounded by an introductory vignette of the ways that live television closed-captioners dealt with the non-stop news cycle on 9/11. And the final unit of my newest course, "The information society," now deals with the threat of "cyberwar" and the constantly-changing definitions of terror and justice in a world with both robotic Predator drones and crowdsourced Wikileaks archives.

It seems almost inappropriate for me to use this forum to call on my friends and colleagues to remember this day, to honor those who were lost, and respect those who continue to work for a better, more peaceful world ten years later. Other leaders, activists, and writers will call on us to remember these things with much more grace, authority, and power than I can. But maybe I can call on readers of this blog post to simply offer their own perspectives on how that day ten years ago ended up changing their work as academics — or their work as students — and how it again may inspire us to change our curriculum and our university for the better. We still need such ideas, more than ever.

Brief thoughts on the Wisconsin recall elections

2011-08-10T07:57:00.000-05:00

Six hugely expensive and energetic state Senate recall elections took place yesterday in Wisconsin; two more remain to go next week. Result so far? The state where I live, work, spend, vote, pay taxes, donate money, volunteer my time, and raise my children is still extremely polarized, and too often aggressively, intolerantly so -- but in the state Senate, at least, it is also slightly more balanced between those two poles. If I were an optimist, I'd hope that both sides might now better work together to develop effective governing policy for all citizens (not just their paying campaign supporters), through responsible and constructive political compromise (where citizens are given time to understand and comment on legislative proposals, and legislators are compelled to follow proper procedure in debating and voting on them), rather than a situation where the current side holding power demolishes those same structures of governance and compromise (such as democratic worker unions, checks on corporate campaign spending, and competitive electoral districts) simply to preserve their own power position.

Today I choose to be an optimist, and to imagine better.

More helpful hints for deciding "What are the consequences?" and "What do they mean?"

2011-07-13T07:36:00.009-05:00

A few months ago, during the height of the debate across Wisconsin about our Governor's then-proposed "budget repair bill," I wrote an informal blog post entitled Helpful hints for deciding “What is happening?” and “Where do I stand?” in which I detailed one example of how an interested student, activist, worker, or citizen might wade through the complex and contradictory media environment in order to learn about the context, meaning, and ramifications of this bill -- and hopefully come to some informed, if provisional, opinion on its merit. I was surprised and pleased to see that my little blog post circulated not only through my own civic and intellectual community here in Madison, but across the state and beyond. (Just this week I found out that it will be used as part of an exercise in a media literacy course up in the Twin Cities next semester.)

Today, after a long but historic season of public protests and political maneuvers which brought out both the best and the worst of our system of governance, both the budget repair bill and the larger budget bill that it heralded are now law. The media discourse has subsequently shifted into two new parallel tracks. One of these tracks builds directly on the first: it follows the continued public action and political posturing as Wisconsin works through an unprecedented series of recall elections targeting both Democratic and Republican state legislators in various districts across the state -- districts that are themselves now subject to accelerated and, arguably, partisan redistricting proposals by the current Republican legislative majority. But the other track is new, as it deals with the short-term and long-term consequences of the new laws themselves. In short, are they working? And if so, for whom?

This is not merely an academic question. The degree to which voters will be motivated to participate in recall elections -- in this round or in future rounds next year, for or against incumbents -- depends on how they feel that they, or their interests, or their families, or their neighbors, or their communities have been affected by the many new service cuts, corporate subsidies, local government restrictions and collective bargaining dilutions mandated by the two budget bills. Our local media is charged with seeking out and representing those community reactions and examples -- and with doing the difficult work of fairly and proportionately representing them back to the rest of us, rather than engaging in easy "one side said this, and the other side said that" equivalencies. Our regional and national media are similarly charged with putting our local situations into wider context, demonstrating how success stories in one site might connect to stories of greater hardship in another site, in complex and even contradictory ways. In other words, we still need to follow this story -- and we may still need some tools and tricks in order to follow it carefully and thoroughly enough to come to our own decisions about "What are the consequences?" and "What do they mean?"

This need was brought home to me last week when a friend of mine from Illinois -- I think it's fair to classify her as an "independent" and "moderate" -- forwarded to me a link to an online article she had read about our situation in Wisconsin. It was written by Byron York of the Washington Examiner. The headline? "Union curbs rescue a Wisconsin school district." Here, in part, is what the article claimed:

Now the bill is law, and we have some very early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it's a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it's all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

My friend simply asked me "what's missing from this account?" which struck me as exactly the right question to ask about this, or any, claim of success or failure of the Wisconsin budget bills. My reaction when reading something like this is usually to break it down by (a) who's reported it, (b) what's the source of the report, (c) what's missing from the report, and (d) what are the implications of the report if it is true. What follows is my own path in trying to answer these questions.

(a) Who reported it? My quick web search (yes, including a Wikipedia query) indicates that the Washington Examiner is owned by the same parent company as the Weekly Standard; both are clearly marketed as conservative media outlets. The columnist, Byron York, was previously a writer for the National Review (a well-known journal of conservative political thought) and published a book in 2005 titled The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. So from the outset, I wouldn't expect either this newspaper or this opinion columnist to be favorable to the cause of WI union members -- just as I wouldn't expect a partisan columnist writing at the Nation, a well-known journal of progressive political thought, to be favorable to Governor Walker. (That doesn't mean that I would dismiss something written in either the Washington Examiner or the Nation on this basis; for full disclosure, I subscribe to the Nation and find it to be mostly very insightful and informative. But it's usually good to know at the outset whether a journalist self-affiliates with a particular worldview or cause, and whether a particular article or news outlet generally fits in with the political assumptions of its target audience, or challenges them.)

(b) What's the source of the report? As far as I can tell, the column does not represent any original reporting at all, but is simply a summary of a press release from the Kaukauna school district, which hit the internet three days before and was promoted by the district's Republican state representative Jim Steineke, a self-described Tea Party candidate who wants to abolish the corporate income tax, among other positions. (A Google search of some of the keywords in the original report led me quickly to the press release.) I could find no information on whether the majority of the school board members who set this policy and issued the press release are Tea Party members or progressives, but that would be something interesting to seek out.

(c) What's missing? Given the outlet and the source, it's not surprising to me that neither the column in the Examiner nor the original press release explores what teachers, residents, or students say about the issue. A Google News search of the rather unique keyword "Kaukauna" led me to other press reports on the district's situation. I found one report from a Green Bay television station that mentioned briefly the teacher reaction. The teacher quoted points to the lack of prep time when teachers are expected to handle more classes. The Appleton Post-Crescent report on the story includes the interesting tidbit that "In April, the school board rejected a proposal from the Kaukauna Education Association [the union] to extend the union’s contract and incorporate pension and healthcare concessions along with a wage freeze, a move the union projected could save the district about $1.8 million next year." (I find it interesting that $1.8 million is greater than $1.5 million.) The best contextual summary I could find was at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website which made it clear that across all of Wisconsin, 410 out of the state's 424 school districts will receive less money under the whole budget plan, and the Governor's budget even prevents local communities from voting their own property tax increases. Here in Madison, the Wisconsin State Journal (if anything, a "moderate" news source, branded against the overtly "progressive" Capital Times) detailed the cuts to our school district and reminded readers that we in Madison were in no way "bloated" to begin with, as four years ago we had been cut even more.

(d) What if it's true? In other words, how do we interpret the reported effects back in Kaukauna? This is perhaps the hardest question, and I've saved it for last. We can get part of the answer from current media reports, but a fuller analysis demands deeper investigation -- reading a book on the history or current working of the education system (a good start might be Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System), or talking to some education professionals themselves (such as the folks at our own Wisconsin Center for Education Research). My take is based on nearly two decades of graduate education and university work in which issues of public education have continually connected with my own research and teaching -- in other words, consider me not an "expert" but an "informed layperson." Like many taxpayers and parents, at first glance I think that creating smaller class sizes and saving public money both sound great. But with the same amount of teachers, working longer hours and teaching more periods during the day, how is this not simply a work speedup and a wage cut? Teachers aren't assembly line workers. They're not performing unskilled labor at the rhythm of a machine that can be tweaked to get a better quota with less cost. Teachers are supposedly the ones who have the education, training, and experience to make decisions -- together -- about the best strategies for education children. School boards, though, are often comprised of politically motivated citizens, on both sides of the aisle, who are elected by very small groups of highly partisan voters and are often bringing ideological agendas to the table (like debates over the teaching of evolution in the classroom). Personally, based on what I know about the public education system and what I know from teachers I've met in my career, I'd rather trust the judgment of the teachers when it comes to structuring the school day and making educational curriculum and staffing decisions. But in any case, if you cut teacher wages and increase their hours, you're making it a less attractive job. You will get what you pay for, in the end -- just like the free market theory would predict. And if your goal is the privatization of public school education, as is the stated goal of most Tea Party groups that I've looked at, well, you've just taken a significant step toward that. So my tentative assessment? There's much more to this story, and to call out any such dramatic "success" is, at best, premature.

You may not share this conclusion. That's understandable if your own experience, your own circle of experts that you trust, and your own intellectual background is different than my own. Having an effective and responsible media doesn't demand that we all agree. But it does demand that we talk to each other rather than past each other, that we understand different perspectives rather than dismissing them, and that we wrestle with serious evidence and analysis rather than accepting easy "common sense" assumptions or solutions. Good media outlets -- like good schools and universities -- dig for that evidence and work through that analysis, forcing us to challenge each other (and ourselves). Poor media outlets give us the answers we already think we know, served up with a generous side-order of flattery.

No matter what you might have imagined would happen after these budget bills were signed, I hope this brief blog post helps you find your way through the many complex and, yes, contradictory results that the media will both report and ignore over the next few months. It's an important story for the audiences to demand that the analysts follow.

Helpful hints for deciding “What is happening?” and “Where do I stand?”

2011-02-20T20:51:00.026-06:00

Many of us who work here at UW-Madison -- faculty, staff, and graduate students -- have participated to one degree or another in the Capitol Square protests against Governor Walker's proposed budget repair bill. (Full disclosure: I showed up a couple of times, bringing my kids on Thursday and honking my ridiculous bicycle horn quite loudly on Saturday). Individual reasons for discomfort with this bill vary. Some oppose the notion that a "shared sacrifice" during a state financial crisis should translate simply to more cuts in remuneration for public service employees while businesses get tax breaks at the same time. Others are concerned about the speed at which this legislation has been proposed, without any consultation with public service employee representatives (especially labor unions). What unites much of the bill's opposition are its provisions for dismantling both the legal rights and the practical abilities of public employees to collectively organize and democratically negotiate their wages, benefits, and working conditions. This is why so many individuals who are not themselves directly affected by the bill's provisions -- including both firefighters and police officers, both union and non-union workers, both public and private employees -- have united to pack the Capitol Rotunda and surrounding grounds for days on end.

However, for many UW-Madison students, witnessing this drama playing out on and around their college campus, the situation may seem bewildering or even exasperating. Students may have to deal with classes that are moved, postponed, cancelled or reformulated on short notice in response to rapidly shifting circumstances. Students may be unused to seeing their instructors shed their more customary classroom personas of "disinterested observer" or "omniscient narrator" for a more activist position in a complicated political debate. And students may simply wonder, without ever articulating it for fear of seeming out of touch, "What is happening?"

To me, the ability to fearlessly ask that basic question of "What is happening?" -- together with its normative follow-up, "Where do I stand?" -- represents the very reason that one spends precious years and precious dollars attending a university in the first place. This week, I and many of my fellow instructors have been using the current political-economic debate in Wisconsin as a "teachable moment" in classes ranging from mass communication to political science, women's studies to geography. But what about students who aren't wrestling with these issues in class right now? What kind of advice can we as UW instructors offer to students who are trying to figure out "What is happening?" and "Where do I stand?" on their own?

Rather than try to explain my own position on these two questions, I thought I might offer a list of strategies for developing your own views on the current crisis. Through the networked digital information infrastructure of the Web, college students in the early 21st century are privileged to have access to more media voices, more first-person accounts, more background data, and more historical context than ever before. Using these resources effectively, however, requires care, skill, and practice. Here are some guidelines that I follow in my own media diet, with selected but incomplete examples, that I hope will be helpful to you.

1. Start with a summary from a trusted national news source. Most of the information that circulates on social networking services like Facebook or Twitter, or that gets reposted and excerpted on blogs and news aggregators, still comes from professional journalists working for newspapers and magazines, television and radio stations, and online news sites. When an issue has both large-scale and local implications such as our Wisconsin budget debate, I like to start with a national newspaper like the New York Times, a national broadcaster like CNN, or a national public-service media outlet like National Public Radio. For example, Michael Cooper and Katharine Q. Seelye's New York Times article "Wisconsin leads the way as workers fight state cuts" (18 Feb 2011) succinctly explains the issues at stake: "Governor Walker's plan would limit collective bargaining for most state and local government employees to wages, barring them from negotiating on issues like benefits and work conditions. It would also require workers to contribute more to their pension and health care plans, cap wage increases based on the Consumer Price Index and limit contracts to one year. And it would take on the power of unions by requiring them to take annual votes to maintain certification, and by permitting workers to stop paying union dues. Police and fire unions, which have some of the most expensive benefits but who supported Mr. Walker's campaign for governor, are exempted."

2. Continue by exploring local and regional news sources. For an issue dealing with UW-Madison, our two student newspapers (the Badger Herald and the Daily Cardinal) are great local starting points. But professional papers are still the best source for pieces written by full-time journalists who have spent years cultivating connections to local sources and developing a thorough understanding of the diverse local culture. I start with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Wisconsin State Journal, the Capital Times, and the Isthmus. For example, in the Capital Times, longtime area business reporter Mike Ivey provides some crucial background on our current budget woes: "Former Gov. Jim Doyle was able to reduce the deficit then through a combination of furloughs for state workers, increases to the cigarette tax, a move to combined reporting for corporate tax collections and a boost in income taxes for those in the upper bracket. The state was also helped by $1.3 billion in one-time federal stimulus funding. Moreover, state tax collections have continued to rise as the economy recovers. In January, the state collected $1.46 billion in revenue, up 7.1 percent from a year ago. And Wisconsin's unemployment rate of 7.5 percent is better than the 9 percent for the U.S. as a whole. While the state has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs, the recession has not hit as hard here as other places." ("Analysis: Despite budget woes, state less in crisis now than two years ago," 18 Feb 2011)

3. Dive into the detail. Once you've got the basic story, find some longer narrative or analysis pieces to bring more detail to the picture. Look for eyewitness accounts. Find unusual angles. Pay special attention to articles that set the story in context, comparing it to previous historical moments, to other events happening elsewhere around the world, or to similar issues with comparable stakes. These pieces often come from weekly long-form culture and news magazines like the New Yorker, the Atlantic, or the New Republic -- news organizations that can better disregard the demands of a daily (or hourly) news cycle deadline and focus on longer-term reporting. For example:

Follow the money and the power. Many times stories taking an investigative journalism angle will come from the partisan or alternative press -- that is, news outlets that transparently (and proudly) declare their own editorial position, such as "fearless watchdogging of the powerful" on the left or "free markets and free ideas" on the right. The news magazine Mother Jones ran a piece by Andy Kroll ("Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: Funded by the Koch Bros," 18 Feb 2011) which charged that "Charles and David Koch are conservative titans of industry who have infamously used their vast wealth to undermine President Obama and fight legislation they detest, such as the cap-and-trade climate bill, the health care reform act, and the economic stimulus package. [...] Koch Industries' political action committee has doled out more than $2.6 million to candidates. And one prominent beneficiary of the Koch brothers' largess is Scott Walker."
Unpack the numbers and the language. An early Associated Press report from 10 February 2011 (Scott Bauer, "Walker to strip most union rights") largely relied on the budget numbers put forth by the Governor's own office, reporting that "cuts are necessary to avoid up to 1,500 state employee layoffs. The state faces a $137 million budget shortfall in the fiscal year that ends June 30." But a later editorial from the Capital Times ("Walker gins up 'crisis' to reward cronies," 26 Feb 2011) argued that "To the extent that there is an imbalance -- Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit -- it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January. If the Legislature were simply to rescind Walker's new spending schemes -- or delay their implementation until they are offset by fresh revenues -- the 'crisis' would not exist." Seemingly objective numbers are actually quite contested in this story. Similarly, whether one refers to the Capitol Square protestors as "thugs and rioters" or "peaceful demonstrators" casts a spin over an entire news report. Watch out for such fighting words.
Understand the history. A recent piece in the The New Republic (Joseph A. McCain, "What's really going on in Wisconsin?," 19 Feb 2011) does a good job of setting our current debate in historical context. The author noted that "Public-sector collective bargaining arose in tandem with the civil rights movement between 1955 and 1965. This was no coincidence, as both movements were making the same point: How could the nation justify denying some citizens the rights and freedoms that it granted to others?"

4. Question your sources. Having explored the national, local, and in-depth angles of any big story, you'll no doubt encounter some differences, and maybe even some contradictions, in how the story is told. Some sources might be getting their voices out in all venues, while others seem strangely silent. Different reporters might use different terms for the event itself (was it "protest" or "intimidation"?). And even numbers represented in one article as objective facts (like budgetary projections or the results of public opinion polls) may be contested in another article. How do you decide what is true? Here are some questions you can ask of each news outlet, each reporter, and each article to help clarify how the article is meant to "work":

Does the news outlet transparently declare a particular partisan position? For example, in Madison the Capital Times bills itself as "your progressive news source." In their articles you might see a greater number of sources from, say, the labor movement or the progressive grassroots. That doesn't necessarily mean that the Capital Times is "biased" or uncritical towards these sources; however, it does mean that the paper takes seriously its responsibility to help these sources participate in the debate.
Does the news outlet target a particular audience that it might either want to please or fear to alienate? Except for public service media, most news sources have a very clear idea of the market segment that they are trying to reach -- in order to deliver that market segment to their advertisers -- and some may end up running more and more stories that appeal to the preexisting assumptions of their audience base. For example, the Fox News Channel bills itself as "fair and balanced," but research on its audience demonstrates that it reaches a very homogenous conservative-leaning psychographic (that is, an audience segment defined by subjective traits -- shared ideas or lifestyle -- rather than by objective demographic traits like household income, education level, or age). Similarly, MSNBC's new branding of its audience as one that "leans forward" might be part of its strategy to send Ed Schultz to Madison to run his prime-time opinion-journalism show from the center of the rallies.
Does the reporter have the experience to cover the issue critically? Debates over budget legislation, economic forecasts, and the social realities of working families are complicated. Look for reporters who have a track record of dealing competently and completely with these issues, rather than reporters who are uncritically recirculating the soundbites of others. When a reporter simply reports "he said, she said" quotes to create a supposedly "balanced" article, we call this "stenography" (simply taking down what is said verbatim) rather than journalism (applying a critical filter to bring readers your best interpretation of what is happening).
Does the reporter clearly describe the sources used in an article? Even the most experienced reporters need to rely on the statements of elected public officials, paid public relations professionals, and independent experts in putting together a comprehensive news article. You can't always know if these sources are telling the truth, but the reporter should give you as much information as possible in order to help you make that decision. What organization does a source represent? On behalf of whose interests does a source claim to speak? How does the source stand to lose or gain from the outcome of the debate? Watch out for the use of "anonymous sources" (sources that are not named but are described as to their expertise and position), and especially "blind anonymous sources" (unnamed sources whose positions are not even described in the article) because such sources may have their own agendas in leaking information to the press -- without being accountable to the public for their own words.
Does the story you're reading claim to be "objective" reporting, in-depth analysis, or journalistic opinion? The same news outlet will usually contain all three of these types of stories. Breaking news stories receive the "just the facts" treatment, to get the known outline of the story out before the competition does, even if that leaves many questions unanswered. Later, reporters are assigned to delve into a story and bring more analysis to their pieces, which both introduces a subjective element (what the reporter thinks is happening) and allows the reporter to add a richer context (explaining why something is happening and what it means). Finally, reporters (and editorial boards) often declare their views on the issues of the day in their newspapers, news magazines, or web sites. Make sure such pieces are marked as "opinion" or "editorial" columns. Don't disregard them just because they state a clear point of view; instead, try to judge whether opinion journalists have effectively communicated to you why they are taking the stance that they claim. That's their job.

5. Check in with the media watchdogs. Many political action organizations like Media Matters for America (on the left) and Accuracy in Media (on the right) purport to watchdog both the mainstream and the partisan media for "bias" and spin. Visiting these sites can help prepare you to notice the strategic use of language, data, or emotion to frame a debate in a certain way that serves certain interests. But beware of false equivalency. The right wing charges that "liberal" news organizations have personal power agendas that skew all their reporting; the left wing charges that "conservative" news organizations target their audiences with what they want to hear for purposes of making profit, and that mainstream news organizations lack the will to aggressively question authorities who might later refuse to talk with them. For example, Media Matters argued on 18 Feb 2011 that "Fox News' coverage of the Wisconsin protests over Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to eliminate public employees' collective bargaining rights, among other things, has been marked with repeated attacks on the protesters. However, by contrast, Fox has relentlessly promoted and even encouraged viewers to participate in tea party and 'Tax Day' protests over the past few years." ("Fox slams WI protests but cheered Tea Party protests")

6. Don't be distracted. Side-issues, conspiracy theories, and anecdotal reports (often the fodder of the media watchdogs above!) all help round out the coverage of many news outlets, especially to jack-up page views online, but these sensational tidbits often serve to increase outrage more than they serve to increase understanding. For example, how important are one or two incidents of incivility or poor behavior at a political rally when 60,000 people behaved peacefully and appropriately? How important is a politician's personal life when it comes to an unrelated budget proposal? And does it really matter that "In Madison, two sides in bitter fight agree over beers"? (James Kelleher, Reuters, 29 Feb 2011). Make sure you're not simply helping a news outlet build buzz and audience by repeating and reposting the most salacious or silly bits of gossip about a news story.

7. See what Wikipedia says. Yep, I'm a professor and I'm telling you it's OK to use Wikipedia. You might even use it as a starting point in your investigation into an issue. A well-written Wikipedia article has all the same strengths of a well-written piece of journalism: it summarizes the issue, it sets the issue in context, and it clearly identifies its sources. I often use Wikipedia articles not for their conclusions, but for their list of "see also" web sites and news reports at the bottom of the page. See if you think their "2011 Wisconsin budget protests" article is useful.

8. See what your social network says. Now that you've done your own background reading on the issue, Facebook and Twitter can be great resources to see if you've found the same reports that others have, or if you've followed a trail of journalism that's rather unique. Trading the best news you've found through tweets or status updates is a nice way to let others benefit from the thorough research and reading that you've done. And opening your media diet up to criticism from your social networking community ("you're citing that media outlet!?") is a good way to enter into a critical conversation about journalism with a trusted group of friends. And check out Kristian Knutsen's "A guide to social media campaigns against Scott Walker's agenda for Wisconsin unions" (Isthmus, 13 Feb 2011) to see how one side is mobilizing this resource.

9. See what your instructors say. Out of modesty I've left this one for nearly last, but really, your university teachers have a wealth of insight and experience with complicated public issues that often doesn't get to come out in structured classroom settings. But if you start asking critical questions of them -- in class or outside of class -- I guarantee that they'll rise to the occasion and help you think things through. Some instructors might be hesitant to reveal their own positions on divisive issues for fear of alienating students who hold differing views; others will gladly hold forth in spirited debate, if you encourage them. (I'm somewhere in the middle, personally.) But if you ask, they can help. You may even change some minds yourself (it's happened to me).

10. Finally, go see for yourself. We're incredibly lucky that so many important issues unfold right in our own backyard here in Madison. But don't think that eyewitness experience automatically substitutes for thoughtful research. The two should challenge and complement each other in building your understanding.

In the end, I think all of this media research -- both answering your initial questions and (most likely) inspiring new ones -- comes down to one thing: What kind of future do you want to see? In any given debate, think about which side is offering a better (or any) vision of tomorrow. How desirable is that future? How feasible is it? And how willing would you be to sacrifice and fight for it? Because that's really what's at stake in every political battle -- not which past we all agree on, but which future we will build together.

On public employees and the right to organize

2011-02-13T09:52:00.003-06:00

With the dramatic budget proposal issued from the Wisconsin governor's office this week, I find that as a knowledge-worker employed to research and to teach -- or to "sift and winnow," we like to say around here -- I am motivated to write a short public piece about my own reactions to these budget proposals. I write from my personal position as both a state worker and a UW-Madison professor. Please remember that my views are my own, and not necessarily those of my department, my college, or my peers.

When I first joined UW-Madison as a new assistant professor in 2001, I also joined the United Faculty and Academic Staff labor organization -- an independent affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers -- even though, at that time, faculty at UW-Madison weren't officially represented by a union and didn't have the right to organize (as granted by the state of WI). Why would I voluntarily earmark a portion of my salary to an organization that didn't officially represent my interests? My own research centers around the history of human labor in highly technological settings for the production and circulation of knowledge -- something I shorthand as "information labor" -- and I've seen enough historical examples of productive and ethical organizing for better working conditions and greater public visibility to believe in the importance of the right to collectively advocate for the long-term interests of labor versus the more short-term goals of capital accumulation or political reelection. But on a more personal note, I knew that through nearly a century of work in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, my own extended family had long benefited from the strength of labor solidarity in other industries -- from the telecommunications sector and the postal service to the dairy industry and the farm-labor coalitions of the progressive era -- and this was a history that I wanted to help uphold. Finally, something about the fact that this little almost-union had the noble goal of uniting both faculty and staff in common purpose really appealed to me the more I discovered the unfortunate administrative divisions that often, if unintentionally, serve to isolate these two categories of knowledge workers from each other at a research university. In 2009 I was elected by my departmental peers to serve as the Director of my administrative unit, and I politely informed UFAS that I would need to end my affiliation with them since I was now taking on what I considered a "management" role (at least temporarily) in a climate when actual faculty unionization might become a real possibility on campus. So I understand the need to speak from a position that recognizes interests on all sides of any particular labor negotiation.

This week our current governor has proposed to roll back nearly all of the state-granted options for meaningful democratic representation and collective bargaining with public labor organizations around Wisconsin -- apparently under the assumption that this will save money in an environment where public workers are "overcompensated." (See this Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article for details.) I strongly disagree with the notion that state workers are a drain on the economy; rather, I point to recent research from the Economic Policy Institute -- "Are Wisconsin Public Employees Over-compensated?" -- that suggests "Wisconsin state and local governments pay college-educated employees 25% less in annual compensation, on average, than private employers." And in the case of university workers in particular, I think it is easy to demonstrate that the economic gains to the state -- an educated workforce, a more competent citizenry, and the direct importing of millions of dollars in research and gift funds -- entirely justify a higher budget investment from taxpayers. I'm very concerned that other options such as progressive taxation or reallocation of funds from, say, corrections (prisons) aren't being considered here -- and in fact, aren't even being discussed, by the government or the press. But that's not the issue that worries me the most at the moment.

Any changes in the amount that state workers pay for benefits should, I think, be subject to legitimate negotiation among a whole host of democratically-chosen representatives, participating at various levels of administration -- from staff labor unions and faculty senates to college boards of regents and county supervisory boards. But the governor, and apparently his political party, are proposing the abandonment of this process of negotiation and participation. It's a proposal so surprising and far-reaching that it made news at the New York Times this week. Personally, I think this proposal is misguided. Over my decade of paid service to UW-Madison, I've seen democracy in action every single day on campus. In every unit and every discipline, our faculty and staff are able to collaboratively prioritize, discuss, debate, and decide issues about the proper course of university education, the proper administration of always-scarce funds, and the proper rewards to hard-working peers. It's not always pretty, and it's never easy, but it's something that the whole organization holds dear; and in the end, it works. It works not because it's the most efficient way of making decisions, but because it's the most transparent and legitimate. It works because it forces those holding opposing views to express and defend them in civil and evidence-based ways. And it works because it brings a basic dignity to a process where, all too easily, those with greater power or fancier credentials or higher salaries could simply have their way. That's what I think we will lose if, as an unrelated side-effect of changing the benefits payment structure of state workers, we throw out the very possibility of collective decision-making. We will lose an important mechanism to preserve the serious and honest participation of state workers, not only in shaping the character of the organizations that they serve, but in shaping the legacy that this state leaves to its next generation of civil servants -- and citizens.

A brief post-election note (which works for most elections)

2010-11-03T06:46:00.001-05:00

A brief post-election note (which works for most elections): Neither side of the partisan divide got everything they wanted in this election, as far as I can tell (though one side is certainly going to claim they did, for a while at least). If you have strong beliefs about the way the world is and should be, don't hide behind an election result as an excuse to stop politely sharing -- and rationally questioning -- those beliefs. If you feel confident that you're doing important and beneficial work in the world, then keep doing it, to the best of your ability, and don't let election results -- whether wins or losses -- slow you in that effort. Elections come and go. Parties wax and wane. Our shared and constant foes are ignorance and apathy.

2010-09-27T08:08:00.000-05:00

Autumn is here, and the leaves have turned on my longtail. Don't tell the Bike Snob.

In case you were wondering ...

2010-07-21T13:16:00.002-05:00

... yes, that was me on my flower power bicycle, breezing by.

My chapter in Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America

2010-06-22T15:25:00.008-05:00

The latest edited volume to emerge from the UW-Madison Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America is out: Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America, edited by UW's own Adam Nelson and John Rudolph. I'm excited in part because I was lucky enough to earn a chapter in the book with my article "Teaching reading with television: Constructing closed captioning using the rhetoric of literacy." Hope you like it!

2010-05-20T12:59:00.002-05:00

My most recent book, Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television, received a nice review in the latest issue of the journal The Information Society. The reviewer wrote, "In illustrating the historical development of closed captioning in court systems as well as television, and by comparing these parallel speech-to- text domains, the author provides a level of insight that is impressive in its depth and breadth." (Now available on Kindle!)

2010-05-12T09:33:00.000-05:00

Have a safe and happy summer, everyone.

2010-04-17T06:30:00.001-05:00

Congratulations to all of our School of Journalism & Mass Communication award winners, and many thanks to those of you who were able to attend our annual banquet!

2010-03-30T17:14:00.002-05:00

Hope everyone is enjoying their spring break. I'm going to be on very intermittent net access this week, so please don't expect my usual lightning-fast responses to emails.

2010-03-05T15:27:00.003-06:00

Those strange-looking things you may have seen on the handlebars of my bicycle are "Moose Mitts" which finally fix my longstanding problem of finger-freezing during my morning winter ride. (Too bad it is now 40 degrees and sunny outside.)

2009-10-15T14:35:00.001-05:00

Interested in a job at UW-Madison? The School of Journalism and Mass Communication is in the market for a bright assistant professor who is keen to develop a high-quality research program and who will contribute to teaching in our strategic communication area and in our introductory courses. We will begin reviewing applications after November 9, 2009. Please see the full job ad here.

2009-04-17T13:53:00.004-05:00

Many of you have heard by now that I've been elected by my fellow Journalism and Mass Communication faculty to serve a three-year term as the 11th Director of our School, starting next semester (Fall 2009). Today I've had the pleasure of meeting with some of our Board of Visitors -- who are both alumni of the School and accomplished professionals in the changing mass communication industry -- to discuss the future of education for "mediated communication" here at UW-Madison. There were plenty of ideas flying around the lunch table for ways to preserve the core principles of "truth telling and community building" upon which journalism is built, as well as the lessons of "ethical and effective persuasion" at the core of strategic communication practices, no matter what comes next in cyberspace after blogs, wikis, Google, Second Life, and (today's big topic) Twitter. I look forward to the challenge of being Director of such a vibrant School in such uncertain but energizing times, and I invite everyone I met today to keep in touch as we plan how to best build upon our current and historic strengths in teaching, research and service, both for our particular majors (and future alumni) and for the larger student population as a whole. You can email me at gdowney@wisc.edu. Cheers!

2009-03-23T09:34:00.001-05:00

Spring Break is over. The rain has arrived. Battlestar Galactica is finished. Back to work!

2009-03-16T08:04:00.003-05:00

Monday morning, 8am, Spring Break in a college town. Me in my favorite coffee shop, sitting at the back, taking up a table meant for three, in the obtuse-angled corner between the window and the fireplace. Wi-fi no longer bogged down by unending updates of Facebook status and perusals of today's hottest YouTube clips. Exactly five days of writing ahead of me, and counting. Turn screen to maximum brightness.

2009-02-26T08:33:00.002-06:00

Here I go again, sending a letter to the editor of my local newspaper in response to what I see as a gross mischaracterization of what goes on at UW-Madison. The column that set me off was here. Tell me if you think my response was off base:

In his Feb. 25, 2009 column, "Make public workers share the pain," Mike Ivey wrote, "head down to the UW-Madison campus, GEF II or the City-County Building, and it's like the Great Recession isn't happening. The conferences, meetings, long lunches and paid sabbaticals go on as usual." He went on to suggest that public employees reduce their supposedly extravagant salaries to balance the state budget. This is not reporting; this is a blanket accusation of waste and fraud based on stereotype and distortion. As a UW-Madison professor myself, I can only speak for my particular state-connected institution, but I would like to remind my fellow Cap Times readers that the state funds less than 20% of the costs of UW-Madison, that our full faculty salaries are $13,500 below the median for our 12-campus peer group (including neighboring state universities), and that the overall UW faculty headcount has declined every year since 2004. Yet in 2008 we admitted over 200 more freshmen than we did in 2004. In short, we are already doing more with less. If Mr. Ivey wishes to suggest that state spending should be further cut in tough economic times, then we his readers can debate whether that is wise given the increased demand for state services (especially health care and education) as the economy slows. Or if Mr. Ivey feels that a progressive tax increase should be levied so that all Wisconsin residents making above a certain income (not just public employees) should pay more to help balance the budget, then we can debate what qualifies as "affluent." But I do not expect to see my work and that of my fellow state-connected employees, especially those at UW-Madison, derided and dismissed as wasteful and fradulent without evidence in the newspaper that claims to be my "progressive voice."

Sources:
http://www.wisc.edu/about/facts/budget.php#budgetrevenue
http://apa.wisc.edu/Diversity/FacStaff_GenderEthnic_200708_MH.pdf
http://www.news.wisc.edu/16048
http://www.news.wisc.edu/15893
http://www.news.wisc.edu/10196

2009-02-17T22:20:00.003-06:00

Because people liked my Facebook cowboy hat, here by popular demand is the Alternate Universe Greg With Long Jerry Garcia Hair.

2009-02-14T10:01:00.002-06:00

My previous note, with the lovely Obama-like posterized rendition of my face, is unavailable because the UW Madison university-wide file storage space, MyWebSpace, has gone down as of Friday morning and won't be back up until Sunday. A two-day outage of a such a service might not seem like a big deal to an outside observer, but let me put it in context: I have stored dozens if not hundreds of supplementary class files for a 400-person introductory mass communication course on MyWebSpace, intended to be used as students complete writing assignments. The first of three big writing assignment that my students are completing this semester is due in section next week; this means that most of them probably budgeted time over the weekend to work on it. A two-day outage of the file server over the weekend thus comes at the worst possible time for my 400 students.

A bit of background: I began moving files to MyWebSpace in order to gain more control and flexibility about how and when they were delivered, rather than relying on library "electronic reserves" schemes or on my department's own web server (which has been subject to its own complicated technical and administrative difficulties over the last semester).

None of these three scales — the departmental IT resources, the library IT resources, or the university IT resources — has proven reslient enough for my needs. (I know that servers fail and hard drives die, but I expect such critical resources to have nearly-instant backups or mirrors at the ready.) It seems that my next option is to either scale down — say, repurposing an old Mac as a personal file server for my classroom needs — or to scale up — moving items to Google's domain, for example. Either way, the department and the university lose the opportunity to "brand" the eductional resources produced and distributed under their institutional umbrella.

2009-02-11T15:17:00.003-06:00

"Hope" was already taken.

(See Obamicon.me)

2009-01-20T14:51:00.004-06:00

Well I was teaching my first J201 section today and missed the inauguration, but I've got it TiVo'd at home so I'll get to see the drama later. For now, I was struck by how much the www.whitehouse.gov site — which now bears President Obama's striking brand and style — has changed over the last decade. How do I know? Why, I just step into the Wayback Machine, Sherman! (Thanks for the inspiration to Political Base.) Funny, it went from late-1990s sparse in the Clinton/Gore administration (just a list of bullet points, really) to early-21st-century cluttered in the Bush/Cheney administration, and now back to post-Obama crisp. "Change we can click on." (Now if they'd only fix www.usa.gov too ...)

UPDATE!

For those of you who know what a "robots.txt" file does, an astute graduate student of mine spotted this as well, from boingboing:

The old whitehouse.gov robots.txt file, 2400 lines long, disallowing easy indexing of content for search engines, etc.:

http://pastebin.com/f18309565

The new one, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes

2008-12-15T13:34:00.001-06:00

During finals week, an interesting and, to me, alarming statistic to ponder ...

The U.S. Department of Labor predicts that in four years, 3 million more jobs will require bachelor's degrees, and there won't be enough graduates to fill them; 90% of the fastest-growing jobs, 60% of all new jobs, and 40% of manufacturing jobs will require some education beyond high school. Yet in Wisconsin, just 25% of adults have four-year degrees.

Source: Kevin P. Reilly, president of the University of Wisconsin System, in an op-ed piece published in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 15 December 2008

2008-11-05T06:03:00.003-06:00

As President-Elect Obama put it so well last night, no matter who you voted for, now that the campaign is over, the real challenge of collective service and sacrifice can begin. Kudos to all of my students on all sides of the political spectrum who labored to get us this far. But this is only the first step. We have a clear and common direction now. Let's get to work.

P.S. Remind yourself of Obama's proposals on higher education.

P.P.S. Take a moment to laugh.

2008-09-16T13:13:00.002-05:00

By popular demand: A photo of my long bicycle decorated for autumn. Coming after Thanksgiving break: holiday lights.

2008-09-06T07:58:00.008-05:00

I have officially entered the Wireless Age. My first book has an Amazon Kindle edition.

2008-07-20T21:34:00.001-05:00

Spaces are still available for LIS 201, The Information Society, and J880, Human Geography and Mass Communication, in Fall 2008.

2008-06-27T07:47:00.002-05:00

My weekly vanity Google search reveals that I received a brief mention in a 2004 publication of the Computing Research Association entitled "Using History To Teach Computer Science and Related Disciplines" (downloadable as a PDF). This 300+ page report is a fantastic resource guide for computer science and engineering departments wondering how to work issues of history and social theory into more traditional courses on computer programming and technology. I wish I could take credit for an insightful, substantive contribution to the volume but strangely the reason my Google search even found it — and the sole place where I am cited within its pages — is simply a listing of my web site under the "more resources" section. Not the kind of thing a tenure committee would accept as evidence of influence in a field, I suppose. Still, it's a start.

2008-06-13T17:11:00.003-05:00

RSS WILL NOT DEFEAT ME!

Look here, after SEVERAL attempts, I finally figured out how to make my Magpie RSS PHP code parse silly quotes (like “this”) and em dashes ( — ) without getting confused!

(What this means is that I was able to steal the appropriate code from a help forum on teh Interwebs.)

I knew that Masters Degree in Computer Science would come in handy someday.

2008-05-31T15:34:00.003-05:00

I've been at the Charles Babbage Institute in Minneapolis for the last few days, attending a very useful workshop on "History | Gender | Computing". I presented some very tentative work on the connections between librarianship, second-wave feminism, and library computerization (MARC, OCLC, OPACs) from the 1960s to the 1980s, and I was encouraged by the engaged and critical response of the other participants and the audience. Tom Misa, Jeffrey Yost and the rest of the CBI staff did a great job at pulling this mini-conference together (and getting it funded). It's especially nice to be back in Twin Cities for a few days, as I lived here for a year while on a postdoc in the University of Minnesota Department of Geography in 2000-2001. Sadly, I won't have time to visit the Lego store, though I think I found a nice comic book shop on the way to the light rail station. If only I had my bicycle with me ...

2008-05-21T10:06:00.003-05:00

Random notes on my new "Wii Fit" balance board and training game ...

- Out of the dozen or so people purchasing a Wii Fit at Target this morning at 8:00am, all of them (including me) were middle-aged men. I tried joking with one of them about this and was met with a blank, zombie-like stare.

- I was the only one of the middle-aged men to have actually biked to the Target to get his Wii Fit.

- The Wii balance board has a weight limit of 300-some pounds. No doubt some enterprising hacker will figure out a way to wire two balance boards in parallel, one for each foot, for those over the limit ...

- The balance board is very solid, good feel, no cables or wires, with the ON switch meant to be flicked with your toe while standing (nice touch).

- The Wii balance board avatar on the screen speaks with a fine anime kitten voice.

- My Wii Fit Age is 28 (or 4 in Wii Fit Dog Years).

- Yes, it's actually fun, and (I think) even motivating.

2008-05-15T09:47:00.003-05:00

I currently have 17 students enrolled in my summer 2008 class on "Video games and mass communication" -- that's found under "J676" in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication during the first 4-week summer session in the timetable -- so we certainly have room for a few more. We'll be bringing in a nice parade of guest lecturers in both gaming research and gaming development, as well as watching some films (Tron! The King of Kong! Wargames!) and even playing some games (just ordered our Wii system today). And of course there will be lots of reading and writing, as with all of my classes, but that will be fun too. Both undergraduates and graduate students are welcome to sign up.

2008-05-02T09:02:00.002-05:00

The semester is almost over! That's all I can muster up the energy to say at this point ... :)

2008-04-02T08:14:00.003-05:00

This week I'll be spending some time down at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (where I did my undergraduate degree in computer science in the late 1980s) to speak to the Graduate School of Library and Information Science under the banner of their new "Information in Society" doctoral program concentration (thanks to professors Dan Schiller and Linda Smith for the kind invitation). I'll be discussing some very, very "in progress" work dealing with the history of libraries, computers, and human labor in the postwar but pre-Web era. It's part of my third book project, which I'm tentatively calling "The push-button library: Computers and the transformation of metadata labor, 1945-1995" (catchy, huh?). The angle I'll be discussing deals with the way we as historians might make claims about the connections between gender and technology in librarianship during this period -- even when most of the historical actors at the time weren't talking about such connections themselves. It's a topic I'll also be working up in more detail as a formal paper for a conference and workshop entitled "History, Gender, Computing" at the Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information Technology up at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in late May.

2008-03-14T16:17:00.006-05:00

Through some pre-spring-break, end-of-the-day-procrastinating, ego-inflating Googling, I just found out that my first book, Telegraph Messenger Boys (2002), was (mostly) favorably reviewed in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Urban History. Glad to know people are still reading it! (And fortunately it's still in print ...) I was glad to get a nice review from the author, Harold L. Platt, whose 1991 book The Electric City was itself one of the exemplars I looked to during my own graduate education. But in a weird way I'm maybe more proud to see my book appear on the Google listing for the "STS wiki" under the "social construction of technology" entry as an example of (presumably useful) research adopting this broad approach. Don't know which random wiki author threw my book into the mix, but thanks, that's nice.

2008-03-08T07:13:00.002-06:00

This week I'll be speaking on weblogs, journalism, and education at the Kettle Moraine Press Association 2008 Winter Advisers’ Seminar, down at Lake Geneva. I plan to talk all about the surprises I've encountered in using blogs with 18- and 19-year-olds in classes like J201.

2008-02-06T07:29:00.000-06:00

At long last, my second book, Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television, is officially out. (I received my box of ten complementary copies from the publisher in the mail yesterday. This time I won't be reckless enough to donate five copies to various UW-Madison libraries.) Here's the blurb from Johns Hopkins University Press:

This engaging study traces the development of closed captioning -- a field that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from decades-long developments in cinematic subtitling, courtroom stenography, and education for the deaf. Gregory J. Downey discusses how digital computers, coupled with human mental and physical skills, made live television captioning possible. Downey's survey includess the hidden information workers who mediate between live audiovisual action and the production of visual track and written records. His work examines communication technology, human geography, and the place of labor in a technologically complex and spatially fragmented world. Illustrating the ways in which technological development grows out of government regulation, education innovation, professional profit-seeking, and social activism, this interdisciplinary study combines insights from several fields, among them the history of technology, human geography, mass communication, and information studies.

My "book tour" will consist of an upcoming talk in the UW-Madison Department of Geography Yi-Fu Tuan lecture series, and a short trip to Drexel University where my book just happens to fit with their seminar series on "humans and machines" this semester. My J201 class and I were just discussing book publishing this week, and since I showed them in lecture that my previous book, Telegraph Messenger Boys, sits comfortably around the 1 million mark in terms of sales rank at Amazon.com (that means "millionth best selling," not "sold a million copies"), here's hoping this one breaks the 900,000 mark.

2008-02-05T10:56:00.000-06:00

Did you know professors sometimes take classes too? I was lucky enough to be accepted into a faculty seminar on "Migration and Diaspora: Cultural Theory and Representation" led by Susan Friedman, from English and Women's Studies. We just had the first meeting last night. If any students are interested in the topic, I'd be happy to pass on her reading list.

2008-01-09T15:51:00.001-06:00

Well, I'm officially back from sabbatical and nearly ready for Spring classes. Bound, xeroxed readers for J 201 and LIS 569 will be coming soon to the ASM Student Print. I should have some time to clean all the road salt and sand out of my bicycle chain over the weekend, too, if I'm lucky. But please be patient with me in faculty meetings, as I've missed a whole semester's worth of gossip and intrigue, and won't get all the jokes for a while.

2007-11-29T08:13:00.000-06:00

Just found out this week that two special new course proposals of mine have been accepted at the college (Letters & Science) level. Both of them deal with information technology in social context, both are open to undergraduates, and both have earned guaranteed funding (above and beyond normal department course funding) under various "new course initiative" competitions. I'm excited about both courses, and wanted to give folks a preview here.

The first one is a summer course, planned for the first 4-week session in June-July 2008, entitled "Video games and mass communication," taught through the School of Journalism & Mass Communication. It's open to both undergraduates and graduate students since it's at the 600 level. Here's the blurb:

J 676 "Video games and mass communication" (3 credits)
breadth requirement Z (humanities / social science)
4-week summer session
limit 80 students

Far from the days of "Pac Man Fever," video, computer, and internet games are now a significant mass communication industry -- a $6 billion/year market involving the largest of computer and media companies, from Microsoft to Sony. Today's games are enmeshed in controversial claims over their contributions to violence and stereotyping, lawlessness and addiction. But they are just as often hailed as tools for education and moral choices, community-building and artistic production. And even consumers who never play a video game are subject to a gaming aesthetic that permeates not only television advertising and cinematic entertainment, but even the nightly news of war and politics. In this course, students critically examine the history, theory, and political economy of video, computer, and internet gaming in mass communication. The course involves both traditional lecture and discussion, reading and writing, as well as plenty of hands-on experimentation and even a little game playing itself. Students will be expected to read about six articles per week, write four short papers over the course of the term, contribute regularly to both a class weblog and a class wiki, and perform four hands-on game-related assignments. 3 credits.

The idea for the course came from the enthusiastic response of my Spring 2007 J201 students to a new lecture on video games that I put together. (Plus I keep getting asked to be on dissertation committees and invited to academic conferences dealing with gaming, "play," and virtual worlds, so I figured, go with the flow.) I'm hoping it will be successful enough to eventually earn a place in the normal J-School course rotation.

The second course will be taught through the School of Library & Information Studies -- a first for this department, as their normal focus is on graduate students studying to be librarians and information specialists. Here's the info:

LIS 201 "The information society" (4 credits)
Comm-B (research, writing, and speaking skills)
Breadth requirement Z (humanities / social science)

Today, in an environment of web-enhanced workplaces, schools, and shopping malls, we routinely speak of living in an "information society". But what does this term mean and where did it come from? How has information -- in oral, print, broadcast, and now digital/networked forms -- been tied to notions of democracy, capitalism, social justice, and "progress" in American history? And if we really are living in a "postindustrial," "global," and "informational" economy today, what does such a world mean for our understandings of our fragmented selves, our cultural affiliations, and our social responsibilities to each other? Through both lecture and discussion, both readings and films, and both offline and online experiences, this course will guide students in interrogating the information society. As a Comm-B course, students will both experiment with new personal publishing tools like text weblogs and audio podcasts, and hone more traditional skills of academic argument and presentation.

LECTURE: one 50-minute in-person lecture and one asynchronous virtual lecture per week
DISCUSSION: one 50-minute in-person section and additional asynchronous online work per week

READINGS: two articles/week (from a custom course reader available in both print and electronic form)
ASSIGNMENTS: four written assignments (with revisions) and two oral assignments of increasing length and complexity; peer reviews of student writing and oral presentation; participate in collaborative course weblog and wiki; attend at least one individual, in-person writing conference with TA
EXAMS: one written midterm exam and one written final exam

If the structure of this course sounds a lot like that of J201, "Introduction to mass communication," well, that's on purpose. My goal was to translate that model to the field of information studies and design a course that could potentially become the core of a future "Information and Society" undergraduate certificate. LIS 201 will enroll 200 students and employ 5 TAs each fall, and is guaranteed to be funded for the next five years -- starting in Fall 2008, if all goes well (meaning, if all the proper committees approve it). I will even be able to employ a graduate project assistant in Spring 2008 to help me design the course details (and stress-test the course technology).

So please keep an eye out for both of these courses, and until then, I'll see you back in the classroom for J201 and LIS 569 (library history!) in January 2008.

2007-10-25T23:13:00.001-05:00

I have a chapter in a new book that just came out, edited by Catherine McKercher and Vincent Mosco, titled Knowledge Workers in the Information Society (Lexington Books, 2007). Here's what Ursula Huws said about the volume:

At last, we have a book that gives knowledge workers back their agency. With analytical clarity and shrewd judgment, McKercher and Mosco have drawn together an impressive range of contributions from around the world that illustrate vividly, in all their complexity, the hard choices that knowledge workers make each day to balance their urge to creativity with their need to scrape a living and defend working conditions.

My piece is called "The librarian and the Univac: Automation and labor at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair," and it represents a bit of the research I'm doing for my current book project, The push-button library: Computers and the transformation of metadata labor, 1945-1995. Here's the abstract:

The Univac on the Puget Sound gave 84 librarians throughout a diverse geographical and functional division of labor -- in academic libraries, public libraries, school libraries, and corporate libraries -- their first concrete example of information automation. How the designers of LIBRARY-21 understood the labor of these librarians, and how these librarians in turn came to understand their place within LIBRARY-21, illustrates that the 'library of future' which evolved over the next 40 years was less of an inevitable and 'scientific' application of technology in the name of efficiency, and more a complicated negotiation between systems designers, information machines, and knowledge professionals.

You can check out the rest of the contents at the Lexington Books web site.

2007-10-22T10:38:00.000-05:00

Since I just met a whole bunch of smart scholars of technology and society over my last three weeks of conference-hopping, and since some of them might be tempted to Google me and check out my web page, I've decided to repost this conference announcement here in hopes of enticing them to submit (I'll be one of the co-editors of the eventual conference volume):

CALL FOR PAPERS
The Culture of Print in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM)
Madison, Wisconsin
September 12-13, 2008

This conference will include papers focusing on the dynamic intersection of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM) and print culture. Papers might address ways in which STEM -- its histories and materials, its theories and practices, its economics, and its practitioners -- affects or is affected by print culture. These approaches might include: innovations in the production and circulation of print; patterns of authorship and reading; publication, and dissemination of knowledge in the history of STEM. Alternatively, taking the various theories and methodologies that have grown out of half-a-century of historical and social studies of STEM, papers could investigate the social construction of STEM knowledge through print; technologies of experimentation and inscription as a print culture of the laboratory; and the social networks of readership in the production of scientific consensus or conflict. Though our emphasis is on the United States scene, we welcome submissions from other areas of the globe as well.

The keynote speaker will be Professor Jim Secord, of Cambridge University, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, and author of many publications, including the award-winning Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Proposals for individual papers or complete sessions (up to three papers) should include a 250-word abstract and a one-page c.v. for each presenter. If possible, submissions should be made via email. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2008. Notifications of acceptance will be made by early March.

As with previous conferences, we anticipate producing a volume of papers from the conference for publication in a volume in the Center’s series, "Print Culture History in Modern America," published by the University of Wisconsin Press. A list of books the Center has produced, available on the Center's website, offers a guide to prospective authors.

2007-10-15T08:52:00.000-05:00

This week I'll be attending the Society for the History of Technology annual meeting in Washington DC (first in a series of two "fiftieth anniversary celebrations" for the group) so do look for me wandering bleary-eyed in the halls of the conference hotel so we can catch up.

2007-10-09T11:01:00.000-05:00

I'll be at the 4S conference in Montreal this week, tyring to relate my current historical project to the evolving research field of "cyberinfrastructure," but the real highlight will be the Playful Technocultures Unconference organized by some folks at Cornell and taking place the day before the main conference. (I appreciate the invite and regret that I can't convince my kids to part with the Wii for a few days.)

2007-10-04T11:56:00.000-05:00

The kids and I redecorated my bike for autumn ... although if you look closely, the summer plastic bugs are still there.

2007-09-24T13:06:00.000-05:00

This week I'll be participating in a small conference at the University of Utah entitled "Frontiers of New Media: Historical and Cultural Explorations of Region, Identity, and Power in the Development of New Communications Technologies". The work I'll be presenting is soon to be published as "The librarian and the Univac: Automation and labor at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair," in C. McKercher and V. Mosco, eds., Knowledge workers in the information society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, forthcoming 2007). I'm excited that I was invited to contribute to this event and eager to meet both the folks on site in Salt Lake City and the other scheduled speakers.

2007-08-22T14:49:00.001-05:00

I'm going to be taking the first sabbatical of my career this semester, so I'm afraid you won't see me teaching any classes or attending any committee meetings this fall. My email response will likely be rather slow as well. But I will be in town to speak with students whenever needed.

2007-08-01T08:59:00.000-05:00

I just found out that I've officially been granted an affiliate appointment with the fine folks over in our Department of History of Science. This makes me very happy, as much of my own graduate training took place in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology department at the Johns Hopkins University. (And it also brings me one step closer to my sinister goal of becoming a member of every single department at UW-Madison. I loooooove faculty meetings.)

2007-07-25T13:51:00.000-05:00

Yay, my letter to the editor concerning State Representative Steve Nass and his attacks on two UW-Madison professors has been printed in the Capital Times (a week after I sent it in, and with light editing).

2007-07-18T08:16:00.000-05:00

I hope The Capital Times decides to print the letter to the editor that I just sent off this morning:

As both a Wisconsin taxpayer and a tenured UW-Madison faculty member, I was saddened and disgusted to read that the lastest attack on our flagship research university by State Representative Steve Nass came in the form of ridiculing the important new media and education investigations of fellow faculty members Erica and Rich Halverson (Anita Weier, "Fantasy baseball researachers to pol: It's not all fun and games," The Capital Times, Tuesday July 17 2007). I'm glad the Capital Times gave the Halversons a chance to reply to Nass's irresponsible press release (timed just as the state legislature is working on the next UW budget) and to explain their research to the public. As a faculty member who teaches and researches on mass communication and information studies himself, I can verify for your readers that online education and gaming are both crucial fields of study in our evolving "informational society" -- and that the students and alumni who I have talked to about these topics feel the same way. But what really distresses me is not the fear of an open, civil debate over which fields of study might be valuable to our students, our state, and our society -- we faculty and staff at the UW have that debate among ourselves all the time, I assure you. What bothers me is that Nass would issue a press release attacking my friends and colleagues for their hard work, apparently on the basis of his own personal prejudice against the title of a research project and not on the basis of _any research of his own_. In about three seconds, using the online new media technology of Google, I was able to pull up pages of original research reports detailing the theory, method, and social impact of the Halversons' work. With a single phone call Nass might have discovered that Erica Halverson actually spent a week of this very summer traveling by bus around the state of Wisconsin, apart from her family, as part of the venerable "Wisconsin Idea" road trip to improve university service toward the public. And with a single email I could have found out what Nass apparently could not, that the Halversons' current research is funded not by taxpayers but by an outside grant (bringing money directly into our state economy, above and beyond the knowledge generated by their research). With the state having reduced its proportion of support for the UW-Madison budget to around 20% over the last decade, my tax dollars contribute much more to Steve Nass's salary than they do to the salaries of any UW-Madison professors. Thus I would like to demand some research accountability and integrity from Representative Nass, and from all of the other State Representatives and Senators who have yet to repudiate his ridiculous attacks.

Greg Downey
Madison

2007-07-10T08:34:00.000-05:00

Folks visiting my web site might be interested to know that the Wisconsin State Assembly is reportedly planning to cut the UW budget once again, according to an article in today's Wisconsin State Journal.

In addition to $96 million in general cuts to the UW System, the Assembly budget would cap tuition increases at 4 percent through 2011, cut $8 million in system administrative and communications positions and cut $4 million from the UW-Madison law school. It also cuts money for System building projects.

David Giroux, a spokesman for the System, said the cuts would be "very, very harmful to our students, to our research and people in every corner of the state."

The budget would also bar the state, as of Sept. 1, from paying the first 5 percent of a state employee's earnings into the state pension fund. That provision would apply to UW-Madison faculty and staff and is designed to save more than $163 million.

Black said the proposal amounts to a 5 percent pay cut for most state employees.

The budget would also raise health insurance premiums for most state employees.

Whether you feel these are helpful or harmful developments, if you are a stakeholder in the UW, I would urge you to get involved in this budget process by communicating your views to the State Assembly. I have.

UPDATE: UW-Madison Chancellor Wiley has released a statement on the Assembly budget, writing "For the last several budgets, we've been told to absorb cuts and 'wait until the next budget' for critically needed investments. Assembly Republicans want us to continue waiting as Wisconsin slips into a ruinous pattern of disinvestment that has gutted higher education in other states. This is simply wrong."

2007-06-21T17:15:00.000-05:00

Trying to find me over the summer? You'll generally be out of luck in the mornings, as I'll be watching my kids. However, in the early afternoons I'll often be working over at the Fair Trade Coffee House on State Street ... and later in the afternoon, I'll often be in the Memorial Union cafeteria (or on the terrace if it's pleasant). Do stop by and say hello ... historical research and writing can be oh so lonely.

2007-05-30T09:43:00.000-05:00

The summer 2007 schedule for our "Reading Information Studies" book and beverages group is now in session. Tuition is free and the reading list is short: only three books. Homework includes reading the three books we've chosen, posting some ideas, questions, complaints, or musings to the web site here, and then attending a 3pm Friday discussion session on the Terrace. Any students, faculty, and staff broadly interested in "information studies" are invited to participate. Just send me a message if you'd like to be added as an "author" on the weblog.

The books this year were chosen with various purposes in mind. Several of us are interested in political-economic and cultural issues surrounding copyright, digital rights management, and new media. Tarleton Gillespie's new monograph Wired Shut has been garnering good buzz and as several of us know him (he's at Cornell in their STS department) we're eager to give his work a read. Some of us also know Fernando Elichirigoity, who just earned tenure down at the Univeristy of Illinois, and his work on the connections between information studies and global environmental crises provides a nice forum for us to discuss the sorts of issues that the UW SLIS Sustainability Working Group has recently organized to consider. (We're hoping that both Gillespie and Elichirigoity will contribute to our blog as we read their books.) Finally, diversity in media and technology studies is also a big issue around SLIS, especially with our successful recruiting of a couple of Spectrum scholars as new Ph.D. students arriving in Fall 2007. Thus we hope the volume edited by Nelson, Tu, and Hines on race and technology will be a thought-provoking reading.

Here's the full description of the three books, along with the discussion dates:

Friday June 22 3pm: Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut: Copyright and the shape of digital culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). [hardcover: $23]

While the public and the media have been distracted by the story of Napster, warnings about the evils of "piracy," and lawsuits by the recording and film industries, the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology. Lawmakers and commercial interests are pursuing what might be called a technical fix: instead of specifying what can and cannot be done legally with a copyrighted work, this new approach calls for the strategic use of encryption technologies to build standards of copyright directly into digital devices so that some uses are possible and others rendered impossible. In Wired Shut, Tarleton Gillespie examines this shift to “technical copy protection" and its profound political, economic, and cultural implications.

Friday July 20 3pm: Fernando Elichirigoity, Planet Management: Limits to Growth, Computer Simulation, and the Emergence of Global Spaces (Northwestern University Press, 1999). [paper: $28]

Planet Management is a study of, and contribution to, the history of "globality"--the emergence of a complex organization of politics, economics, and culture at a planetary rather than a national level. Drawing on historical archival research as well as recent theoretical work in science studies and critical theory, the book tell the story of the central role of technoscientific discourses and practices in the emergence of globality.

Friday Aug 17 3pm: Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines, eds., Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (New York: NYU Press, 2001). [paper; $21]

From Indian H-1B Workers and Detroit techno music to karaoke and the Chicano interneta, TechniColor's specific case studies document the ways in which people of color actually use technology. The results rupture such racial stereotypes as Asian whiz-kids and Black and Latino techno-phobes, while fundamentally challenging many widely-held theoretical and political assumptions.

All discussions will take place on the Memorial Union Terrace (or inside the Rathskellar if it's raining).

We do hope that, in addition your required reading of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this summer, you will join us as we read and discuss these three important books in the information studies field.

2007-05-25T07:02:00.000-05:00

This week I've been on a bus tour of the state of Wisconsin with four dozen or so of the most interesting and engaged fellow faculty and staff I could ever hope to meet. We've visited public radio stations and private manufacturing plants, state correctional institutions (prisons) and state nature preserves (parks). We've talked to "regular" Wisconsin residents, alumni, and families only in the sense that there is no "regular" prototype into which they all fit. This is very reassuring. I've been reminded that we as UW faculty are well able to ask sincere but challenging questions to the people of our state -- and to each other. More importantly, we're usually well willing to try to answer such challenging questions. If there's been one disappointment for me on the trip, it's been the reminder from my own past positions of learning (both graduate training in social theory and corporate training in public relations) that the answers we allow ourselves to give to crucial questions around the state -- questions about justice and equity, development and sustainability, the meaning of the "good life" for Wisconsinites and the processes by which some are granted Wisconsinite status while some are not -- are often sadly limited by our own personal, cultural, and institutional positionalities. The warden of the Green Bay Correctional Facility says it is "not their problem" that their population is grossly misrepresentative in race and ethnicity of the Wisconsin citizenry as a whole -- just as I've sometimes heard that it's "not our problem" here in Madison that our incoming student body each year is similarly misrepresentative. It seems to me that the purpose of the Wisconsin Idea is to challenge us to think beyond our own positions, views, and responsibilities, if only for a moment, to consider our place in a larger circulation of lives, capital, energy, and ideas. It's a very ecological way of thinking, really, which should come as no surprise in the state of Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson. But it's a way of thinking that can be difficult to learn and to sustain, especially when a lack of resources, attention, and political leadership make it easier for us to cocoon within our own institutions (or towns, or firms, or families) and ignore the outside world. If there's one thing I've learned from this trip, it is that we ignore that wider world -- it's problems, it's processes, and it's people -- at our peril.

(For more on this issue and the prison visit which inspired it, check out this UW News posting by Nicole Miller. And see my further musings on this trip at my main weblog, Uncovering Information Labor.)

2007-05-14T09:23:00.000-05:00

Not only is this finals week, it's also "Bike to Work Week." (Personally, I think it should be called, "Bike, Walk, Run, Skate, Razor, Canoe, or Bus to Work Week," but what do I know.) I'm an advocate for both human-powered transportation and urban environments which encourage such transport. Although I am proud to say that I choose to either bike or bus to work every day, the most important sustainable transport choice I have made (and was privileged enough to make) was actually to select a residence within easy biking and busing distance of my work site in the first place. To all of my students who may be graduating this semester, I'd encourage you to think about making similar sustainable residential choices as you venture out into the world.

Photo: Greg's bug bike (note extended frame for carrying beer and children).

2007-05-01T07:56:00.000-05:00

Happy May Day.

I had a professor once who would start off the semester by asking, "Where does your breakfast come from?" This led us into creative discussions of where other necessities of modern life came from, whether news and information, water and electricity, or clothing and shelter. Not coincidentally, this was the professor who introduced me to the idea of advocating, at minimum, a "living wage" for any and all laborers who help reproduce the many and various conditions of modern social life.

As someone who professes to study "information labor" I tend to think it is important to remember and recognize the ongoing and often hidden human effort, skill, thought, and value that underpins our daily material and cultural existence.

For more information on the changing value of human labor in our national information society, you might wish to explore the Economic Policy Institute. For a more local view, check out the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.

2007-04-16T20:13:00.000-05:00

My thoughts and sympathies go out to the students and staff, faculty and families, of Virginia Tech.

All of us in education work hard against such despicable acts of violence every day that we come together peacefully to teach and to learn, to remember and to understand, to make life better not only for ourselves, but for all.

I might suggest that this is a good time to explore organizations working to curb gun violence in America, such as the Brady Campaign. I've also found the Berkeley Media Studies Group "Reporting on Violence" project, including their downloadable PDF report, "Reporting on Violence: A Handbook for Journalists," to be a useful classroom resource.

UW-Madison folks might check out this list of ways to show support for Virginia Tech here on campus.

2007-03-19T11:50:00.000-05:00

It's been four years since my country went to war in Iraq. That war is still going on. Some tools for analysis:

President Bush's speech to the nation today can be viewed at C-SPAN (video, RealPlayer format, 8 minutes)

New York Times summary of coverage

BBC report "Iraq: Four years on"

Mother Jones "Iraq 101" primer

2007-03-09T11:44:00.000-06:00

To my SLIS advisees: I'll have office hours for advising in my H.C. White office on Wednesday March 14 and Friday March 16, from 1:30pm-4:00pm both days. No appointment necessary; just come on by and I will advise you on any and all matters within the vast areas of my expertise.

2007-02-18T21:11:00.000-06:00

I recently found out that I'm slated to receive a campus teaching award, and I couldn't be happier. The best part just might be the many congratulations I've received from my colleagues and students. (Well, OK, the best part is that there was some money involved, but well-wishes are very nice.) Kidding aside, though, my attitude toward teaching at the university level is much like my attitude toward research. Even though my form of research seems like a solo pursuit -- reading old manuscripts in archives, composing book-length prose in front of my computer screen -- it is really a collaborative conversation in which I am constantly learning from my peers (and benefiting from their critique). In the same way, I see my teaching as part of a collaborative conversation. In classes large and small, my teaching success is directly dependent on the hard work of graduate teaching assistants and the valuable time of faculty guest-lecturers. My own teaching style was inspired and influenced by that of my graduate advisers, and I strive in a similar way to model both effective instructional techniques and enthusiastic educational attitudes in my classroom work. And really, no one on this campus could possibly hope to become an effective teacher -- let alone win any awards doing it -- if they weren't housed in a department which took its undergraduate and graduate teaching responsibilities seriously at all levels. Hopefully all departments on our campus do this -- but I can say for certain that my two departments do. So thanks back to the rest of UW-Madison for letting me care about my teaching in the first place.

2007-02-05T06:59:00.000-06:00

An article in the Wisconsin State Journal today highlights an unfortunate bottleneck within UW-Madison that even many faculty find surprising when they first start working here: "For roughly half of the nearly 150 majors on campus, all that's required is to declare an intention to major in a particular field and you're in. For other majors, the so-called limited enrollment majors, students must apply and be admitted." This limitation on majors is particularly acute in one of my departments, Journalism and Mass Communication, where due to low faculty numbers, lack of funding for graduate student TAs, and other limits of space and time, even though "200-250 students typically apply each term to become journalism majors [,] Only 100 will be accepted." It's a situation that's personally frustrating to me, as I teach the first journalism class that our majors are exposed to -- after taking my 450-student intro course, they may apply for admission to the major. Our applications have increased of late, telling me that we're doing a good job inspiring students to consider communication as a worthy career. But I wish we had more resources to follow through on that inspiration.

2007-01-25T15:47:00.000-06:00

New fun with sound in my blog posts. Let's see if this works ...

(The Mermen, "Miserlou," recorded live in 2002; from the Internet Live Music Archive)

2007-01-09T07:30:00.000-06:00

The secret is out. My birthday was January 8 -- same day as Elvis Presley and David Bowie, which likely means something important -- and I turned 40. For some reason this number is considered an age milestone in US culture, although I don't get to drink anything new (21) or see any scarier type of movie (18) or drive any more dangerous sort of vehicle (16). We marked the event at my house with take-out from Sushi Box, a big homemade chocolate chip cookie, and a DVD of "Godzilla vs. Mothra" on loan from the public library. (The kids were rooting for Mothra.)

P.S. Instead of the customary expensive sports car, I decided to get a Wii in order to recapture my youth ... and a car-sharing membership.

2006-12-29T09:45:00.000-06:00

The students in my Fall J676 class put together some impressive projects dealing with "cyberspace" and I wanted to showcase them here:

Professional Journalism vs. Amateur Blogging

Wikipedia (actually presented as a wiki)

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Open Source Movement

Network Neutrality

The Patriot Act

The most wonderful time of the year

2006-12-28T09:49:00.000-06:00

Ah, the week between the Winter Solstice holiday and the New Year holiday. Most UW students are out of school and many UW workers are on vacation. (Kudos to those who aren't -- the university is really a year-round, 24-hour knowledge-production factory as far as I'm concerned.) I've claimed my regular spot at the Fair Trade Coffee House and I'm one of a grand total of half a dozen people here on this warmish midwestern December Thursday morning. The striking thing is that, unlike a normal morning in the cafe, I'm the only patron to be typing away on a laptop computer. Other folks are actually perusing newspapers, reading books, and talking to each other. It's like being in transported back in time to 1987 or something. I really should be finishing revisions on three articles, entering grades for last semester, and finalizing the readings for my classes next semester. But somehow it seemed more important right at this moment to start yet another weblog. Oh, the freedom and power that new media affords us!

The note on my door

2006-12-28T09:44:00.000-06:00

The problem is, I actually have two doors -- one for each of my two offices, in each of my two departments on the UW-Madison campus -- so leaving the friendly note saying "I'm over in the library" or "I'm on a sailing vacation in Tortuga" or "Please don't bother me I'm finishing the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is kind of difficult for me. I already have a serious, topic-oriented weblog dealing with my research interests, called Uncovering Information Labor, so this weblog will be a more casual and chatty vehicle for letting friends know what I'm up to on an occasional basis. Students may find it interesting as a firsthand glimpse into the thoroughly exciting life of a modern-day university professor, to be sure. But for the most part, this little blog is just a way to leave a friendly note on my door.