Do I Have Your Attention? Howard Rheingold's Balloon Experiment

[src: djsoundwav's YouTube Channel]

Are we afraid to ask students "Do I have your attention" because they'll say, as Zuckerberg does in the clip, "No"?

Of everyone I've been reading lately, Howard Rheingold is the most innovative thinker about attention in the f2f in networked classrooms.

Check out these two tweets (18 minutes ago) about a social experiment he ran in his class today:

2 show capabilities of social networks, my ingenious students placed balloons arnd campus, challenged others 2 ask friends 2 locate them

Students sent SMS, tweets, Facebook updates @ start of class. An hour later, one student had located 11 balloons through her social netowrk

What better to collapse the distances--physical, psychic--between our lives online and our lives on campus than the balloon experiment?

It literalizes the proximal nature of our networks: those folks chasing balloons across campus are both of us and their own selves, following their own desires. Those who get the call to chase balloons can opt to do it or ignore it. But if they see the status update about the balloons and choose not to pursue them, they still have more knowledge than they had before the update: if they see a balloon on campus, they'll *see* it. The social network has given them more knowledge and insight than they would have had without it. And that's just for being part of one: not the reward for opting in.

The social network, in other words, allowed something otherwise invisible or unremarkable to take on significance. To become meaningful.

Today in Howard's experiment, one student's network found 11 balloons. Wouldn't it be fun to figure out why her network found so many? Is her network more playful than most? Blessed with more disposable time? More spontaenous? How are networks inflected by the personalities that gather them, and are there folks studying this? At what point are networks so compendious as to exceed the parameters of personality, turn into a blob of electrons?

Howard's students (and all of us, thanks to his tweet) might think through a couple of ideas manifest in the balloon experiment.

1. In classroom settings, the virtual and the physical (f2f) work most productively in tandem. Neither group (the students in the classroom nor the ones hunting balloons) could find the balloons alone.

2. F2f classes must deliver something that students cannot find themselves online. Bahktin, in Dialogic Imagination calls this "eventness": the infusion of surprise and contingency into the prosaic. Now more than ever, classes need to be "eventful" in order to compel attention. The balloons surprised Howard's students into "seeing" an element of social networking that perhaps they'd taken for granted. That's the job of "eventness": to make visible underlying assumptions of how systems of power operate.

3. Compelling attention in an f2f writing class will necessitate rethinking what counts as a classroom activity, and what gets done in the network or alone in front of a screen. I'm proposing to teach my Advanced Writing class at USC 75% online/ 25% f2f. That ratio is my best guess of how student writers will most productively and eventfully use their time. But that ratio is being met with deep skepticism among decision makers because to acknowledge how much the writing classroom is changed by social media is to heap onto already full plates the challenge of redesign and the thrill of experimentation.

I offer these observations not to those who know social networks to be fundamental to one's self. I offer them to the many people I encounter in higher ed who think of SNs as virtual replications of f2f. If your SN is comprised entirely of people you know f2f, this might be you.

Howard has some f2f exercises for increasing students' awareness of how they spend their attention. This is from his recent EDUCAUSE article, "Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies":

The first thing I do in my class now is ask the students to turn off their cellphones, shut their laptops, and close their eyes.

I tell them that I will let them know when 60 seconds have gone by, and I ask them to just do nothing but notice what happens in their minds, to observe where their attention would go without any external distractions.

Of course, anybody who meditates knows that your mind is pretty much out of control. Your attention can go anywhere: to yesterday, to tomorrow.

After they open their eyes, I ask them to keep their laptops closed, and I add that I will upload my notes for that first lecture so they shouldn't have to worry about taking notes.

But because my intention is to probe, not control, and ultimately to instill in students an experience of some reflection about their media practices, I did not outright ban the use of laptops.

This move at the end is most interesting. It's tempting for teachers to abuse our power and prohibit screens by edict.

But there are several innovators in my department at USC who are already using screens in fantastically exciting ways: Geoff Middlebrook's Blogfolios, Mark Marino's crowdsourced anti-bullying resource, Stephanie Bowers & John Murray's "Writing for the Common Good," docu/writing in the neighborhood course, Matt Manson's tweet stream, Ron Scheer's students' YouTube advocacy vids, and Norah Ashe-McNalley & Nathalie Joseph's student online writing journal, AngeLingo. There may be others flying new stuff: I'm on sabbatical this year, and removed from the day-to-day chez JEF.

I think Howard's fusion of the f2f with the networked is a micrograph of how classrooms will begin to look: shuttling between f2f and screen, lively, kinetic, expansive.

In networked classrooms we're going to be using our bodies more, not less, than we do in the f2f classroom. Rather than passively regard the folks sitting around the seminar table, our bodies will activate new kinds of learning when the networked writing class gathers f2f: as we crowdsource knowledge, extend our selves far beyond the classroom, and jump into the cities that house our universities. Those cities are living texts to explore and annotate. Ulysses.

My wish is that someday soon, we'll all have the chance to hunt after Howard's balloons.

Desire and eMotion: The Wilderness Downtown

View The Wilderness Downtown in Google Chrome or Safari 5.

Almost everyone likes “The Wilderness Downtown,” the interactive film by Chris Milk set to the song “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire.  David Pescovitz at Boing Boing declares The Wilderness Downtown “perhaps the best browser-dominating Net art piece I've experienced since Jodi.org's best work more than a decade ago.”  Of the 27 comments posted to Pescovitz’s piece, many go like this:  “I didn't think I would like this when I saw it a couple days ago. Just some web-tricks. However, the song and the personalization really did it for me. I'm going to send it to my brother and see what he thinks. We have so many memories of the place we grew up.”

The teenage boys to whom I showed it like it.  My elementary-school aged daughter likes it.  My former boss likes it.  My new-media-agile friends like it.  I like it.

Is it a bland aesthetic, this burger to which everybody adds their own secret sauce to make delicious?  Or is “The Wilderness Downtown” popular because it’s a game-changer, creating the expectation of interactivity:  that stories will work harder to meet you, quite literally, where you live.

Yes.

How can both of these things be true?

Metonymy, the rhetorical trope, is the muscle powering Wilderness Downtown’s emotional punch.

Metonymy is the trope of contiguity.  Of desire.  Metaphor draws relationship from similarity:  “Achilles is a lion.”  Metonymy draws relationship by approximation:  “Madison Avenue scripts what we want.”

“The Wilderness Downtown” is metonymy in motion.  Its structure reinforces the nostalgic theme.  Up to five windows open and shut in perfect synchronicity with the music. You watch the faceless, hooded proxy of yourself running through your childhood neighborhood as depicted in present-day Google Maps street view.  The percussive, moody music pushes you through the experience.  Unlike many pieces of eLit, there’s a beginning, middle and end.  The unities of color (black, white, gray and orange) and pacing direct the eye, guide you to unify the window-fragments into a satisfying whole. You are instructed to write or doodle a postcard to the self you were when you lived there; this is the only moment where the piece slows down.  The creators assume you have a lot to say.  “And so I wrote a letter,” intones the Arcade Fire lyric.  “I never took my true heart, I never wrote it down.”

Now you can. 

At the end of WD you can send your postcard along to strangers if you like, or to the  Wilderness Machine, or to the Arcade Fire tour; but of course that defeats the intimacy of the conceit that you are writing to your younger self.  It’s a tease, a fake.

Indeed, the interactivity of this “interactive film” is limited to the moment when you enter your address; after that, you’re just watching the movie play out across the literal landscape of your childhood.

“If the measure is the concept, not the interactivity,” observes Mark Marino at Writer Response Theory, “I find the piece to be a nice mashup of html5 effects, maps, and music under a creepy combo of nostalgia and surveillance crows. True, other elit is more interactive--or offers more significant interaction. This is more of the you be the star of the story -- or Dora episode -- genre.”

The first time I saw it a few weeks ago,” notes Dustin Stevenson in response to Marino, “I expected/hoped that the doodle I drew would manifest in the climactic moment of the film. . . .  [R]eading this post left me wishing for a more deeply mutable digital object.”

Indeed, WD bets that genuine interactivity takes a back seat to nostalgia.  Given the positive reception, it looks like they won the bet.  Urged on by the sexy Arcade Fire refrain “aaaaaah, we used to wait,” WD is a steamy broth of conflicting desires:  to be the self in the video and yet to escape out of it; to be inside that childhood landscape and also watch it destroyed by crows pummeling the ground and thrusting up into trees that occlude your view.  In short, it can be anything to anybody:  a perfect marketing machine (recall WD was created in part to show off the HTML5 and new Google Chrome).  But is it a perfect aesthetic object?  It’s too empty to be truly memorable.


And yet, pretty much everybody I've come across likes it.  A lot.  The negative comments fall along the lines of:  what happened to interoperability?  Why can't I run this on Firefox?


Which returns us to the question of why people like The Wilderness Downtown.

Filmmaker Chris Milk:  “My real motivation came from my quest for music videos to have the equally soul-touching emotional resonance that straight music does. Honestly, I'm not sure they ever can. Music scores your life. You interact with it. You listen to it in the car.  It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl. Music videos are very concrete and rigid. They don't allow for that emotional interaction.”

Unless you customize to each user.  Let him plug in his own address, his own memories and desires, and the user can make the meaning.  In a way, it’s the dream of every artist and reception theorist:  reading is performance, its own art.

But is it art, the infinite regress of me dancing between two mirrors, watching all those arms raise and lower simultaneously?  Milk has created a compelling empty screen on which to project our fantasies about our younger selves.  Empty but with "boids" flying across it.  Duchamp’s fountain has more instrinsic meaning.  

Metonymy in motion = eMotion.  The secret sauce you’ll buy every time because it tastes like you.