The Revolution Will Be Televised

Exam-week insanity=no time for a real post, but the crazy upheavals and uprisings going on at my school while I’m sequestered here in my room with my head in the books is a little hard to ignore. Essentially, as I understand it, a rather complicated and long-building set of circumstances having to do with dissatisfaction with New School president, Bob Kerrey, vice president, Jim Murtha and other high ranking members of the school administration reached a point of critical mass last week, resulting in an almost-unanimous vote of “no confidence” from the school’s tenured faculty, and this week from the entire faculty of the university, a move modeled after actions taken by Harvard against its former president and current Obama appointee, Lawrence Summers. To make a long story short, students have been protesting publicly all week–there have been town hall meetings, a blog started  by administrators to create another forum for discussion, etc. Kerrey, backed by a stacked board of directors, has refused to step down, despite obviously overwhelming public sentiment against him. Last night at 8:00 PM, a large group of students took over the graduate student center and as of now continue to be barricaded inside. New York City police have been brought in to try to disburse them, and there were reports of some students being forcibly removed from the premises and one girl being attacked by a New School security guard. 

One thing that struck me immediately in looking at the coverage of these unfolding events, and something that I think is pertinent to the kinds of issues I’m interested in exploring on this blog, is how interesting it is to see the ways in which modern technologies have changed the face of protest. Looking at pictures of the event, it calls to mind the kinds of images everyone has seen of student protests from generations gone by–students holding hand-made banners and looking defiant, students standing on tables and shouting out strategy. Yet, the web presence of this movement reveals how different modern protest movements are. The first thing is the real-time coverage…there are students inside that building who are live blogging updates  for those on the outside. Furthermore, students have continued calls on the internet–through their hastily constructed website and through email and comments on other blogs, to try to mobilize other students to come and join them as well as to try to mobilize greater news coverage, seemingly with some success. As I say, I unfortunately don’t really have the time at this point to fully explicate what the implications or significance of these changes are, but it’s just interesting to think–if these technologies had existed in the 1960s and 70s, a heyday of the “student protest/sit in”, how would that have changed things, altered outcomes, etc? Marshall McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message”, so how do the changing media of communication and activism change the message and, by extension, the movements producing the messages, if indeed they do at all?

Links to coverage:

New School In Exile Blog (Protesters’ Blog)

New School in Exile Website (Protesters’ Website)

Protest At The New School Seeks Kerrey’s Ouster (New York Times)

New School Students Protest for President’s Ouster (US News & World Report)

New School Students Stage a Sit-In (Gothamist)

New School Student Occupation: Day Two (Gothamist)

‘Mr. Kerrey Has Retreated into the Swayduck‘ (Gawker)

Quick Follow Up

Jezebel has a really thoughtful, interesting write-up of the teen’s webcam suicide I wrote about yesterday (“Virtual In-Vanity“). The Jezebel piece focuses more on the the mentality of the online audience, but also touches on some of the themes of exhibitionism and performativity of actors in the online world as well, writing “There is a loneliness and a patheticism that comes with such a thing; for every person trying to be an internet star, there are five or six just trying to be noticed by somebody, anybody at all.” The piece goes on to quote Montana Miller, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green University, who talks about the “generational desire to live in the most public way possible,” saying “If it’s not recorded or documented then it doesn’t even seem worthwhile. For today’s generation it might seem, `What’s the point of doing it if everyone isn’t going to see it?’”

Virtual In-Vanity

This heartbreaking and very disturbing story on CNN about a Florida teenager who committed suicide on his live webcam while viewers egged him on and chatted back and forth about whether he would succeed got me thinking about the ways the internet has changed and continues to change reality and human interaction. My first reaction, besides revulsion, was that there seems to be something strangely antithetical about committing suicide in such a public, dialogic forum. Suicide seems to me the ultimate act of hopelessness, of isolation and disconnection, from other people and from the world around you. I think it’s a fascinating commentary on our mediated world that, even in death, the only thing that, as the saying goes, everyone does alone, this poor kid’s behavior demonstrated the kind of performative, outwardly-focused presentational awareness, a narcissism of sorts that characterizes so much of online social interaction.

I was talking to a friend yesterday who is working on a project dealing with Myspace, specifically Myspace comments (the messages Myspace “friends” leave each other on their profile walls) as an exemplification of this same sort of online narcissism, and it reminded me of this story, which I’d just read. I’ve never used Myspace, but have been on Facebook for years and I’ve seen this mutual narcissism/voyeurism steadily growing within that space. In the relatively early days of Facebook when I first joined, users had only the comparatively limited forum of the Facebook profile to personalize with such information as your dating status, home town, religious beliefs, favorite music, and an open-ended blurb called “about me”. At the time I remember being a little embarrassed to post such things as my political views and favorite activities for all to see. Part of me enjoyed being able to craft an image for myself, to see some kind of a skeletal, one-dimensional version of me cohesively represented in a little box–neat, clean, definite, and much simpler and more easily digestible than the three-dimensional reality of my life. Especially as a somewhat shy, reserved person, I think I relished the chance to let the profile represent me to people better than I felt I might be able to. At the same time, I did feel a vague sense of embarrassment, the same embarrassment, in fact, that kept me from starting a blog for years–the feeling that there was something incredibly presumptuous in assuming that anyone would want to hear what I thought or know a bunch of random information about me.

Over the years, I’ve had that feeling again and again as Facebook has become more pervasive, providing an ever greater variety of  ways to exhibit one’s self publicly–photo albums and video, all kinds of “applications” which let you, for instance, display a map showing everywhere in the world you’ve been or a little box that shows your friends what music you’re listening to at that very minute. Most recently came the “news feed”, a somewhat creepy feature which aids and abets the stalker in all of us by showing us a running list of all of our friends’ most recent facebook actions–who just changed their “relationship status”, who wrote on whose wall, who became friends with whom, etc. At the same time, Facebook also added the “status message” feature which allows users to post a short message, which informs their “friends” of their current whereabouts, feelings, or plans. It took me a long time to come around to the status message. Something about writing into a window which forced me to discuss myself in the third person was just too much for me. But, even that has come to seem much more normal to me and I will probably even put the link to this post up in my status message after I finish writing. At least in my personal experience and observation, it seems to me that the internet continues to facilitate ever-greater potential for narcissism and self-display. Other forms of media certainly encode these values as well, but I think it is the internet’s participatory and productive elements that reify messages by allowing individuals who were primarily consumers of these values previously to become producers and reproducers of them as well.