Blog Post 9: Patriarchy-smashing witches and socialism are the Answers
Class Notes
Book club class! I really enjoyed taking part in our book club sessions as both a participant and facilitator. The rotating structure to the bookclub was a function of necessity for the class, but I actually think having this kind of rotating facilitator group could work really well within a library workshop context! I’m imagining a kind of skill-share collective where folks take turn leading a discussion -- perhaps among librarian staff members, or a mixture of librarians and students. (And perhaps this is idealistic, but I love the democratic/participatory feel of it.)
I absolutely loved Grimm’s Cinderella. I was pretty unfamiliar with Cinderella and entirely unfamiliar with Grimm’s version, which I imagined would be gory and sweetly dark in the Grimm Brothers’ style (which it certainly was!) We came up with a headcannon ( https://fanlore.org/wiki/Headcanon ) of Cinderella as a punky witch subverting the patriarchy, which was lovely (and maybe, like, 70% affirmed by the story). Cinderella spent a lot of time being sad in the woods and using this kind of fantasy-land to escape tough family things. I related way way more to this than I expected (never thought I’d see myself in Cinderella, ha).
It was also really helpful to think through issues of inclusion in librarianship, how to function best within an institutional context, and how to affect change from within a profession. I’m definitely conceptualizing myself more and more as a librarian as time goes on, and am grateful for opportunities to hear my peers reflect on this as well, share what they’ve learned from their own work experiences, all of those good things.
Reading/Listening Notes
I chose to listen to the conversation between Tristan Harris and Ezra Klein. I found it absolutely fascinating, and disturbing, and thought-provoking. Many superlatives. I noticed many of the themes in our previous class discussion show up here, including:
- The theme of giving people what they want versus giving them healthy, positive sources of data (the “should we feed them vegetables?” question. In the context of data literacy in particular, this often overlaps with what we know about reliable news and information from traditional approaches to information literacy (e.g. evaluating sources, fact-checking, academic rigor, etc.) When we no longer think about our readers as citizens or learners or young folks, but only as consumers, the conversation looks very different. Ezra and Tristan do a good job digging contextualizing just why we tend to think about “giving consumers choice” and “consumer freedom”, and how that carries with it a superficial set of ideas about what is truly meaningful and deeply desired by individuals.
- To that end, I found it especially helpful to think about how we can better listen to, affirm, and fulfill the values of individuals we serve, rather than simply fostering a short-term, often artificially stimulated desire for an in-the-moment outcome. How can libraries provoke this kind of thoughtful awareness of their patron communities values and desires on a deeper level? In what way do community values become part of the planning process for programming, workshops, and other learning interventions?
- It was also fascinating to see the many juxtapositions in the podcast. For instance, at one point Ezra Klein interrupts the interview to give a very personal, informal ad spot for eHarmony. Improvising off of a script apparently, Ezra makes a case for how eHarmony is uniquely able to understand romance and nourish healthy relationships because of the large quantity of data it captures. I don’t really blame him for giving an ad spot -- we all exist within capitalism and have to make a buck to pay bills, etc. - but it did make me wonder, what would make the ideas and expression of anxieties around technology reach a sufficient volume so that they could truly transform the policy/governmental/societal landscape?
- Both Ezra and Tristan dance around the idea of regulation, and express some hesitation for saying the answer is firm-handed government intervention. They gesture towards societal changes being necessary, and do specifically call out neoliberalism, but stop short of providing a focused proposition re: political and economic structures, which is where I personally feel this change needs to come from. Tristan also repeatedly uses game theory formulations (“applying a discount,” which I only know about because of SI 617!) It’s interesting to see how their different critiques and perspective is constrained by these limitations.
- I wrote down “Snapchat streak!?” and “Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.” Woof.
- I’ve been trying the grayscale filter on my iPhone for the last several days! It’s actually been moderately-to-very effective. I still use the Internet too much, but my phone-grabbing instinct has noticably lost a bit of its teeth. I’m going to try it all month and see how it feels -- will update more later.
Your first two bullet points about respecting stable, long-term values rather than just satisfying passing short-term impulses (which, as you note, are often manufactured or whetted by the platforms themselves), as well as the comparative merits of 'feeding them vegetables," resonate with some of my biggest takeaways from the interview. Since it's now been a couple weeks, I am unclear on whether Klein and Harris talked about it specifically in terms of 'revealed preference' vs. stated preference or if that language was more prominent in Klein's interview with Jaron Lanier a while back. Regardless, the gist there was that 'revealed preference,' or the tailoring of a personal profile of likes and dislikes based solely on observed online behavior, creates a reductive, impulsive, and totally non-aspirational version of someone's wants and needs. They raise the question: What would it be like if we were able to take into account what people claim they want to read, view, or be (i.e. a longer-term, aspirational dimension of self) in the curation of their online feeds and exposure, rather than essentially feeding them junk that plays into the hands of their more base interests and instincts? I confess myself more than a little creeped out by the idea of such a nanny state-ish, paternalistic approach to managing people's online existence, but the fact is that the status quo is already so ugly that all alternatives seem to merit our consideration.
ReplyDeleteI've had this experience many times in our classes (for instance, in that conversation about censorship back in our first semester of SI 647!) where I've had to wonder whether "paternalism" is such a dirty word. I mean, it certainly can be used for oppressive and horrible ends. At the same time, if the alternative is always conceptualizing of folks as "consumers" and accepting all of the manipulation and baggage that comes with that, is it really so bad to think about the deeper values and needs of folks in our communities? I agree with you're point about if the status quo is so ugly already... perhaps a middle ground can be making sure design processes (and tech in general) has some kind of accountability to our best interests rather than, say, Facebook making the argument that they're already letting us do everything we need. (Regulation!!)
DeleteI'm surprised you didn't mention your own reading as relating to the overall theme of overcoming oppressive systems and ideologies in our book club! Astrology as a means of acknowledging the inherent flaws of organized religion and providing some form of comfort and structure in our chaotic, neoliberal landscape was definitely something we latched onto in our discussions. I also think it fit in nice with our witchy interpretation of Cinderella. Perhaps it would have been worth it to have a closing discussion where we talk about these overlapping themes. And if more book clubs sessions were like those skill collectives you envision, that practice would already be set in stone.
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