This post represents personal opinions only. It is available under a CC-BY licence.
It’s rare that a blog post manages to implicitly offer a critique of itself, but this one by Ewen Le Borgne at the International Livestock Research Unit does so in a such a mesmerisingly symmetrical way that I can only assume that it is intentional.
As a late 90s lit-crit student, I was of course introduced to Mikhail Bakhtin’s legendary “Rabelais and his world”, taking from it the central conceit of the carnivalesque in literature – you’d expect to come across this in any literature course. But what was maybe unique for me and my generation is that this discovery coincided with sudden and rapid growth of the world wide web. To me, as a precocious undergraduate, the web and the discourse of the web was a carnival, in the Bakhtinian sense that here was a place where social norms and hierarchies were shifted, where anything was fair game for reuse and parody, and where the marginalised and reviled found a new confident voice as their “superiors” were embarrassed, scared and tongue-tied.
What no-one predicted was the way in which, over the following decade and a half, this discourse would become mainstream, the geek would (sorry, horrid cliché) inherit the earth, and the practices and protocols embedded in our early use of the web would come to define the way in which my generation and the ones after it expected intellectual property, publishing and knowledge management to work. This unexpected carnival radically re-conceptualised ideas of property, of the nature of the idea, of the idea of education and knowledge, of reputation and authority – we thought we were just downloading lost albums from Napster and writing about them on our Geocities pages, but it turned out we were living through the opening years of a revolution similar in scope to the advent of mechanisation.
Writer Cathrynne M Valente recently described the impact of this rather better than I could:
“Now that the internet has settled in to being a massive and integral part of our lives on Planet Earth, we are starting to see how it changes our culture in the medium to long term, how profoundly it skews even comparatively young predictions from 10-15 years ago. The internet is not a Singularity with a capital S, but it is a sea change sharing more in common with the industrial revolution than simply a new device.”
And the carnival is still here, it is just that we have forgotten it in a rush to import pre-digital ideas of authority and property online. And Le Borgne’s post, with a call for a limited academian feast of fools, carefully constrained so as not to have any danger of disrupting anything, takes me back once again to Jim and Brian’s high water mark. But this is not my point.
These days, we are complicit in selling the carnivalesque back to ourselves. Keynote talks and online seminars codify disruption as something that happens on a stage with a wireless headset mic and stock photos that aspire to the symbolic without ever quite reaching it. Andrew Orlowski slips this idea into a very amusing rant about Malcolm (Tipping Point) Gladwell:
“You could say these [Vertical Marketing Bureaucrat roles] are non-productive jobs in non-productive companies: the skills required to prattle on about “horizontal marketing segmentation” have very little to do with traditional sales skills, or R&D. But what they rely on are the same things the New Bureaucrats rely on: measurement and monitoring.
[…] For want of a snappy description, and because it traverses the public and private sectors in a kind of League of the Clueless, I’ll call this new class the vertical marketing bureaucracy, or VMB). These are people whose ambition is to speak at, or at least attend, New Media Conferences. Gladwell is their passport. And because TV and posh paper executives are now essentially part of the same vertical marketing bureaucracy (VMB) too, they’re only too happy to report on Gladwell, the Phenomenon.”
There’s now an established pattern for disruptive thought, a set of tropes and reference points that alert a bored audience that they are about to have their minds exploded by someone saying that learning is, like, all about people – and here are some numbers and graphs to prove it. Look, here’s a picture of a poor person I saw on my holidays. LOOK AT MY HOLIDAY SNAPS, PEOPLE. FEEL MY SOCIOCULTURAL TOURISM! So instead of the full-on feast of fools, we get a feast-lite: a hierarchy of fools… largely white, largely male, largely middle-class, largely Euro-American at the top doing TED talks, with a slightly wider pool of similarly attributed VMBs beneath them aping their styles at things like Learning Without Frontiers and other futurist conferences in exciting inflatable spaces with stages and lighting rigs. And below that, the general seeker after truth – a conference-goer often at public expense – who gets… what?
They are no longer participants in the carnival. They are a backdrop to the official feast. A means of signifying to the Gladwell-esque that they have arrived. Whoop and holler, people.
I don’t mind as much for New Media Conferences. I mean, people who voluntarily go to new media conferences deserve all they get. But when this Apple-toting licensed court jester approach sneaks in to serious conversations about education, I reach for my (metaphorical) revolver. Education (and the struggle for the soul of education) is far too important to trivialise with this cut-and-paste, cut-and-dried approach to disruption-by-numbers.
There are a small but significant number of education keynotees who may read this, and I have annoyed them before. But to anyone contemplating a large scale public address in this sphere, I point you to these three words of advice from Rob Englebright.
Purity. Truth. Beauty.
(the other rule of keynotes is always to use other peoples ideas. Though to be fair, Jim should absolutely use this slide and Rob would be delighted)
Some words in conclusion from Prof. Michael Holquist (introduction to my 1984 edition of “Rabelais and his world”), Mikhail Bakhtin, and François Rabelais.
“Those who lived through [the Russian revolution of 1917] were willy nilly thrown into the work of history. No one was allowed the luxury of a spectator’s role. Those who normally seek the safety and anonymity of the gallery, such as peasants, workers, and – perhaps especially – intellectuals, to watch the kings, generals, prophets, and other public figures who occupy center stage go forward to volunteer their blood at Hegel’s “slaughter bench of history,” discovered they could not sit back and eat popcorn-or read books. The revolution gave a particularly Russian twist to Joyce’s line, “Here comes everybody.”” (Holquist)
“[…] the official feasts of the Middle Ages, whether ecclesiastic, feudal or sponsored by the state, did not lead the people out of the established world order and created no second life. On the contrary, they sanctioned the existing pattern of things and reinforced them.” (Bakhtin)
“Friends, you will notice that in this world there are many more bollocks than men. Remember this.” (Rabelais)
“Welcome to Soviet ds106, where art is beauty. Exalted leader Jim Groom shall poor upon you truth and purity every morning before 12 hour mandated ds106radio listening time.”It sound better if you read it in a thick Russian accent :)I appreciate you calling out TED Talks for the very thinly veiled guise of revolution. While some of the messages are good for the soul, the TED Talks that reveal how easy it is to whip an unassuming audience into a frenzy because kids can now practice math lessons AND watch math videos in the same place makes me #ds106emo. A huge thanks to Mr. Groom for coining that hash.
That guy from the Eels, Mark Oliver Everett, would call it “edgy” – which he defines as what is left when a revolution has all of the revolution sucked out of it.Is #ds106emo a “Thing” now. I remember carving #4life into my forearm. The hash really stung :-/TED is merely the most visible of a growing crop – I worry about otherwise worthwhile education conferences. Thanks for your comments.