Generally speaking, it’s important to remember that ‘openness’ is less often a virtue or even an activity than it is a declaration, a rhetorical framing, a kind of branding. It’s often used to make something appear open that isn’t (part of Shirky’s point), or to associate a product or domain with the spirit of openness. In this case, most things called 'open’ really aren’t, just as most things called 'green’ really aren’t. Some of us have been calling this 'openwashing.’ Contemporary technology culture loves the idea of being 'open’ so much, it spreads the rhetorical ideal in place of the reality through the 'opener than thou’ logic of shame. Shirky’s an expert at this particular homily.
In the original [Star Wars] trilogy, though, and in Casablanca, all the mixed-up old elements are turned inward. Grand Moff Tarkin may be a cheekbone-for-cheekbone copy of Major Strasser, but he doesn’t know it. If you’ll forgive the expression, Star Wars and Casablanca are postmodern without being self-aware. They’re coherent, self-contained worlds that, because they’re made out of stories that have been fulfilling wishes forever, happen to conform in a particularly accessible way to both the weirdness and the innocence of our desires. They’re fully operational miniatures of the kind of world to which we want to escape when we’re at our most simple and open and thoughtless.
At colleges across the land, panel discussions organized on the economic crisis have bemoaned such things as the absence of oversight, a lax regulatory regime, failures of public and private entities to exercise diligence in dispensing credit or expanding complex financial products. But what university president or leader has admitted that there was some culpability on the part of his own institution for failing to well-educate its students? After all, it was the leading graduates of the elite institutions of the nation who occupied places of esteem in financial and political institutions throughout the land that helped to precipitate this crisis. Our universities readily take credit for their Rhodes scholars and Fulbright award winners. What of those graduates who helped foster an environment of avarice and get-rich-quick schemes? Are we so assured that they did not learn exceedingly well the lessons that were taught them in college?
Sometimes it is easy to draw quick lessons from a defeat — but this is not one of those times. Frankly, the scope of this defeat, not just for the White House but in the Senate and down-ballot races as well, is enough worse than expected that it requires a lot more sober, and lengthy, analysis.
It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you’re a rank-and-file conservative, you’re probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn’t accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thing; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.But guess what?
You haven’t just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven’t tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they’ve done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.
Why do you keep putting up with it?
CLT never faileth: but whether there be speculations, they shall fail; whether there be talking heads, they shall cease; whether there be punditry, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we expound in part. But when the election actually happens, then that which is observed in sample shall generalize to the population. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish ideas that polls were deliberately biased. For now we see as through a homophilous social network; but then directly observe the population: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as my secret ballot remains unknown. And now abideth parameter, error, CLT, these three; but the greatest of these is CLT.
In an effort to provide distraction on election day, I’ve mounted on my site the full text of the 1892 proto-steampunk dime novel, “Tom Edison Jr.’s Electric Sea Spider.”
Tyler Schnoebelen, who recently completed his PhD in linguistics at Stanford University, told the NWAV crowd how he and his colleagues plumbed Twitter to create a corpus of more than 9 million tweets from English speakers in the United States. There’s no gender checkbox on Twitter, but by looking at the distribution of given names in census data, they were able to assign genders with a high degree of accuracy. (You’re not likely to find many men going by “Annette” or women named “Eugene.”)They then looked at which bits of tweeted language skewed male and female. In line with previous research on gender and discourse, women were found to use more pronouns, emotion terms (like “sad,” “love,” and “glad”), and abbreviations associated with online discourse (like “lol” and “omg”). Women also rate highly on the use of emoticons and “backchannel sounds” (like “ah,” “hmmm,” “ugh,” and “grr”).
Men, on the other hand, have higher frequencies of standard dictionary words, numbers, proper nouns (especially the names of sports teams), and taboo words. Simply by looking at these different rates of word usage, Schnoebelen and his colleagues, David Bamman of Carnegie Mellon University and Jacob Eisenstein of Georgia Tech, can predict the gender of an author on Twitter with 88 percent accuracy.
But Schnoebelen, Bamman, and Eisenstein didn’t stop there, even if such a high level of accuracy in pinpointing gender would be good enough for, say, L’Oréal. They wanted to go beyond the standard binary stereotypes of “Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus” to understand how “male” and “female” linguistic markers actually work in the world, at least online.
Yet even in the moment of triumph, things started to crumble. Roger Williams challenged the biblical basis for the Christendom assumptions of the entire New England Way. The clear-eyed Bible-reader Anne Hutchinson charged that the “works” required to build a Puritan social ordered violated the crucial doctrine of “free grace” that grounded all of Puritan theology. In the 1640s, concern began to grow about the increasing numbers of rising adults who, though living upright lives, could not or would not make a profession of saving grace. That problem, which threatened the entire system, became the subject of intense divisiveness for more than a century. In the 1650s, the violent potential of the system broke out when Massachusetts executed four Quakers for returning to the colony after they had been banished. And then in the 1680s, when the dynamics of power shifted in England and Massachusetts lost its charter, which again made voting a function of property, the colony meekly gave up the crucial mechanism that had grounded their entire system.None of these upsets completely compromised what John Winthrop and the other early Puritans had hoped to accomplish in the new world. Yet all of them spoke to how much easier it was to protest evils in church and society than to translate dedicated personal holiness into a godly political regime. All also spoke to the really difficult problem of getting deeply committed Bible-believers to agree on what Christian politics actually entailed.
The message of hope from such scholarship today is that whatever shape Christian politics now takes, it would benefit by learning from the Puritans. They were indeed heroic spiritual ancestors. But if they—even with unusual purity of heart and unusual dedication for the long haul—could not succeed, then those of us who are weaker in faith and less self-sacrificing in resolution should look first in our politics to cultivating the virtues that even these hardy pioneers sometimes neglected, including modesty, patience, gentleness, kindness, and self-control.