“Privacy” doesn’t mean that no one in the world knows about your business. It means that you get to choose who knows about your business.Anyone who pays attention will see that kids do, in fact, care a whole lot about their privacy. They don’t want their parents to know what they’re saying to their friends. They don’t want their friends to see how they relate to their parents. They don’t want their teachers to know what they think of them. They don’t want their enemies to know about their fears and anxieties.
This isn’t what we hear from people who want to invade kids’ privacy though. Facebook is a company whose business model is based on the idea that if they spy on you enough and trick you into revealing enough about your life, they can sell you stuff through targeted ads. When they get called on this, they explain that because kids end up revealing so much about their personal lives on Facebook, it must be OK, because digital natives know how the Internet is supposed to be used. And when kids get a little older and start to regret their Facebook disclosures, they are told that they, too, just don’t understand what it means to be a digital native, because they’ve grown up and lost touch with the Internet’s true spirit.
So here’s the thing. The other practice that we cherish as faculty that’s under assault nationwide is faculty governance. If your idea, as a faculty member, of faculty governance is that the one person who says, “I don’t like X” should override a committee and a process and an entire faculty, then guess what, we deserve to lose the fight for governance.If your idea of faculty governance is that you demand the outcomes you wanted in the first place after the meeting is done, and think it’s ok to rock the casbah to get there, then we deserve to lose the fight for governance. When some Smith students and some faculty rise to say, “We don’t want Christine Lagarde to speak because the IMF is imperialist”, they’re effectively saying, “We don’t care who decided that or how”, and thus they’re also embedding an attack on governance along the way. Because surely to disdain the IMF (or the World Bank) so wholly that you will do what you can, what you must, to stop them from being honored guests is to also disdain anyone who might have, in any context, ever have thought otherwise. As, for example, in most Departments of Economics, perhaps here and there in pockets of usage and support and consultancies in other departments as well.
At which point we deserve to lose the fight for academic freedom as well as governance.
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19484,19482,19483”]
Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová. I read about this woman in Signals from Unknown: Czech Comics 1922-2012, Googled her, and found a HuffPo article had been posted 9 hours before my Googling. Good timing. It promotes the exhibit The First Woman Graphic Novelist: Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová.
[gallery] mythologyofblue:
Ma Yuan, Southern Song dynasty, part of a 12 piece painting describing the different moods of water + (via yama-bato)
"An Entangled Thing"
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An essay I published in The Oxford American 29 (Sept./Oct. 1999): An Entangled Thing
"What I Was Afraid Of"
An essay I published in The Oxford American 20 (1998): What I Was Afraid Of
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRzq9XiRZuY?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
A sad story, and one whose outlines I know all too well.
[gallery] Nathan Salsburg’s fine essay in the Oxford American about Paramount Records.
Extreme people doing things at an extreme level are, believe it or not, often a little extreme. And let’s face it, elite modern football is a deeply unnatural environment, a multi-billion‑pound industry peopled entirely by men dressed in shorts, a glazed and airless place of minor concerns endlessly magnified, and an industry that would simply cease to function if everybody blinked a couple of times, took a breath and decided to be completely sensible about everything. Elite, big-money teams in particular are fascinatingly strange, a conspiracy of cosmopolitan self-interest that still remains somehow coherent, these disparate bands of sporting brothers ferried via chinchilla fur-lined helicopter gunship from hotel to airport to luxury compound, barked and yelped and brayed at twice weekly but still able to leap and fight and run through pain for one another, presenting in the process an oddly stirring example of the indomitable human spirit, even while filtered through the triple-glazed tinted glass of billionaire idiot ball. At the end of which: Yaya wants a cake. Give him a bloody cake.
