Teaching Civility: Two Daring Assignments

Why has &quot;community engagement&quot; broken down? The author phrases it in terms of &quot;omg kids and their cell phones, lol&quot; but it&#x27;s at least worth contemplating:<p>- there was a massive campaign of neighborhood destruction from post-WW2 era to perhaps the mid 1990s, resulting in atomization, suburbanization, and quasi-military occupation of the remainder. There is a robust hypothesis that city living is at the root of civic engagment and that, eg, the Great Migrations explain the timing of the civil rights movement. Suburbanization is basically that in reverse. The atomization that happens when you geniunely can&#x27;t trust your neighbors is as well.<p>- &quot;civic engagement&quot; of a kind retrospectively judged to be &quot;wrong&quot; now goes on your Permanent Record. It&#x27;s potentially unsafe to organize to do many meaningful things.<p>- major institutions have lost their ability to be as exclusionist as they historically felt necessary to prevent entryism that fundamentally changes the nature of the institution. Instutions historically leading &quot;civic engagment&quot; become ineffective or lose their original purpose.<p>- relentless focus on vacant aggregation-friendly metrics amongst our elite. You can put &quot;volunteer hours&quot; on a spreadsheet, thus, you get the optimal number of &quot;volunteer hours&quot;, rather than civic engagment per se. Elite high school &amp; college-age populations simply lack time for meaningful civic engagement, most of which is indistinguishable on a spreadsheet from &quot;hanging out&quot; - ironically, &quot;chilling on the agora&quot; is essentially what civic engagement breaks down to.

The whole thesis falls apart if you accept that digitally-mediated communication can be as meaningful as in meatspace. And it should be obvious that many people already treat it as meaningful in their own lives.<p>Finding it meaningful depends on the fidelity of the technology. As the tech keeps improving, the circle of people who experience real community online keeps expanding.<p>There was a time when only perceived-maladjusted uber-geeks found community through digital networks. Now the average young person does. Eventually everyone will, it&#x27;s blindingly obvious that that&#x27;s where the tech is going.<p>I think most people lack an appreciation of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. <i>Anything</i> you can experience in &quot;the real world&quot; can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system.

Interesting article, though it&#x27;s essentially a extension of the the concept of &quot;filter bubbles&quot; into the social sphere (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Filter_bubble</a>).<p>I question the hypothesis that the internet is uniquely responsible for the formation of filter bubbles – &quot;cultural or ideological bubbles&quot; can be formed a variety of ways, and have been forming for all of human history. Having said that, technology may accelerate this process, or lower the barriers required to connect with like-minded people, for better or worse.

rant{ how do you compare texting, tweeting, and video games. HOW. texting and tweeting are meant as a means of communication. Video games are not. They are done by people who want to engage with a particular medium, like reading. They may HAVE communication such as, I don&#x27;t know, shopping. Whatever argument you want to make about our new culture that we&#x27;ve developed as a result of assimilating new technology, fine. But do not lump unrelated activities that may look similar from the outside as a means to prove your point. If you argue that video games shut people off then you have to admit that books, and to some extent movies, do the same. Video games are ENTERTAINMENT that one might (and probably does) require full focus on and solitude with which to focus. Texting and Tweeting are things that require very small, quick amounts of attention and it is not a focused effort with the goal of getting something out; you just want to communicate. Which makes it easy to make our presence in the community inconsistent.}

Has the good professor considered the fact that the sneering condescension of his hard no texting&#x2F;no e-mailing rules encourages the very breakdown in civility that he&#x27;s studying? At one point the landline telephone was the cause of the very same moral panic that people are having about texting and cell phones. It was thought that having instantaneous voice communication would erode the &quot;civility&quot; of letter writing.<p>Social rules change as the means of communication change. Attempting to preserve social rules at one period of time, whether it&#x27;s 1890 or 1990 is foolhardy.