GranMarcha2008.Org

To
allow oneself to be physically re-arranged by another is much like allowing
oneself to be mentally re-arranged by another.  Both require compliance
and conformity, and I guess both require deference to the “power” or
“expertise” of another. 

Physical
rearrangement has its attraction. 

For
example when The Magnet and I became "a living topiary" for a
Wreathed Hornbill, a Malay-Eagle Owl, a Chestnut-bellied Hawk Eagle, a Sulfur
Crested Cockatoo and a couple of Macaws of the Scarlet and the Blue &
Yellow varieties, in the Feathered Friends Photo Booth at the KL Bird Park – we
sat where required, raised limbs as required and were perched upon as required.
 The photo booth attendants had an expertise with arranging birds and
making people into perches that was difficult to fault. The marketing of this
expertise was clearly signposted in the “use your own camera” or “instant
photo” charges at the front of the photo booth. The outcome and the compliance
required transparent.   

I
am less certain about the attraction in mental re-arrangement by another. 
It is more usual to frame compliance and conformity of thought as
indoctrination or an “extraordinary
popular delusions and the madness of crowds, or as a consequence of Keen's “the cult of the
amateur”  .

Our
New Zealand Ministry of Education funded by far the largest number of educators
to The International Conference on Thinking, ICOT09, in Malaysia this July –
reports from conference organisers put the figure at one hundred and sixty plus
educators from "the wobbly isles".  In truth it was hard to
escape the wobbly isle educators dusted over corridors, and conference rooms –
all trying to find stuff to make sense of the New Zealand Curriculum Key
Competency “Thinking” – and to find educators to network with from other
places.   

On
offer at ICOT09 was a continuum of mental re-arrangement expertise – academic
expertise, edu_consultant expertise, edu_marketing expertise and the amateurs
offering classroom educator expertise.  Though the schools’ “thinking
journeys” were often an edu_road-trip better described as a support act for the
professional elite than an amateur’s attempt to make meaning .

What
surprised me and others when we discussed the days programme over Tiger Beer at
the end of each day was the sense that “everyone had something to sell”

It
is not that I am unused to applying Paul (1972)’s key questions to evaluate the
claims made at educational conferences. For example this is one of my
favourites …

Does the acceptance of this information advance the
vested interest of the person or group asserting it? 

It
is a good question to ask about anything you read – offline or blogged online -
by amateur, consultant or academic.

It
is the question that usually allows me to discriminate between the conference
claims made by educational consultants and marketers  and the claims made
by academics. 

However,
in the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, during ICOT09, the question didn’t work
so well.  Many of the celebrity academics were conterminous with
educational consultants – both professional elites appeared to be networking to
extend their power and status –  lobbying for invites to the next ICOT
conference in Belfast, and waving their latest book.  Some even offered
autographs.  On some days it seemed more like a trade fair than a
conference.

I
was startled by the celebrity academics who chose to use chunks of their
allotted speaking time for self promotional marketing and I was reminded of the
BBC
“Yes Minister” series  and its cynical take on academics

“The surprising thing about academics is not that they
have their price, but how low that price is.”

 “No one really understands the true nature of
fawning servility until he sees an academic who has glimpsed the prospect of
money or personal publicity.”

By
the end of the week any difference between the ICOT09  conference and the
Petaling St Chinatown marketplace was largely a matter of the air-conditioning.

And
all of it made me wonder;

Is
the marketing of academia something new or just something I had failed to
notice before because in other edu_conferences in New Zealand I have been
distracted by the marketing of ICTs?

Is
the celebrity academic at ICOT09 an indicator of the end of “freedom of access
to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a nonprofit
way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.” Stephen
Downes The Future of Education cited in Unesco Chair Blogs

Is
the validity and reliability of academic research compromised when we make
revenue seeking celebrities of the academics themselves rather than ensuring
free access to their research findings?

And
although it seems that nowadays, at least in New Zealand’s popular media, Paglia
is eminently “ Always loved that” baggable …

As a bonus, here's the
famous 1993 Julie Burchill-Paglia "fax war", in which Paglia
comes off as humourless and smug, and Burchill signs off with the immortal:

Dear Professor Paglia,
Fuck off you crazy old dyke.
Always,
Julie Burchill

Always loved that.

My
experience at ICOT09 means I cannot help but think that in “Sex
Art and American Culture” Paglia buttoned what I observed seventeen years
later

“The
huge post 60s proliferation of conferences, produced a diversion of
professional energy away from study and towards performance, networking,
advertisement, cruising, hustling, glad handing, back scratching, chit chat,
group think.”  Paglia
in Sex, Art and American Culture 1992 p 221

All
of which makes me wonder – will the future with its increasing digitisation of
content make performance over study even more attractive for academics?

 Virginia
Postrel’s NYTimes Review  of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” by
Chris Anderson has a passage that explains why this may well be the case. 
  

 Postrel
writes

Faced with collapsing business models, today’s
journalists-in-denial rail against Anderson’s message. Free content cannot be
the future, they say, because content is valuable. Fixed costs must be covered.
We have bills to pay. The problem, they argue, is that we’re giving our work
away.

As Anderson himself says, “I’ve got a lot of kids and
college isn’t getting any cheaper.” His own strategy, one outlined by Dyson way
back when, is to charge little or nothing for his writing and use it to
generate lucrative speaking gigs. “You can read a copy of this book online
(abundant, commodity information) for free,” he writes (not noting that the
free offer expires shortly after the printed book’s publication), “but if you
want me to fly to your city and prepare a custom talk on Free as it applies to
your business, I’ll be happy to, but you’re going to have to pay me for my
(scarce) time.”

So
it seems when the internet increasingly allows everything to be free, the
future will be all about the value we can leverage from time.

And
when time is the new money, the pockets will change

Illich,
prescient as ever, identified the role of “time” and “scarcity” with respect to
consumption a while back [In “Towards a history of needs.” 1977 – p33]

Time scarcity may soon turn into the major obstacle to
the consumption of prescribed and often publicly financed, services.

 Postrel
puts it this way

“Unlike tangible commodities like T-shirts or plastics,
most digital content doesn’t generate much new demand as its price falls toward
zero. Even with no admission fee, videos, blog posts and online games soak up
users’ time, and time has a hard limit. So as the supply of cheap content
expands, it can’t simply fill ever-growing closets (or garbage dumps). Instead,
the competition for time and attention becomes ever fiercer, and the market
ever more fragmented. Any given producer will find profits elusive, especially
since it’s so easy for amateurs to enter the market.”

When
Gertrude Stein claimed “The money is always there, but the pockets change”
she wasn’t necessarily thinking about freedom of access to public goods. 
But it is worth noting that when we make celebrities of academics, we change
the location of the pockets and when we change the location of the pockets we
stand to lose an important freedom.

We stand to lose what Downes describes as the “freedom of
access to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a
nonprofit way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.”

Source: Artichoke

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