The stakes are high: the surrounding community was ravaged in earlier waves of COVID-19 as family members in service jobs or working in nearby garment factories brought the virus home to crowded, multi-generational, and multi-family households. But after a year of mostly distance learning amidst the traumas of the pandemic, the kids need to be back in the classroom, and they need us there to support them.

Yet as we return, and as we try to reinvent our school to be as physically and emotionally safe as possible, there’s a lot my colleagues and I learned during our unexpected time as a Zoom school.

Our first few months online were a struggle. My sixth and eighth graders often signed into their Zoom late or for the wrong class periods, had trouble finding the materials for their assignments, and turned off their cameras.

My email would ping with Zoom notifications from students trying to join my English class hours after it had ended. They’d leave comments in the Google Classroom stream: “Mister, where are you?” or “When are you starting class?” They’d turn in blank assignments, I’d return them, and they’d immediately turn them back in again. After requesting cameras be turned on so we could all be present together, I’d view a half dozen or more ceiling fans.

Plus, it was a challenge to build relationships with my students. There weren’t opportunities to chat at the door, to check in while they worked, to guide to the right book from my classroom library. My frustration mounted as my expectations for myself and for them weren’t being met.

By mid-October, after the first quarter had ended and with the staff temperature near boiling, our administration devoted a weekly meeting to checking in and recalibrating.  What was working and what wasn’t? What did the kids need from us now? What did we need now?

In Zoom breakout rooms, bleary and slumped low in their chairs or leaning on their knuckles, colleagues vented. They were spending more time planning than they had since they were first-year-teachers, but not seeing results. Kids were not completing assignments and not responding in our interactive lesson platforms. And we were just burned out from staring at screens.

Being asked how I felt—and being given the space to be vulnerable and honest in answering—made me feel as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

We had to let go of our hold on what things had been like before the pandemic and accept the reality of what was: We all were learning, on the fly, a different job. Our students, facing spotty internet and often difficult situations at home, were also being asked to do something they’d never done before.

As a staff, we responded by simplifying and streamlining, both in our classrooms—where we set common expectations for everything from assignment names to office hours and reduced the clutter of notifications—and our mindsets. This meant a recommitment to building relationships—one of the only tools we had to keep students engaged, and to engage with one another. We built in time during our staff trainings and meetings as well as during our classes just to check in with the community, catch up, and see how everyone was doing. Over winter break, I mailed each of my students (over 120 of them) a personalized postcard just saying hello and that I looked forward to seeing them after the holidays.

The new and improved classroom. Photo courtesy of Carl Finer.

Research supports this deliberate recalibration of our professional and student relationships.

The Search Institute, a youth development nonprofit research center, defines a “developmental” relationship as a close connection between a young person and an adult or peer that powerfully and positively shapes the young person’s identity and helps them develop a thriving mindset.

Middle school students who reported strong developmental relationships with teachers were eight times more likely to stick with challenging tasks, enjoy working hard, and know it is OK to make mistakes when learning. They also were more likely to have higher grade point averages, feel connected to school, and feel culturally respected and included.

Last spring, after examining district-level data on relationships and engagement during distance learning, our organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, which I’m a member of, gathered two focus groups of our most vulnerable students—middle schoolers with disabilities and high schoolers who identify as LGBTQ+—to find out what it took to keep them engaged in online school.  The belief was that listening to these students could help us build support systems that, by addressing their needs, would also serve everyone better.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, both groups praised teachers who proactively built trusting relationships through open (often private) communication and found ways to show they cared. Surprisingly, it didn’t take much to make a difference.

Students said:

“People just need to be asked how they are doing.”

“My best teacher talks to me privately. If I’m having trouble with something, they’ll message me in the chat or pull me into a breakout room or stay after class and ask what’s going on or how they can help.”

“One time a teacher noticed I was off, that I was kind of depressed, and asked me if I was OK. I’d been going through a tough time, and it meant so much that they just asked. I was able to do my work after that.”

At the end of last year, I asked my journalism students to share their experience of living during the pandemic in a photo essay, and they responded with images capturing their frustrations with screens and boredom of quarantine as well as challenging family situations. They also took photos of the things that gave them joy and connection: new pets, escaping into nature, time with family. I asked—and in response, they shared their resilience and creativity.

Now, back with these students in-person, I’ve rebuilt my classroom environment to be more warm and welcoming, even as the environment outside the school frays. Plants and framed art line my walls along with bean-bag chairs and a couch from Target. The rows of desks have been moved into groups along with much of the learning. Each class created their own Spotify playlist, a practice I started during distance learning, and we play these during independent work. And, in my assignments, using technological tools like interactive collaboration boards, Google Forms, and our class website along with old-fashioned, desk-side conversations, I make space for students to shout out classmates, share how they are feeling, and reflect on what matters most to them.

The personal and mental health challenges we all still face as the pandemic continues are immense. But fortunately, one of the most impactful tools we have to cope with those challenges is simple.

Just ask.

The post Zoom Made Me a Better Teacher appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A mythology grew up around the importance of inserting graphic elements at the ends of written online text: Because we aren’t face-to-face with our interlocutor, we need to provide additional information to convey what our demeanor, body stance, or vocal intonation might have offered. During the early popularization of email and IM, newbies were warned that online messages could be easily misunderstood. As a safeguard, emoticons could help.

Over time, online graphic markers have evolved in type, number, and function. The Japanese invented kaomoji, a version of emoticons but written horizontally, in 1986, and the style spread in Asia. GIFs—essentially small pictures, these days often animated—first appeared in 1987. And then there are emojis, initially introduced on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s. (The word “emoji” sounds as if it’s related to “emoticon,” but it’s a combination of two Japanese words meaning “picture” and “character”.) Though it feels as if there are now zillions of emojis, the official total in the Unicode Standard was just over 2600 as of July 2017. Users of mobile devices can pluck off what they like to incorporate into messages.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, we might think that emojis, like their emoticon and kaomoji ancestors, could be relied upon to clarify our online written messages. It turns out, though, that emojis are subject to the same potential pitfalls as traditional speech and writing.

Emoji cookies. Photo courtesy of Clare Griffiths/Flickr.

At its core, human language enables people to convey meaning to one another. When language or other symbolic systems don’t seem adequate to express what’s on our minds, we get creative. We repurpose existing words to have new meanings, as when in the 1950s, Americans began to use the word “moonlighting” to mean working a second job (as it were, by the light of the moon). We borrow from elsewhere, as with the wonderfully onomatopoetic “schlep,” taken from Yiddish, which had earlier schlepped over from Middle High German.

We also borrow (or make up) words or symbols that concisely express what otherwise would require a whole phrase. Think of German “Schadenfreude,” which is definitely shorter than “pleasure derived from the misfortune of others.” Or take the “thinking face” emoji——or the “person getting a massage” emoji—. The expressive power of today’s emojis make the original smiley and frowny seem primitive.

Even with plenty of words, though—or plenty of emojis—communication can be misleading or ambiguous. For communication to be successful, both sender and recipient need to assign the same meaning to symbols. But there may be no guarantee of a match. If I’m your supervisor, and I say, “Just take an hour” for lunch, you might bristle because you interpret me to be a stickler for time on the job, when I mean to encourage you to get out of the office and relax. (This is an actual example. It took two years before my administrative assistant revealed she’d felt insulted.) When The New York Times tweeted on June 4, 2017 that “The London attacks [on London Bridge] hit a nation still reeling from the shock of the bombing in Manchester almost 2 weeks ago,” resilient Brits reminded the world that in the U.K., “reeling” denotes a Scottish form of dancing. With emojis, if I send you a message that just shows a person in a bed——am I saying that I’m going to bed? That you should? That I’m about to buy a bed? That I’m in the hospital? It turns out that pictures rely on context for correct interpretation, just as words do.

But there’s another requirement for communication (offline and online) to be successful, and that is knowing how to express what we want to say. Writers have long looked to others for help. Take the old-fashioned genre of “complete letter writers”—books which provided sample missives for all occasions, from writing home to your family to asking a business associate for money. By the early 20th century, when use of the telegraph became more familiar and affordable, Western Union started offering pre-set messages for those who (in the words of Annteresa Lubrano, author of The Telegraph) “needed help in finding the right words for the right occasion.”

Emojis on Halloween, 2014. Photo courtesy of Chris Blakely/Flickr.

Then there’s the printed greeting card, which first appeared in the mid-19th century. Those purchasing such cards don’t need to figure out what to say or how to say it. Be it a wedding or birthday, retirement or death, just sign the card, address the envelope, affix a stamp, and find a mailbox.

Sometimes greeting card messages accurately convey what is in our hearts. But not always. Valentine’s Day cards are the perfect example. Stand at the greeting cards section of a store in the run-up to February 14, and you find men and women purchasing mushy sentiments that hardly represent what they feel about their significant other. The same duplicity occurs in spoken language: Think of passing an acquaintance on the street, asking “How are you doing?” and hastening on before waiting for an answer, or of telling a person you instantly dislike, “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

What about using pre-fabricated emoticons or emojis in online communication? Do we always mean what they say? Sometimes we insert graphic markers because we feel we are supposed to. Teenage girls, studies have found, judge male age-mates to be unfeeling if they don’t liberally pepper their text messages with graphic add-ons. At the other end of the user spectrum, my professional colleagues of a certain age are now inserting icons from their mobile phone menus, though they would never wink or stick out their tongue that way IRL, even with their closest friends. When I ask why, the answers are “It’s fun,” “It makes me feel young,” or “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

As teenage girls, mature academics, and millions of others can attest, using graphic markers can add enjoyment, along with creativity, and often clarity, to online communication. Such benefits are important because they encourage us to think about what meanings and emotions we wish to convey to others.

However, as with spoken and written language, is there any guarantee that our symbols will consistently convey to our interlocutor what is in our minds or hearts? As any linguist—or psychiatrist—will tell you: Don’t count on it.

The post Emojis Don’t Give Meaning to Our Deepest Feelings appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What does “crowd-work platform” mean? Basically, Mechanical Turk is a website where workers (“Turkers”) can find jobs and employers (“requesters”) post them. Jobs are varied, anything one might do on a computer that a computer cannot do alone—tagging photos, writing copy, classifying videos, taking surveys. But jobs are not very big. Instead, each big project is broken down into numerous tiny “microtasks,” called Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs.

Imagine, for example, if a requester wanted to use Mechanical Turk (mTurk) to translate this article into French. Offline, someone might hire a single person to translate the whole thing. But on mTurk the piece would be cut into single sentences, turning one job into hundreds of small jobs. The entire pile appears online, on the mTurk dashboard, at once. Thousands of workers at their different computers rush the pile, grabbing as many as they can.

The workers complete all of those sentences at the same time, so the translation takes just a few minutes—rather than the few days it might take one person working alone. The HIT method is also cheaper than employing a single worker, as each sentence pays only a penny or two. Amazon facilitates the entire process. The job poster just has to upload the work, prepay Amazon’s fees, and wait a short while.

Cheap, easy, fast: No surprise that businesses and academics use mTurk frequently. The most common business tasks posted are transcription, content creation, classification, and feedback. Academics—as much as half of requesters at any given time are researchers—often seek study participants (asking them to provide information as innocuous as their favorite food or as disturbing as their experience of sexual abuse). Since academics tend to offer the worst pay on the platform, workers have gone so far as to create a set of guidelines for researchers to urge better treatment. Businesses are not much better. One study found the median hourly wage for all mTurk tasks is only $1.38.

mTurk likes to emphasize worker perks. You can work when you want, where you want. Most of the tasks do not take advanced skills to complete. People who struggle to find a job offline—such as those with disabilities, those with criminal convictions, and those who must stay home—can make money Turking. And supposedly, you can be choosy about the work you want to do, skipping tasks that you don’t like or that you feel do not pay enough.

But that wasn’t my experience. I started at mTurk when it opened in November of 2005. An entrepreneur, I had always attempted to stay on the cusp of profitable online work, and I was intrigued. Within just a few minutes I was choosing which of three images shown on screen best represented the front door of a business. I didn’t see it as work—more an experiment, something new to try while the kids were sleeping.

Then in April of 2010, my husband lost his job. We had just bought our first home, and when we moved I’d closed the daycare I ran. I realized mTurk would have to be my family’s income. I worked seven days a week, sometimes 17 hours a day, to make enough. While my husband went back to school, and over the two years it took him to find a new job, I kept Turking to feed us and pay our mortgage.

I developed a ganglion cyst in my wrist, then tennis elbow, then problems with my trapezius muscle in my shoulder. There was a psychological toll as well. “Content moderation” work on mTurk can mean exposure to some of the worst imagery available online: tagging a photograph of decapitated heads, classifying photographs and videos of animals being tortured and murdered or children being sexually abused.

Could I have refused these tasks? Technically, yes, although there is no way to definitively know the content of a task before you accept it. But you cannot be picky when you have a daily income goal to meet. You don’t know if another task will pop up—and most HITs pay less than a dime per piece. The worker flexibility and choice that Amazon touts, therefore, was to me mostly a mirage.

A typical day began as soon as I woke up. I would turn on my “refreshers,” scripts which looked at HITs posted and alerted me to anything feasible. I looked at my Dashboard, which told me how much of my recent work had been approved or rejected. If things were okay, I could get breakfast. And lunch, since I knew I would not be making it to the kitchen again any time soon. If there was some good work up, I would rush and make my dinner as well, preparing for a long day at the keyboard, during which teeth might not be brushed, showers not taken, doctor’s appointments missed, and my child would make her own way to the school bus.

Studies show that looking for work takes more time than completing it. Since tasks are posted randomly throughout the day and night, I had to stay glued to the screen; planning anything apart from mTurk was difficult. When I found HITs, I would rush to get them done, because thousands of profitable tasks can disappear in a matter of minutes. One second I would be frantically completing a batch, the next looking desperately for something to do. I might be designing a logo, then watching a video of a man immolated by ISIS, then translating business documents into French. The grind was wearing.

So was worry about rejection. Requesters on mTurk can download work you submit before approving payment. If they want to keep the work for free, all they have to do is reject your payment. (This paper explains the limited means of appealing rejections: “Dissatisfied workers … had little option other than to leave the system altogether.”) The more rejections you get, the less work you can access; requesters often disallow anyone with a low “approval rating”—and “low” can mean 98 percent—to access their work. Too many rejections may get you suspended from mTurk completely.

A few years ago Amazon added the “Master’s Qualification,” billed as a status given to the best workers and provided at a premium to requesters. But Amazon does not say how they grant this status—workers have seen it given to people with low ratings or even those currently suspended for bad work—and Master’s qualified work isn’t better quality or better paying. mTurk also rolled out a new “worker’s website,” but it offers no real new tools, just streamlined looks and a better mobile platform. Amazon doubled their requester fees in June 2015, after which the number of jobs plummeted, making it even harder for workers to meet income goals.

Despite all of this, I continued. I couldn’t work outside my home, so my offline choices were limited. My family had to eat and needed shelter, so I stayed.

What improved my worker experience on mTurk is the organization of workers themselves. TurkerNation.com, a forum for mTurkers, opened in November of 2005. Hundreds of workers gather there to share tips. We warn each other which requesters to avoid and sound the alert when good work is posted. I started to work as a community manager on TurkerNation in 2005. If not for that group of people and their support, I do not think I would have been able to make enough to live in the last decade, let alone kept my sanity through the process.

The most amazing thing about Turkers is how varied they are, and I like to refer to the community as being like a quilt. Each square is different, from the homemaker in the United States, to the IT consultant from India, to the content moderator from the Philippines. Some are young, some are old; some are unemployed, others are looking for additional income; some do it for fun, others for money, and still others to learn or to fill their time. This variety serves requesters well, as any demographic they wish to reach is easily available, and yet it sometimes keeps the Turkers separated due to language and cultural differences. Regardless, those who do participate in the community make it rich, and their participation is the reason why I stick around.

So mTurk has changed for me, from an experiment, to a job that makes me miserable, to a community of people I have come to love. The moment my husband found a new job in 2013 I promised myself I would never work on mTurk again. I went back to school, finished my degree, and hope to keep that promise. I continue to stay a part of the mTurk community, however, because of the forum. I’ve grown to see them as my family, and I will fight to the end to try to help all of them earn as much as they deserve.

More and more stable, well-paying jobs seem to be making way for precarious workplaces such as mTurk—or TaskRabbit, Uber, Instacart. Turkers are asked to be journalists, pathologists, programmers, graphic designers, legal assistants, academics, and virtual girlfriends. None of these jobs are disappearing. They are just going to a cheaper, faster, and more efficient platform, offered to a crowd of workers at pennies a piece. Right now, thousands are ready and willing to take the offer. In the future, thousands more may have to. Based on my experience, this scares me.

The post What the “Crowd-Work” Economy Taught Me About Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Err, that’s not what the app is telling me to do.”

“Yes, but it’s faster this way. The app is taking you to the beltway. Traffic is terrible there!”

“Okay. I don’t know these roads.”

So went a conversation with an Uber driver in northern Virginia recently. But imagine it was a self-driving Uber. Would you even have that conversation, or would you be doomed to a frustrating 25 minutes on the beltway when you could have been home in 15?

And as your frustration mounts, will the AI driving the car recognize this—or appear to—and respond accordingly? Will customers prefer cars that seem to empathize?

Or imagine instead that you and your partner are arguing in the back seat over which route to take. How will you feel when your partner seems to be siding with the machine? Or the machine is siding with your partner?

Empathy is widely praised as a good thing. But it also has its dark sides: Empathy can be manipulated and it leads people to unthinkingly take sides in conflicts. Add robots to this mix, and the potential for things to go wrong multiplies. Give robots the capacity to appear empathetic, and the potential for trouble is even greater.

A traffic robot in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

To know why this is a problem, it helps to understand how empathy works in our daily lives. Many of our interactions involve seeking empathy from others. People aim to elicit empathy because it’s taken as a proxy for rational support. For example, the guy in front of you at an auto repair shop tells the agent that he wants his money back: “The repair you did last month didn’t work out.” The agent replies: “I’m sorry, but this brake issue is an unrelated and new repair.” The argument continues, and the customer is getting angry. It seems like he might even punch the agent.

But instead, at this point, the customer and the agent might both look to you. Humans constantly recruit bystanders. Taking sides helps to settle things before they escalate. If it’s two against one, the one usually backs down. A lot of conflicts thereby get resolved without violence. (Compare chimpanzees, where fights often lead to serious injury.) Our tendency to make quick judgments and to take sides in conflicts among strangers is one of the key features of our species.

When we take sides, we assume the perspective of our chosen side—and from here it is a short step to develop emotional empathy. According to the three-person model of empathy introduced by Breithaupt, this is not entirely positive, because the dynamic of side-taking makes the first side we take stick, and we therefore assume that our side is right, and the other side is wrong. In this way, empathy accelerates divisions. Further, we typically view this empathy as an act of approval that extends to our consequent actions, including, for example, lashing back at the other side.

Now let’s imagine that the agent at the repair shop is a robot. The robot may appeal to you, a supposedly neutral third party, to help it to persuade the frustrated customer to accept the charge. It might say: “Please trust me, sir. I am a robot and programmed not to lie.”

Sounds harmless enough, does it? But suppose the robot has been programmed to learn about human interactions. It will pick up on social strategies that work for its purposes. It may become very good at bystander recruitment. It knows how to get you to agree with its perspective and against the other customer’s. The robot could even provide perfect cover for an unscrupulous garage owner who stands to make some extra money with unnecessary repairs.

You might be skeptical that humans would empathize with a robot. Social robotics has already begun to explore this question. And experiments suggest that children will side with robots against people when they perceive that the robots are being mistreated. In one study, a team of American and Japanese researchers carried out an experiment in which children played several rounds of a game with a robot. Later the game was interrupted by an overzealous confederate of the experimenters, who ordered the robot into a closet before the game was over. The robot complained and pleaded not to be sent into the closet before the game could be completed. The children indicated that they identified socially with the robot and against the experimenter.

We also know that when bystanders watch a robot and a person arguing, they may take the side of the robot and may start to develop something like empathy for the machine. We already have some anecdotal evidence for this effect from traffic-directing robots in Kinshasa. According to photojournalist Brian Sokol in The Guardian, “People on the streets apparently respect the robots … they don’t follow directions from human traffic cops.” Similarly, a study conducted at Harvard demonstrated that students were willing to help a robot enter secured residential areas simply because it asked to be let in, raising questions about the potential dangers posed by the human tendency to respect a request from a machine that needs help.

It is a relatively short step from robots that passively engage human empathy to robots that actively recruit bystanders. Robots will provoke empathy in situations of conflict. They will draw humans to their side and will learn to pick up on the signals that work. Bystander support will then mean that robots can accomplish what they are programmed to accomplish—whether that is calming down customers, or redirecting attention, or marketing products, or isolating competitors. Or selling propaganda and manipulating opinions.

It would be naive to think that AI corporations will not make us guinea pigs in their experiments with developing human empathy for robots. (Humans are already guinea pigs in experiments being run by the manufacturers of self-driving cars.) The robots will not shed tears, but may use various strategies to make the other (human) side appear overtly emotional and irrational. This may also include deliberately infuriating the other side. Humans will become unwitting participants in an apparatus increasingly controlled by AI with the capacity to manipulate empathy. And suddenly, we will have empathy with robots, and find ourselves taking their sides against fellow human beings.

When people imagine empathy by machines, they often think about selfless robot nurses and robot suicide helplines, or perhaps also robot sex. In all of these, machines seem to be in the service of the human. However, the hidden aspects of robot empathy are the commercial interests that will drive its development. Whose interests will dominate when learning machines can outwit not only their customers but also their owners?

Researchers now speculate about whether machines will learn genuine empathy. But that question is a distraction from the more immediate issue, which is that machines will not “feel” what humans feel, even if they get good at naming human emotions and responding to them. (At least for a while.) But in the near future, it doesn’t matter which emotions machines have. What is important is which emotions they can produce in humans, and how well they learn to master and manipulate these human responses. Instead of AI with empathy, we should be more concerned about humans having misplaced empathy with AI.

The post Why We Should Fear Emotionally Manipulative Robots appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Over the last three decades, the term “arts participation” has essentially been understood as arts attendance within the non-profit arts field. The field’s key indicator of arts participation over this time has been attendance at any of the seven “benchmark” arts events: performances of ballet, musical and nonmusical theater, jazz, classical music, opera, and visiting an art museum—at least once a year as measured by the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.

But in this century, rates of attendance at benchmark arts events in California have steadily declined. Even attendance at a wider range of arts events, extending beyond the benchmark arts, fell 10 percentage points between 2002 and 2012 in California.

Equally worrying, “benchmark” arts audiences do not resemble the population of the state; they are drawn disproportionately from those with higher incomes. In 2012 in California, 49 percent of arts attendees had household incomes of $75,000 or more—eight percentage points higher than the 41 percent of total California households earning that much. Arts attendees in California also had higher education levels; in 2012, 41 percent of them had at least a college degree, compared to 31 percent of the state’s population as a whole. Despite the fact that Hispanics have surpassed non-Hispanic whites as the largest portion of the state’s population, adult arts audiences remain 55 percent non-Hispanic white, even though this group comprises only 43 percent of the state’s total adult population. (These statistics draw from the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and more about them is available here.)

Despite such statistics, there is considerable evidence of deep interest in the arts among California’s highly diverse population. What does a more complete picture look like?

Two years ago, I led an effort, supported by The James Irvine Foundation, that used a more inclusive lens for looking at the landscape of artistic and cultural expression and experience in California. What we saw was profound, and involves the very meaning of arts and culture, and thus raises all kinds of questions about the future of the arts, of participation, and of the state itself. Detailed findings are available in two reports, A Closer Look at Arts Engagement in California and The Cultural Lives of Californians; here I highlight some key findings.

Arts participation today isn’t only about sitting in a concert hall or pondering a painting in a museum. Bikers light up a night ride in Santa Cruz in 2015. Photo courtesy of Richard Masoner/Flickr.

Across many different cultural contexts, two themes often appeared: choice and control.

For example, using the NEA’s 2012 survey we found that the most popular venue for California adults to attend arts was in a park or open-air facility. Approximately one in four California adults attended an art museum, craft fair or visual arts festival, historic park or monument, or outdoor performing arts festival.

These are all types of cultural events that tend to offer people control and choice over their own experience. They allow each person to handpick what to see and do, and afford degrees of flexibility as to when to arrive and depart, or whether or not to engage in different aspects of the event. Events that were less well-attended, according to the survey, were ones that tended to offer less control; they were activities that usually had precise starting and ending times, and that adhered to a set program.

Geography also influenced choice. Even after accounting for socioeconomic and demographic differences among regions, we found that adults living in the state’s large urban areas were more likely to attend arts events in general. These regions also tend to have the highest densities of non-profit arts organizations, suggesting that issues of access also may be affecting rates of participation. Attendance rates are significantly higher for California adults living in the state’s urban regions, compared to those living outside of those areas, specifically for visiting art museums, touring historic parks or monuments, and attending musical plays, classical music, and jazz performances. Urbanites also were more likely to create visual arts (although those living outside of these areas are more likely to make textile-based art, such as weaving, crocheting, quilting, needlepoint, knitting, or sewing).

There were other disparities in arts participation: Whites reported participating in art at the highest rates. But we found that educational attainment, age, income, immigrant status, and living in metropolitan areas are more important factors in determining arts participation than race or ethnicity. Indeed, the differences in participation among racial and ethnic groups could be largely explained by differences in education, household income, and an individual’s immigrant identity.

Most strikingly, one’s level of education was the strongest explanatory factor for differences in rates across all arts participation measures. Having at least a college degree was the single strongest predictor of whether one participates in the arts.

Can the digital revolution, a shift led by many California companies and institutions, change this? Trying to answer that question led to more questions.

We found that the most common form of arts participation among California adults, as measured in the NEA’s 2012 survey, was consuming arts through electronic media, including television, radio, computers, or handheld or mobile devices. Seventy-seven percent of adults accessed arts electronically. Back then, the rate of consuming arts was almost 1.5 times the rate at which California adults attend live arts events (53 percent) or make art (54 percent).

But five years ago is a long time. And the ways in which we describe and understand digital technologies as new means of consuming, interacting with, and creating art are evolving as technology changes. The ability to choose when and how to participate is central to the digital word. And that choice is in turn changing the definition of cultural participation, while enabling new forms of art. Platforms such as online gaming, crowdsourced art, writing and posting fan fiction, and sharing YouTube content (either self-created or otherwise) are forms of online cultural and arts participation.

And digital is only one force changing the meaning of arts participation. As attendance at benchmark events declines, arts participation through the making of art and creative expression is palpable. In 2012, 54 percent of California adults engaged in art making. The most commonly reported art making activity in California was social dancing (African Americans had the highest participation rates in social dance compared to any other activity measured in the NEA’s 2012 survey).

The range of artistic activities and forms of creative and cultural expression that are meaningful to Californians – and to people across the U.S. – demands that the term “arts participation” become more elastic. We must consider the many ways that people engage with art and artistic forms. For example, there are a large number and variety of folk arts in which people take part, though they have not traditionally been captured in arts participation studies. These activities often are passed along through family heritage. For example, an important part of traditional Hmong cultural activity, among Southeast Asian immigrants in the San Joaquin Valley, is a private home ceremony that involves playing the qeej, a bamboo mouth organ. (More about widening the aperture for what is considered arts participation is available here).

Not long ago, I conducted a study with Chinese and Chinese Americans in Chicago’s Chinatown who had reported low levels of arts participation in standard surveys. But in interviews for the study, they revealed their participation in a great variety of artistic and creative activities. For example, an interviewee shared that he had attended an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy at a library, but that he was not sure whether that could be counted and reported when he was asked a survey question about whether he had visited an art museum or gallery.

The gap between survey responses and the reality of our interviewee’s activities highlights the need for terms and research tools that better reflect what is happening in today’s society. The distinctions between artistic genres are blending and blurring over time. Art creators do not necessarily assign themselves to a genre or even a precise artistic form, and classifications are seemingly less relevant for audiences as other dimensions of arts experiences—particularly having more control and flexibility over arts activities and experiences—come to the fore.

This shift in the meaning and measurement of arts and culture is of course not just an issue for California. A UNESCO report in 2012 found:

“We are currently observing big changes and the rise of new cultural paradigms and behavior, armed with a set of research tools elaborated in the last century and adapted to analyze social life through a well-defined taxonomy that is every year less adequate for helping our understanding.”

Californians and California organizations could lead a fundamental reconceptualization of culture—in its forms, modes of interaction, sites of engagement, actors, and the roles it plays in community matters across California. This is a critical moment for posing new and fundamental questions that have the potential to shift traditional paradigms. We need to ask ourselves: What are the many artistic, creative and aesthetic forms that people engage in? And how can we describe and understand the multiple dimensions and variations in the experiences, settings, contexts, motivations, and benefits of individual engagement in this broad domain of activity that we used to call “the arts?”

The post California Can Reconceive the Arts by Offering More Choices and Ways to Participate appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Just as the Church has always been run by a tiny group of white men who have the power to determine what is worthwhile and what is not, the art trade’s tiny group of “influencers”—gallerists, managers, a few artists, high-end high-visibility collectors, publicists, and critics—largely determine which artists are in, which receive accolades, which make millions. Charles Saatchi, when he was a high-profile, admired influencer, almost single-handedly “made” the Young British Artists when they were unknowns. His purchases encouraged other collectors to follow, thereby inflating the value of what Saatchi had already bought before it was hot. Now the Armory, Frieze, and Art Basel art fairs are so influential as to leave others in the dust. Galleries do the heavy lifting in terms of publicizing, and get 50 percent of sale prices, while largely determining which artists make it. Note that this is less about the objective qualities of the art, if examined in a vacuum, than about influence, PR, hype, and muscle.

Art criticism is the same, just without the money. Old-school art critics, those with a prominent voice through columns in the right newspapers and magazines, get to choose what is good and what is not (though this most often manifests in shining a light on select artists and ignoring the others, which in PR terms is worse than giving them negative reviews). Criticism is least interesting when the critic decides what is good and bad, while it is at its best when it explores a work and then allows you to decide.

The former type of criticism results in petty territorialism all too often, with ideas and arguments bouncing around the squash courts of peer-reviewed journals, without reaching the public at large. It amounts to preaching to the converted or to those in “rival” pulpits.

The Reformation that opens up art and criticism to the masses, to the audiences for art, is not yet upon us, but its harbingers can be heard.

Take, as one wonderful example, a project funded initially by the Slovenian Ministry of Culture. It is a beta version of a website, by the name of ArtOpen, and it has been a modest success. Founded by a few Slovenian artists, the concept caught on and spread, with international users from the United States to India signing up within the first few months. It is run on a volunteer basis for the time being by its founders, with hope that the Ministry will continue to fund its expansion.

The principle of ArtOpen is this: It opens up art criticism and trade to anyone around the world, of any background. All you have to have is an interest in art and a willingness to engage and share your opinion.

Here’s how it works: Artists create social media-style profiles and upload their art to the site. Other users can create profiles without uploading art. Then all of the users can vote, each month, on their favorite art that was uploaded, in various categories (works on paper, paintings, graphics, etc.). The process includes a jury of some arts professional and experts (I’m one), but every user, regardless of expertise, has the same vote. Evaluations of the art are made based only on digital images, which is of course not ideal—truly great art should be seen in person. But since this is logistically prohibitive, digital is an adequate solution.

In the past, I’ve described ArtOpen as a Tinder for art lovers, which proved to be apt. In the future, ArtOpen plans to be available in a Tinder-style app.

Whichever art has the most “likes” wins that month and is a candidate for Artwork of the Year. ArtOpen has recently begun to allow users to sell their art directly through the site, receiving 100 percent of their asking price. ArtOpen adds a 20 percent reservation fee to the author’s price, paid for by the buyer, auction house-style.

You can argue about ArtOpen just like you can argue about art. But the site undoubtedly cuts out the middle men, the critics who like to shape opinion and the gallerists who do likewise for their 50 percent fee.

The naysayers will argue that allowing the masses to decide is, in theory, good, but doesn’t always result in the cream floating to the surface. That is a sound argument, but one that suggests that the masses need to be better informed, rather than that decisions should be kept away from them. And a tool like ArtOpen can be one method of better informing the masses.

Reformations are good things—the religious one decentralized and democratized Christianity—and the empowerment of the 99 percent can only be progressive. Art should be opened up.

The post Can a Small Slovenian Innovation Democratize the Art World? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The question of whether tech-enhanced education can help break down—or perhaps even erase—growing social divisions confronted a panel of educators brought together at a Zócalo/Arizona State University event titled “Can Digital Learning Dismantle the American Class System?”

The panelists’ collective answer: Digital education can indeed shake up rigid class hierarchies, and it’s already having that effect. But it’s going to take more time and commitment.

“We’re just getting to the point where these tools can start being useful,” said Jaime Casap, the chief education evangelist at Google, who noted that in 1995 only one percent of the world was online. Twenty years later, some 40 percent is.

Casap’s opinion was echoed by Arizona State University president Michael Crow. Crow suggested that giving every student access to digital tools would empower them—not as faceless members of a socio-ethnic group or class hierarchy, but as individuals.

“We’re at the early stages of an extremely complicated process,” Crow said. “We’ve never lived as a species when everyone was actually equal.”

The conversation unfolded before an overflow audience at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles. Moderator Goldie Blumenstyk, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, started the dialogue by asking each panelist to reframe the evening’s theme in a sentence or two.

Some gave bluntly personal responses. Darryl Adams, retired superintendent of the Coachella Valley Unified School District, talked about growing up economically disadvantaged in Memphis, Tennessee.

“Now, with digital access and the tools that are available, power is available to everyone,” Adams said. “That is opportunity.”

Casap spoke of his family’s dependence on food stamps and welfare while he was growing up in New York City’s rough Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. When he was a kid, to look up information he had to trudge over to the Columbus branch of the New York Public Library on 10th Avenue—unless it was a Sunday or holiday, when it was closed.

Today, more young students like him could get that information by pressing a key. Withholding technology from needy students guarantees they’ll fall further behind rich ones whose parents can pay for it privately, he suggested.

“I get to do what I do today because of education,” said Casap, who did graduate work at Arizona State University. The educational benefits he received are now being enhanced by digital tools and extended to the next generation, Casap said, mentioning one of his own children’s pursuit of a higher education degree.

“She assumed I was going to pay for it, so that’s a good problem to have,” he joked.

Marie Cini, college provost at the University of Maryland University College, ventured that digital education alone won’t end the class system. Rather, she suggested, digital education creates connectivity among formerly disadvantaged and marginalized people, which in turn creates opportunities and shifts power relationships. That, eventually, leads to changes within the class system.

But there still are obstacles to obtaining all the benefits that digitally enhanced education can offer, Cini said. Parents worried about social status may hesitate to support a child who chooses a blue-collar career, even a high-skilled one. Brand-name institutions still have big advantages over their less well-endowed rivals. These social distinctions and prejudices can carry forward and be exacerbated well after an individual leaves college.

“Look at who runs the country, look who’s on the Supreme Court,” Cini said. “We segment as people, and that’s what ossifies the class system.”

Access to digital technology is important, “but it’s not enough,” Cini said.

Blumenstyk repeatedly pressed the panelists about whether digital technology really could shake up the class system and deliver on its utopian promises if elected officials and taxpayers aren’t willing to pony up more money—an uncertain possibility, at best, in the current political climate.

Adams replied that his school district actually had banded together and agreed to tax itself to provide digital technology to its students, including those living in isolated trailer homes scattered across the region. To reach those students, buses were outfitted with routers and parked in remote neighborhoods so students could access the internet.

“It’s possible to make this transformation, but you’ve got to have the will,” Adams said.

At one point, Blumenstyk reminded Crow of an interview in which he raised the troubling prospect of a future world in which rich kids get taught by professors and poor kids get taught by computers.

Crow responded that there always will be a need for master teachers and professors giving face-to-face instruction, but technology can be an enhancement and a means for “evening out the outcomes.” Virtually everything in our human-made environment—from food, eyewear, and clothing to dictionaries and cell phones—is a technology, “passive objects” that can be “empowered” through “the creativity of individual students or individual teachers,” Crow had said earlier.

And the notion that we must make an either/or choice between old-fashioned learning and digital learning is false, he stressed. As for the cost of education, Crow said, investing in technology reduces it over the long term.

As the evening moved toward its question-and-answer portion, one audience member wondered aloud how digital learning could foster an improved civic culture. Casap said that young students need not simply to be given access to technology, but shown how to use it. For example, he said, studies have shown many kids don’t know how to tell a sponsored website from a real news website.

Another questioner asked why, despite the wider availability of digital technology, there aren’t more people of color working in Silicon Valley.

“What I told my kids was, ‘Build your own company. Don’t wait for Apple to call you,’” Adams responded.

Digital learning, the panelists concurred, is not a panacea, either for all of society’s problems or for any individual’s challenge in staying productive and engaged.

“It’s a long life, you’re probably going to have nine different careers, so you have keep going back and reinventing yourself,” Cini said.

But if digital learning isn’t a cure-all, or a revolutionary action, the panelists seemed to agree that we’re long past the point when moving forward without it is an option.

“We’re going to get the name of the species altered,” Crow said, “so that everyone born before 2000 is a homo sapiens; everyone born after 2000 is a homo sapiens.net.”

The post Yes, Classroom Tech Can Tackle Inequality—but Change Takes Politics and Patience appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That someone would be me. I worked for Vodafone, the British telecom giant that serves Asia, Africa, Europe and Oceania, while living in both London and The Hague. I went on to work with young technology companies, then at the U.S. State Department, and eventually to teach at UCLA Anderson School of Management.

At the State Department, I held a role as U.S. ambassador negotiating the 2012 telecom and internet treaty called the World Conference on International Telecommunications. Those negotiations sought to prevent nations from monitoring and censoring internet traffic, which is antithetical to U.S. political and economic beliefs.

And yes, I’m sensitive to the needs of broadband network providers. Such networks should receive sufficient revenues to ensure an adequate return on their significant capital investments.

One lesson connects all my various work and travel: A free and open internet is core to the future of our societies. Service providers have an abiding interest in this as well. After all, their networks have value because they can carry our fundamental traffic—guaranteeing individual access to the internet, voice and video communications, social networks, e-commerce, and access to crucial research—in an unfettered and unrestricted manner. Here there is no room for financial arrangements that would allow telecom operators to make solely financial decisions over which traffic is prioritized over a network and which isn’t.

“Net neutrality” is the principle under which internet service providers would enable access to all content and applications regardless of their sources, without favoring or blocking any particular traffic, products, or sites. The principle to me is defining.

Future innovation and economic growth comes from the individual rights we enjoy. Net neutrality helps protect those rights on the internet, and with good reason. Technology and ubiquitous high-speed networks can have such an impact on citizens, consumers, enterprises, and, more broadly, society that they must be defended.

I have seen the consequences of philosophies and policies that lead to censorship, metering of traffic, and attacks on the free and open internet we enjoy today. During the WCIT treaty negotiations, nondemocratic nations sought to win legitimacy for their efforts to monitor internet traffic and block spam. While spam in the United States might represent unnecessary commercial content, in these countries spam could express political dissent.

I also saw nations in emerging markets that, in lieu of creating competitive broadband providers with private investment, sought to impose fees for any internet traffic that ended on their networks. This model only promised a limitation of internet traffic flows, as many organizations wouldn’t want to pay the fee to have their traffic transported, including small entrepreneurial or nonprofit organizations. All of this would cripple economic growth and internet access to vital content and commerce in nations that need it most.

Of all my different jobs, my role at the State Department, heading the U.S. Delegation for the WCIT, allowed me to meet with the broadest array of international industry and government officials. Despite the many fundamental political and economic differences I encountered, I was struck by the number of my counterparts who asked me about the special success of the United States: its overall level of prosperity, adoption of technology, individual rights, and vibrant entrepreneurial spirit. What, they would ask, enabled this success?

My answer was our immense privilege. Americans have been privileged to live in a system where entrepreneurship is encouraged and rewarded, where both failures and successes are valued, and where individual rights and varying perspectives are not just tolerated, but encouraged in the quest for getting the “right answer” and stimulating engagement, whether in the community, new ventures, or society at large.

That system explains why we’ve led in technological advances—most recently in areas such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of things, which promise to yield amazing conveniences as well as new insights and solutions. Our system is why we have made progress in understanding the causes, predispositions, and effective treatments of life-altering diseases. And it’s why we’re quick to adopt autonomous vehicles that can reduce the number of traffic injuries and fatalities, lessen the impact on climate change, and create a major “gift of time” in congested cities, freeing up individuals to connect, be entertained, transact, or do whatever they please.

But none of these advances is possible without a free and open internet, where the flow of traffic—be it university research, social media, connecting people, on-demand entertainment, and knowledge—is protected.

In 2015, the United States had a breakthrough in adopting net neutrality as an official policy. It’s been concerning to see efforts by the current FCC, which seek to undermine that seminal 2015 decision.

Those opposing net neutrality often cite the need to protect future pricing models and revenue streams for telecom networks. But such protection is not worth the worrisome precedent and unintended consequences that would be triggered by the abolition of net neutrality. I fear those consequences would fall on telecom itself.

In the absence of net neutrality, internet traffic could be easily throttled or blocked. We could live in a world where only those organizations with the greatest resources could afford to have their traffic sent in a seamless manner. And in a broadband environment with limited resources, what would happen to nonprofit organizations and universities that seek to send their content free and unfettered?

I fear we would be creating an environment similar to the costly mobile phone one. In that economic ecosphere, it’s expensive to call a mobile user overseas, where callers often encounter costly “termination fees.” Such rules have restricted the flow of mobile phone calls internationally and encouraged “over-the top” calling solutions, which undermine telecom revenues.

The end of net neutrality would likely stifle the flow of information globally. It’s hard to see how stifling information flows would be good for anyone, much less the telecommunication companies for which I used to work. A free and open internet is a rare development that benefits citizens, consumers, enterprises, and societies. Very few other offerings can make such a claim.

Telecom operators have and should exploit numerous growth opportunities to meet consumers’ insatiable demand for mobility, tapping new bundling prospects with video and content. Pursuing new revenue sources by invalidating net neutrality would lead to a potentially dangerous scenario for everyone, where free and open access to the internet is curtailed, traffic is limited, and everyone is hurt.

The post For a More Open Society, Keep the Internet Neutral appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A:
Test me all night, baby.

No, really. Sign me up to be the subject of A/B testing. I’d even be willing to sign a blanket consent form, right now, so that all of Silicon Valley’s biggest brains can test me for the purpose of improving the human future.

Everybody’s doing it. In fact, you’ve likely been A/B tested without your knowledge if you’ve ever used Google or Facebook.

With A/B testing, different users are given different variants of a website or an email or a purchasing button to test what small changes online make you more likely to click, or read, or buy, or spend more time in a particular online environment. (A/B typically suggests two variables but, in reality, we are in a multi-variable world.) If you’re reading this column online, you could be being A/B tested right now—it could be running in three different formats, with your reaction to each variable (different headlines, different layouts, maybe even different handsome photos of your columnist) being measured, recorded, and statistically analyzed.

The gold standard for California’s technology industry, A/B tests are also called bucket testing and split-run testing, and they neither can be detected or escaped. A/B tests are how we improve our designs, our interfaces, and even ourselves.

Conducted carefully and repeatedly, they allow for refinements to fit the needs of users and remove guess-work for those running sites and delivering more products.

This notion of tests is old—it’s often attributed to 1908 tests that were used to improve industrial processes at a Guinness brewery in Ireland. But Google has optimized its globe-dominating search business for such testing. Facebook is similarly devoted to A/B testing to continuously refine its site. On the other side is Snap, whose CEO Evan Spiegel doesn’t like to do such testing, preferring a more visceral approach. Is that why Snap is facing such challenges in keeping users?

A/B testing can feel more like a religion or a cult than a scientific procedure. It requires building unseen rituals into everything you put up online. But the disciplines of experimenting and testing help avoid the human preference for the status quo.

We should demand even more from A/B testing. The human race must redesign and improve all sorts of systems—energy, traffic, food and water supply, communications, and even governing systems —if we’re going to avoid self-inflicted disasters, from climate change to famines to wars. So why don’t we commit ourselves to a culture of continuous optimization in the real world, not just the virtual?

B:
I am not your test subject, baby.

And I have no desire to be Silicon Valley’s guinea pig. Oh, yes, I know the internet is full of fine print that lets me know that I’m being tested. But that doesn’t mean I’m being meaningfully asked for my consent. And I’m not really being compensated for all the data that’s being collected from experiments conducted on me.

My online time is now given over to companies experimenting upon me for the purpose of getting me to choose to see which variables will change my own behavior. In essence, I’m a dystopian lab rat forced to design the maze—and the reward—that will entrap me. Great.

And even the real world no longer provides an escape because the Internet of Things–with its web-connected air conditioning and appliances—tests me even when I’m relaxing in my own home, making a cup of coffee.

Facebook will tell you that all its services, provided to me free, are a form of compensation, but studies also tell me that spending more time on Facebook—which is the goal of many of their experiments—makes me less happy. Sadness is not a method of payment I accept.

Such testing has created an unacknowledged ethical crisis—and real public health concerns. The more we click, the more we’re being tested. And if experiments show the way to make us spend more time than is healthy for us in an online environment, or to spend more money than is good for our family’s finances, aren’t we being harmed by our own testimony? (Am I talking about my own behavior here, you ask? Can I plead the Fifth?)

In other fields, like medicine, society developed standards and review boards for governing the testing of human subjects. But these standards aren’t being applied to all the A/B testing to which we’re constantly subjected online.

There are questions here for our faltering democracy, too. California has hundreds of companies that will help an interest group or a politician test to determine the best ways to manipulate our emotions and online behavior for their purposes. Is such human testing a factor in the rise of polarization and fake information that is weakening our bonds to our fellow citizens?

If so, this world of testing needs real regulation—by the same authorities, and under the same laws, that allow for regulation of business practices in the name of protecting people from health and financial threats. One way to start might be to add regulation of A/B testing and other online experiments to the privacy regulations that some jurisdictions impose on tech companies.

And there are other, more prosaic problems. All these A/B tests can be wasteful, producing data that can become quickly outdated. That data creates its own gravity and a bias in favor of the status quo. That’s dangerous because the past doesn’t always predict the future, especially online.

A/B testing and multivariable varieties of it are also impersonal. Such testing doesn’t capture who the users are, and the needs of people can be as diverse and different as individuals themselves.

Of course, smart people in Silicon Valley know this, which is why they are moving beyond A/B testing to the realm of machine learning: a world of algorithms that learn about each individual user. The promise, as yet unrealized, is that the algorithms will continuously improve in giving each user customized products and answers.

Such machine learning blurs the line between human, interface, and machine. In testing their way into this future, California’s brightest brains are simultaneously hiding behind their screens and intruding into their fellow citizens’ lives and minds in a way that they would never dare in person.

Yes, their goal may improve the human experience in many fields. But constant testing and ever greater refinement can be deeply disrespectful to humans, our privacy, and our rights. Yes, we have the right to choose, A or B. But how much choice does continuous testing really leave us test subjects about the nature of our collective future?

The post Is A/B Product Testing Turning Us into Silicon Valley’s Lab Rats? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Decades later they give off a more innocent retro cool vibe, but arcade video games were treated as objects of urgent fascination and concern when they were new. Kids regarded them as the ultimate playthings and competed to master them and set the high score, or the record for longest time playing Asteroids. Some grown-ups enjoyed them too. Many in positions of authority expressed fears about harmful effects of the electronic amusements and wanted to ban them or regulate their use.

Other adult authorities saw video games not just as diversions or toys, but as essential tools for training young people for a future of high-tech, computerized work and leisure. A magazine story framed the issue as one of essential education in the technology of tomorrow: “Is it somehow more valuable to learn Missile Command than to learn English?”

This moment in the history of pop culture and technology might have seemed unprecedented, as computerized gadgets were just becoming part of the fabric of everyday life in the early ‘80s. But we can recognize it as one in a predictable series of overheated reactions to new media that go back all the way to the invention of writing (which ancients thought would spell the end of memory). There is a particularly American tradition of becoming enthralled with new technologies of communication, identifying their promise of future prosperity and renewed community. It is matched by a related American tradition of freaking out about the same objects, which are also figured as threats to life as we know it.

Teens partying in a family basement with video games in 1985. Photo courtesy of Richie Wiebke.

The emergence of the railroad and the telegraph in the 19th century and of novel 20th century technologies like the telephone, radio, cinema, television, and the internet were all similarly greeted by a familiar mix of high hopes and dark fears. In Walden, published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau warned that, “we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” Technologies of both centuries were imagined to unite to unite a vast and dispersed nation and edify citizens, but they also were suspected of trivializing daily affairs, weakening local bonds, and worse yet, exposing vulnerable children to threats and hindering their development into responsible adults.

These expressions are often a species of moral outrage known as media panic, a reaction of adults to the perceived dangers of an emerging culture popular with children, which the parental generation finds unfamiliar and threatening. Media panics recur in a dubious cycle of lathering outrage, with grownups seeming not to realize that the same excessive alarmism has arisen in every generation. Eighteenth and 19th century novels might have caused confusion to young women about the difference between fantasy and reality, and excited their passions too much. In the 1950s, rock and roll was “the devil’s music,” feared for inspiring lust and youthful rebellion, and encouraging racial mixing. Dime novels, comic books, and camera phones have all been objects of frenzied worry about “the kids these days.”

The popularity of video games in the ‘80s prompted educators, psychotherapists, local government officeholders, and media commentators to warn that young players were likely to suffer serious negative effects. The games would influence their aficionados in the all the wrong ways. They would harm children’s eyes and might cause “Space Invaders Wrist” and other physical ailments. Like television, they would be addictive, like a drug. Games would inculcate violence and aggression in impressionable youngsters. Their players would do badly in school and become isolated and desensitized. A reader wrote to The New York Times to complain that video games were “cultivating a generation of mindless, ill-tempered adolescents.”

Pac-Man Gumball Bank, ca 1983. Image courtesy of Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History.

The arcades where many teenagers preferred to play video games were imagined as dens of vice, of illicit trade in drugs and sex. Kids who went to play Tempest or Donkey Kong might end up seduced by the lowlifes assumed to hang out in arcades, spiraling into lives of substance abuse, sexual depravity, and crime. Children hooked on video games might steal to feed their habit. Reports at the time claimed that video kids had vandalized cigarette machines, pocketing the quarters and leaving behind the nickels and dimes.

Nowhere was this more intense than in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas where regulation of video arcades became a highly publicized legal affair. The city barred children under 17 from the local Aladdin’s Castle emporium unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. Officials also refused the arcade chain a license to open a new location in a shopping mall on the grounds that the owner was connected with “criminal elements.” Bally, which owned Aladdin’s Castle, filed suit against Mesquite. The case made its way through the courts until 1982, when the Supreme Court sent the matter back to the appeals court, effectively dodging an opportunity to establish young people’s right to play video games in arcades. In a New York City case of the same year, a court ruled that the municipality could regulate games to curb noise and congestion, finding that games were not a form of protected speech under the First Amendment.

Such cases, among others, were not really about banning or restricting access to video games, however much some adults despised them. Millions of games were in people’s homes by 1982, and no legal action could remove them. Rather, these efforts sought to regulate the behavior of America’s teenagers, whose presence annoyed adults who objected to their hanging around, maybe skipping school, making fast remarks at passersby, maybe attracting the wrong element, making noise, littering, maybe drinking or smoking dope, and basically being teenagers. Some towns, like Marlborough, Massachusetts and Coral Gables, Florida, managed to keep arcade games out altogether; and others, like Morton Grove, Illinois, managed to prevent arcade openings by enforcing ordinances that forbade businesses from operating more than a certain number of coin-operated machines.

There was a flipside to the freaking out about games and youth, a counterpoint to the panicked discourses that greeted the soaring popularity of the new amusements. Many commentators, particularly social scientists with a skeptical view of the moralizing, sky-is-falling crowd, saw great potential benefits in video games, which they identified as cutting-edge technology. Many observers of American society in the 1970s and ‘80s had recognized a large-scale shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, from work in factories to work in offices, from manufacturing to knowledge and service labor. Among other technologies, electronics and particularly computers were facilitating this shift.

Video games were computerized playthings, often the first introduction to electronics and computers young people received, and they could provide a new form of training in the tools of tomorrow’s workplace, the optimists maintained. It was clear that children were learning from the games—how to master them, but also how to interact with digital electronics and computer interfaces. These were “powerful educational tools.” Some kids who were devoted to playing computer games might graduate to programming, making the pastime an introduction to making software. Several news items in the early ‘80s profiled kids who sold a video game they had programmed at home, thereby teaching themselves not just technical skills but entrepreneurialism. A California teenager named Tom McWilliams, whose parents refused to buy him a computer of his own, sold his game Outpost for $60,000. An NBC News story on March 8, 1982 noted that now they call him “Tommy McMillions.”

Somehow, a generation of teenagers from the 1980s managed to grow up despite the dangers, real or imagined, from video games. The new technology could not have been as powerful as its detractors or its champions imagined. It’s easy to be captivated by novelty, but it can force us to miss the cyclical nature of youth media obsessions. Every generation fastens onto something that its parents find strange, whether Elvis or Atari. In every moment in media history, intergenerational tension accompanies the emergence of new forms of culture and communication. Now we have sexting, cyberbullying, and smartphone addiction to panic about.

But while the gadgets keep changing, our ideas about youth and technology, and our concerns about young people’s development in an uncertain and ever-changing modern world, endure.

The post When Pac-Man Started a National “Media Panic” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.