I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. [...] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.

To hear the quote in some context, listen to it here:

This is yet another example of the submerged state problem-- the inability or refusal of many people to perceive the the way government benefits them personally, preferring instead to see a narrative of self-reliance-- creating a dangerous historical blindness.

Foxx graduated from UNC in 1968-- which means she went to college from 1961 to 1968: smack-dab in the middle of the period of unprecedented growth in higher education that lasted from 1945 to 1975. This time period was also (and not coincidentally) a time of a great influx of federal dollars into higher education-- universities were awash in federal monies, from GI Bill tuitions to Cold War  and Space Race research funding to direct subsidies on higher education to attempt to keep pace with the postwar baby boom.

I don't mean to downplay Rep. Foxx's commitment to her education or the sacrifices she made to get there. It can extremely difficult for a student from a poor family to succeed in higher education, especially when they are financially on their own. However, no matter her struggle, it doesn't lessen the fact that it was simply much easier to do what she did in the 1960s than it is today. The numbers make this abundantly clear:

To take another flagship state school from the southern mid-Atlantic region, tuition and fees for a full-time student at the University of Virginia in 1970 (two years after Dr. Foxx's completion of her Baccalaureate) was $484 for in-state students. If we go by the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, that is approximately $2,862 in today's dollars. However, when we look at the current tuition and fee rate for a full-time, in-state, returning student (in other words, the student who is getting the best deal in terms of price per credit hour) is $11,584 a year. That's about four times the inflation-adjusted 1970 price.

Even if we overlook the fact that she had a partner to help her financially and share costs and that it took her almost twice the "normal" amount of time to matriculate, Dr. Foxx is positing that avoidance of debt is possible for students based on her own experience at a time when school cost approximately a quarter what it does now. This is simply not a tenable model of behavior for students in the current academic economy.

Representative Foxx's comments would merely be frustrating and irksome if she was some random congressperson. But this is a former higher education administrator, and the Chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training, who is serving as such at a time when unemployment among young adults is at a 60-year high, and when many are anticipating student loans to be the next economic "bubble" to burst.

It is essential that our citizens-- especially those who choose to serve the nation by leading it-- are able to perceive the topography of history, to see how historical forces shape the facts of our world in ways that cannot be blotted out by ideology or partisan concern. Dr. Foxx is either unable or unwilling to do so when it comes to the facts of university finance, and this is especially problematic given her position. And her willingness to express a lack of sympathy for individuals who are truly caught between the massive bureaucracies of the loan providers and the skyrocketing price of tuition, rather than targeting either of these systemic problems, is especially troubling.

In writing the post, doing some pre-writing for a field statement I'm working on for school. I wanted to try to express in words why I choose to privilege communications, and to define what I meant when I said I was doing so. While I had hoped the post would be read and that feedback would be offered, it was a pleasant surprise to have it come days later over Twitter. I had several initial reactions to Dr. Fischer's feedback:

• First, I was a bit embarrassed that I had so underplayed the importance of the  history of technology to my thinking on the topic. A very large number of the books on my bookshelves fall under the history of tech rubric. The exhibit that I recently helped curate, on postal systems technology, is very much informed by a history of technology viewpoint-- I was interviewing engineers and even had machine schematics hanging over my desk. And I would very much also argue the story that it tells is part of communications history. I think I had thought that the connections between the kind of communications history I'm advocating and the field of history of technology were more implicitly obvious than they actually are, upon re-reading the post.
• I also felt that, in my experience, historians of technology tend to privilege the science community, business concerns, and legal issues that shape technological development-- sometimes to the expense of users. I recalled going to several telecommunications-related panels at a SHOT conference where I heard a lot about Bell Labs, packet switching, and the like, but almost nothing on customers or users.
• Finally, I just felt there was an ineffable difference between the two. Certainly communications technology deserve to be part of the literature of a history of technology, but to me there just seemed some hard-to-identify difference, something special about communications that made it somehow a little unique, a special case within technology. This was the hardest reaction to express and impossible to defend, but it was also the deepest-felt.

As is often the case on Twitter, the question quickly sparked a lively and very helpful conversation. Dr. Fischer and myself were quickly joined by Shiela Brennan of RRCHNM and Trevor Owens of NDIIPP.

I had expressed concern that people might not consider things like early nineteenth century mail systems "technology" per se, and that much of postal history is written by postal historians (something I regretted while researching for the above-mentioned exhibit.) But I was actually told that there had been several postal presentations at the most recent SHOT conference-- something I was encouraged and excited to hear.

It was also pointed out to me that there is much more of a literature on users than I had been aware of within the history of technology community, and I was recommended several very interesting books on the topic that I look forward to reading. And yet that feeling that there was an ineffable difference persisted-- while historians of technology may indeed deal with users, surely there must be a significant qualitative difference between, say, users of electric razors or polio vaccines, and participants in the republic of letters? Of course, it was then pointed out to me that the written word itself is a technology, and must be thought of as such, and not falsely naturalized.

As the conversation wound down, I was still not satisfied that communications history should be seen as necessarily a subset of the history of technology-- there was that can't-put-my-finger-on-it feeling still there. But I did have a lot of new ideas to explore about the intersection of the two, lots to read, and lots to mull over. (When Twitter is collegial and helpful it's truly an amazing thing.)

Ultimately, I ended up simply asserting that, to my mind, it was an issue of tent size, so to speak.  The history of communications is a very large topic, even if it fits within the auspices of the history of technology. While it is imperative that communications history draws from history of technology, and while there is certainly a place for communications media within the history of technology, it is a large enough and important enough topic to warrant discussion as a discrete thing. Similarly, the advent of gender studies didn't obviate the need for women's studies. Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square.

And yet, even that answer didn't fully satisfy me. I still felt there was some fundamental difference. I still suspected that ultimately, it wasn't like women's studies. It was intersectional. Historians who study African-American women can't be satisfied to draw just from women's history, or from black history. They have to draw from both, because their subjects lived within both experiences. African-American women aren't off-limits to historians who focus on women's history or black history-- they just have to be mindful of that intersectionality and not be reductionist.

I've been trying to figure out why I felt that way, trying to justify this suspicion, ever since. And after a few day's thought, I think I've figured it out.

The issue, as I'm coming to see it, is that there are a whole host of comunicative cultural practices that are difficult to shoehorn into the category of "technology" that are nonetheless very much a part of communications history as I'm conceiving it. (It is also important to remember that the point of these posts is not to prescriptively assert subdisciplines as discrete items, but for me as a PhD student to better articulate the scope and shape of my own specialization. Communications history as I conceive it is essentially all that matters, 'cause I'm trying to hone my own conception, here.)

To give some examples of such phenomena from works that engage with what I think of as having a place in the historiography of communications history:

• Parades, toasts, and parties. David Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes discusses the use of parades, toasts, and parties as communicative acts that helped to reinforce national unity and identity in the early republic. Of course, the utility of doing so is deeply contingent upon use of these events to shape discourse within the emerging news media, which was growing precipitously at this time, but while communications technologies were used to broadcast the events and reinforce their import, I would feel uncomfortable describing a toast or a parade as a "technology." They are social practices with deeply communicative intent.
• Blackface and racial melodrama. Beyond the "technology" of using burnt cork as make-up, blackface is not a technology. It's a mode of cultural expression-- a deeply problematic and revealing one, and one that WT Lhamon Jr. argues ably in his Raising Cain has proven quite good at bridging genre, media, and time. Likewise, Linda Williams's Playing the Race Card demonstrates that racial melodrama-- an understanding of racial relations and identity deeply entrenched in the narrative conventions of melodrama-- is a "wonderful, 'jumping' fish," one that has bridged media and been a dominant narrative in American entertainment since Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is a coupling of a dramatic/narrative mode with a set of cultural constructions-- not a technology. While both blackface and racial melodrama play through media, they are not in and of themselves technology or media.
• Stand-up comedy. In Revel with a Cause, Stephen Kercher provides a challenging, fascinating history of liberal satire during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. While the book is almost encyclopedic in its scope, two figures who definitely stand out are (unsurprisingly) Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. Both men's careers must be framed in terms of communications technology-- Bruce's career was largely built or records, at a time when censorship of "blue" recordings had only recently decreased, and he dealt with the media ecosystem of his time-- from the news media and contemporary politics to jazz. Sahl, even moreso, was a product of mass media, in that he was a direct and vocal critic of it. He read the paper as part of his routine, and gave commentary. Stand up itself was forever changed by the advent of electric amplification. But a man joking and telling stories on a stage? Decidedly low-tech stuff. But due to cultural impact, these comedians are important to understanding the media environment of their times.

...I'm sure there are debates, quibbles, and questions one could bring up with these examples and others. But ultimately, I think they demonstrate the reason for my discomfort with seeing communications history as simply a subset of the history of technology. To me, communications history is-- or should be-- history at the intersection of cultural and media studies on one side, and the history of technology on another. 

Of course, this is still a dramatic simplification. The history of communications also intersects with aspects of legal history, social history, economic history, and countless other subdisciplines. Every breed of historian borrows liberally from others. But I see the intersection of communicative cultural acts and the technology that mediates communication as key.

We're also all the products of our experiences, and I'll be the first to admit that this conviction may be the result of my education-- my concentration on drama and cinema in college, my intense interest in media studies and cultural theory while getting my MA in American Studies, and finally, coming to George Mason, with the prevalence of technology in its History department.

That said, I think what I'm identifying here is a fertile little niche for historical scholarship. And my dissertation, still in the early stages of research, definitely fits within it. At the core of what I've been saying in these two blog posts is something I think is pretty uncontroversial-- Communications is a very important aspect of the modern world. And I would like to see even more scholarship on it.

When the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto wrote this over a decade ago, they were looking for something revolutionary. They were trying to express the impact of the astounding new power of electronic media on communications-- the internet, we are told all the time, is the biggest thing since the printing press!

And a lot of people who drank the Cluetrain Kool-Aid have been somewhat discouraged by what they've seen in the last ten years. Where's the big change? Online communications has allowed for the kinds of conversational brand advocacy that Cluetrain advocates, but in general, corporate communications and marketing are just business as usual. Certainly, a purist would argue that most companies haven't taken the lessons of cluetrain to heart, they haven't gotten into the real, human conversations, and haven't reaped the benefits as a result. And that's not an invalid assessment.

But a couple weeks ago, another reason dawned on me as I was reading on the subway. Something painfully obvious. Markets are communications in the information age, yes. But that was just as true in the nineteenth century as it is today. And likewise, communications in the nineteenth century was undergoing a set of dramatic transformations, much like today. The internet changes everything, to be sure. But that itself is business as usual.

The internet has revolutionized communications. But looking at the history of the United States, from 1788 to present, with an eye to communications technology, one witnesses a nation that is more often in the midst of a communications revolution than it is not. American History has in many ways been singularly defined by a long series of communications revolutions.

From the First Amendment and the Postal Road System to the telegraph to the birth of the Railway Mail Service to the rise of the mass media and the advent of the telephone to the television age to the internet, the United States has been a nation that has been constantly being reshaped by revolutionary shifts in communications. The way that people communicate has been shifting rapidly and radically for most of our nation's history.

What makes communications history such an exciting lens into history is its ability to bring together the two most important historiographic trends of the last thirty years-- the quantitative, materialist approach of the new social history, and the cultural theory and more literary analysis that constitutes the cultural turn. Communications technologies shape and drive markets. These networks are an essential engine of the economy. Simultaneously, it is within the content of communications media that we have our only window into the discursive forces that shape culture. It is for this reason that I think communications history is critically under-explored.

Certainly, ever since Marshall McLuhan became a public intellectual rock star, there has been an ever-growing community of people in media studies, and that [inter]discipline has influenced a good number of historians. There is a lot more work that should be done, however-- and communications history needs to be allowed a more central role in our historiography. It's time to let communications history have center stage.

There are many well-researched histories of particular media-- there are books on the telephone, the telegraph, motion pictures, et cetera. These usually focus on the technological, business, and/or legislative-governmental aspects of the medium's history. And there are books that analyze cultural phenomena within media (usually broadcast media), from issues of class in early silent films to performances of race on the internet. There are far fewer books that integrate both the medium and the message, unfortunately.

Historians have drawn extensively on letters throughout modern historiography. But rare is the author who positions those letters within both the cultural practice of letter writing as it changes over time and the postal networks that allow for such communication. Too often, the letter as an object itself is overlooked.

I think there is still a large body of potential work that foregrounds the history of communications and uses it as an inroads to other avenues of historical investigation.

There are at least three recent books that I have encountered that do an excellent job of foregrounding communications in the way I am discussing. I'm sure there are others, and would welcome suggestions, but these are three that have caught my attention for their broad scope and deep insight.

Paul Starr's 2005 The Creation of the Media is impressive in its scope, taking a comparative approach to media and contrasting the development of the American media over the last 300 years with the parallel developments in France and Britain, arguing for the uniqueness of the US media environment. It's an impressive read, and an amazing introductory text on the subject. While it's still almost entirely on the media and very little on their messages, it is admirable for creating.

More recently, Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought is a work of synthetic history, bringing together much of the most important work in the historiography of the Age of Jackson. One of the primary arguments of the book-- and one of its most fascinating-- is a re-framing of the Market Revolution as a Communications Revolution, foregrounding the import of the rapid dissemination of information as the key change that allowed for the transformation of the American economy.

Unfortunately, by concluding in 1848, (a date which one guesses he chose for the death of his book's hero, John Quincy Adams) he downplays the import of the postal rate reductions of 1845 and 1851. As David Henkin has demonstrated, the import of these rate reforms cannot be overstated, as they allowed for a major cultural shift toward a more egalitarian world of letters in the US. Despite this, the book is admirable for its foregrounding of the broader impact of communications, and makes what I feel is a convincing case on that point.

Finally, Henkin's 2007 The Postal Age-- while much more narrow in its scope than the above two books-- does an amazing job of integrating information about the legislation, policy, and technologies that shape the postal system of the mid-nineteenth century with discussion of the system's public, and how they used the post. While I would have loved to see even more analysis of everyday letter writers' rhetoric and discourse, that would have fallen a bit out of the book's scope, and even still, Henkin proves-- as he did in City Reading-- that he is a master at the difficult task of discussing the complex praxes of common literacy.

What attracts a historian to a particular topic, methodology, or theoretical approach is always highly subjective, and I'm not trying to pretend that this isn't the case for me as well. My primary objective in writing this post has been to try to better put into words why I think that communications history is a worthwhile and interesting lens into American History, an inroad that has yet to be well-explored.

Of course, it would be wonderful to see the field bloom, to see "Communications Historian" listings in the AHA job listings, or to see curatorial positions open up in a new National Communications Museum (something some other nations have, from what I've been told.) I think communications history is just starting to prove itself as a worthy specialty for historians to explore. As I said, it does bring together threads from both social history and the cultural turn, and for those who are banking on digital humanities being the next big thing in the field, I think it could play quite nicely with DH, as well.

Even if none of that happens, however, it's what I want to study and research. It fits quite nicely with my personal interests, and I'm confident that there's many careers' over worth of research left to be done.

ETA: There is now a second part to this blog post, which can be found here.

There is nobody in this nation who got rich on his own. Nobody.

You built a factory out there-- good for you! But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.

You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come, and sieze everything in your factory and [have to] protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look-- you built a factory, and it turned into something terrific or a great idea-- God bless! Keep a big hunk of it!

But part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Politics aside, I think this is a truth that we should all be more conscious of. In the current divisive political environment, everyone seems to be trying to make his neighbor into the enemy. We could all use a refresher in the way the social contract works-- and a reminder of how to be a little bit more human.

There's a reason that Horatio Alger and Charles Dickens wrote about orphans. There's nothing more terrifying-- nothing more tragic-- than seeing someone adrift, without a social safety net, forced to find their own way. We're simply not equipped for it. The social fabric is the only reason any of us survive. Humans are weak creatures-- we don't have sharp teeth, or claws, or even protective fur. Our only strength comes from our empathy, our language, and our ability to work together.

I'm incredibly lucky. If you're reading this, you are too.

I'm 32, I have a history of health problems, I'm unemployed. And I'm INCREDIBLY lucky. I'm luckier than any one person deserves to be. I'm lucky because I have people. People who care about me. Not all of those people agree with me politically, or even about my taste in food or music. But they're my people. We have a mutual investment in one another.

Because I have people, I still have a roof over my head, I still have health insurance, and-- even though it's easy to lose sight of it-- I still have a faith that SOMETHING will come my way. Not because I deserve it. But because all the people who have helped and supported me do. Life will work out. Because I have people.

America has gone through ten really rough years. We have seen ten years of being terrified, of losing ground, of feeling like we're losing control. Domestically and internationally, things seem to just keep getting more uncertain. We've had to question some really fundamental faiths and assumptions. And that's really hard.

This has led to a shift in the nation. Many, in the face of all this, have come to look at their place in life and to regard it as earned, as an accomplishment. It's reassuring, when faced with uncertainty, to look at the world and proclaim that we got where we are because we deserve it-- and that those who may have fell behind did so because they did not.

But this is a dangerous delusion. Nobody in this world got where they did alone. It is cynical and selfish and hurtful to say otherwise. Our strength lies in our ability to open up to our fellow human beings, to inspire empathy, compassion, and support. Even Ragged Dick and Oliver Twist got ahead in this manner-- they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, yes, but they did it by opening up to others, by caring about those that cared about them, and helping those that needed it.

The internet has an amazing ability to build social ties, to help us all find our people, to have meaningful conversations, to support one another... To make the world better for one another. But so often, it's used as an echo chamber where we just work up our venom for those that don't immediately agree with us. The current cycle in the government, pumped up on a 24-hour news cycle and the instant connectivity of electronic communications does the same.

But these are our lesser instincts, our worst aspects.

The most sacred, amazing, special thing about mankind-- the thing that makes us human-- is our ability to relate, to care, to help. We need to remember this, on a real instinctual level, or we're all doomed to reap what we sow.

You are not self-reliant. You are not a self-made-man. You got where you did by caring about others, and by others caring about you. Without others, we would all be lost in an uncaring wilderness, a victim of the worst manifestations of anarchy.

You have people. People have helped you. This is not something to be ashamed of, it's something to celebrate. But it's also time to pay it forward.

I hope this isn't misconstrued as propaganda. We have some tough choices coming up in next year's election, and frankly, I find myself honestly undecided for the first time in my memory.

My only point is this: let's just move forward, into the next year, actually caring about and considering our fellow men. Let's stop letting kneejerk politics and ideology obscure the fact that we're all in this together, that the ties that bind us are more complex and multivalent than are dreamt of in our politics. Let's treat one another as fellow humans, and admit that one point or another, we could all use a hand up.

And at some point, we've all gotten one.

...we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.

We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

...At first blush, the logic of splitting DVD delivery from streaming makes sense to me: licensing for streaming and DVD rentals are two different beasts. I think they may have made this decision looking forward toward their recent parting of ways with Starz.

Even if it's not the right decision, it will take a little while to shake out. But I can tell you, with twitter still reeling about Netflix's announcement, one thing they definitely got wrong: the Qwikster branding.

The name is silly. I personally find the spelling painful. I doubt I'm alone in either of these opinions. But there's also a really powerful historical echo to the name, that dates back to the 1950s. And it's not a good association.

Let's say you're trying to think of a brand name that evokes the speed and efficiency of your service-by-mail. Is this the first thing you want (some) people to think of?

The Mailster -- courtesy National Postal Museum

Qwikster, meet the Mailster.

Netflix, please note, the Mailster was one of the biggest flops of American postal engineering. It had trouble going up hills. Mail carriers complained of them filling with smoke. It couldn't operate in three inches of snow. Some reported it could be knocked over by a large dog. And they had a high rate of injury. But the Post Office Department continued to produce more and more for over a decade, seemingly driven by a sunk cost fallacy.

The Mailster, simply put, was a bad idea, and a giant lemon.

Now, I've spent the last year of my life researching postal engineering. I've met USPS engineers-- they're a talented, intelligent bunch. And I have a lot of affection for the goofy little Mailster. It's a great reminder that engineering successes are built on trial and error, that we learn what works by seeing what does not. And more likely than not, most of the people who will see "Qwikster" and think "Mailster" are big old Postal geeks like me, and not the general population.

But the fact that the names are so similar doesn't bode well. Branding 101 tells you to avoid names that are going to evoke pricey, colossal mistakes of the past. Netflix is already skating on thin ice, PR-wise-- which is why their blog post has the apologetic tone it does.

Beyond the question of whether consumers really will respond positively to having two URLs and potentially two bills for what was once one service, this echo across time of the two names points-- in my opinion-- to a major business decision being made somewhat hastily, and unveiled while still half-baked. And that makes me worry for Netflix's future.

ETA:

The twitter account for "Qwikster" likewise suggests insufficient vetting by PR. SRSLY.

“The UK is the home of so many media inventions,” he said. “It’s interesting that you invented photography, you invented television, you invented computers in both concept and in practice — it’s not widely known, but the world’s first office computer was built in 1951 by Lyon’s chain of tea shops. Interesting. Yet nobody, none of the world’s leading players in these fields are from the UK. That’s a problem.”

Now while I'm sure that the British public was pleased as punch to have Schmidt come over and lecture them on their nation's historical achievements and its subsequent inability to live up to those achievements, I wonder if anyone in the audience immediately noticed what a tin ear for history Schmidt seems to have.

The British definitely do deserve a lot of credit in the early history of computing. And Tim Berners-Lee, a product of British schools somewhat later, has had a little bit of influence himself. The fact is, though, that-- as Schmidt was arguing-- the British influence on the computer market isn't what one might have expected it to be in the 1950s. But for Schmidt to pointedly lay that on the feet of British teachers is historically inaccurate, to put it mildly.

Schmidt is letting an ideologically-driven mythos of the history of computers drive his interpretation of history at the expense of very basic facts.

Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as a meritocracy. Every company starts with scrappy, nerdy college kids in a garage somewhere, college dropouts become multibillionaires, and the internet is a place where information wants to be free-- and make the deserving very, very rich. Internet wonks and tech firms are full of techno-libertarians who believe that computers make the market work better, and that markets fix everything in the end. It's an understandable belief. Computers are a disruptive technology, and disruptive technologies always (initially) upset rigid class boundaries. For this reason, tech is full of people who made it to the top because of skill, intelligence, and perseverance in a way that older industries are not.

However, this fact has led to blind spots about the history of the industry, and why the computer industry looks the way it does. The fact is that the US government spent its way to US dominance in the computer market in the era when the British really had a chance to be players.

This is a widely-established fact, a matter of public record, even if it isn't often brought up in the mythos of American computing and Silicon Valley. For a single, easily readable account, see Roy Rosenzweig's historiographical article "Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet," recently collected in his posthumous volume Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age (most of which, ironically, is available for free on Google Books):

That the Cold War. . .fostered the development of digital computers is relatively easy to show. In 1950, for example, the federal government-- overwhelmingly, its military agencies-- provided 75 to 80 percent of computer development funds. Even when companies began funding their own research and development, they did so with the knowledge of a guaranteed military market. Such massive government support enabled American computer research to destroy foreign (mostly British) competition; the American hegemony in computer markets-- routinely attributed to American free markets-- rests on a solid base of government-subsidized military funding. "The computerization of society," writer Frank Rose aptly observes, "has essentially been a side effect of the computerization of war."

So why this collective amnesia in the tech industry about who has been filling its coffers for most of the last half-century? I would argue that it's a problem of what Suzanne Mettler has described as "the submerged state." That is: beneficiaries of government successful government programs have a tendency to forget that they are the beneficiaries of government programs. They tend to think of their success as their own, over-emphasizing the importance of their own accomplishments and underestimating the institutional structures that allowed them to achieve them. Just like how 45% of recipients of unemployment insurance claimed to not be beneficiaries of government programs, the American tech industry sees government grants and contracts as a right, as something earned, not as a hand up.

That someone as intelligent as Schmidt could overlook this difference in subsidy defies reason, especially since he himself is a beneficiary of that same fountain of money. Google would never have existed without the Department of Defense's funding of the proto-Internet ARPANET, or without military and other government grants and contracts with Stanford where Larry and Sergey did the original work on PageRank, just to name the two most obvious.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think that students do need a "license to tinker" And if Schmidt is honestly trying to get the British to follow Barak Obama's lead in funding more education Engineers, I support that. He's right, "the world needs more engineers." My primary reason for writing this is primarily to point out that blaming the British tech market for not keeping up with America's on issues of curricula seems, historically speaking, colossally unfair.

But there's something more, too-- I think that Schmidt's tenuous grasp on his industry's history belies the difficulty with his desire to return to 19th century standards of education:

"It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges," he said. "Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."

This is all true, of course. But the issue that I have is this: in a time when America is in the middle of a blame-the-teacher-first "educational reform" movement, when the British government is in the middle of austerity reforms, a call for this sort of integrated liberal education is likely to fall on deaf ears, and more likely to be interpreted as a call to defund the humanities, rather than simply beef up funding for science education.

And this is dangerous. It's dangerous because Eric Schmidt is a Very Clever Fellow, and he missed a very fundamental point about the history of the industry that has made him a billionaire. In a world where history becomes a generalist hobby for businessmen and engineers, where funding is taken away from the humanities, we are likely to only see far more misunderstandings like this. And failing to understand the history of a subject tends to make it very easy to make very, very bad decisions about the future.

This means that in some alternate reality, there’s a world where Google+ is called “Backrub Me.”

But I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for it. I was never really a big fan of Facebook in the first place. When it was really taking off, I would read about it-- being a grad student in Boston, interested in technology and culture, I was really curious. But I couldn't access it. The Winklevossian commitment to exclusivity that was baked into it from the start saw the school where I was doing my MA as not worthy of inclusion. I think UMass Boston students had Facebook opened up to their .edu addresses a couple weeks before it just opened to everyone and their grandma. I ended up only getting a Facebook account once I started TAing while working on my PhD coursework, as a way to try to put the names of some 150 students with faces. So while I'm a pretty frequent user of Facebook, I've never felt much fondness for it. I'd be glad to go.

So-- you there, over at Google! You want me to switch over to Google+, and drop my Facebook account all together? I'm ripe for it, and I'm not asking much in return.

All I want is this: we need to start a real discussion about what DATA EXPORTABILITY looks like for social networks.

I know Google has a great record in terms of data exportability and open standards compared to any other tech company its size. And I know that, from the get-go, Google+ has come with a way to export your data in a fairly granular way, and that's a good start. I want more, though. I want a discussion.

You see, Facebook has a way to export your data, too-- go to Settings, and scroll down to Export Data. And at least Google gives us a human-readable, stable URL for this process.

And I believe Eric Schmidt when he says that he thinks there's room for multiple Social Networking platforms, and that Google's trying to play nicely with Facebook and Twitter. I believe that because Google's model has long been to improve the overall internet experience, to keep people online more, so they keep coming back to Google and its ads, as opposed to Facebook's walled-garden approach.

But again, all of this is not quite enough. We're at a major turn, here. Integrating social will be a huge boon to Google in terms of personalized search and finding ways to leverage the social graph. And I'll get on board right now. But in return I want a discussion to happen, here.

What do I want this discussion to look like? It's pretty simple. I want Google to invite outsiders to the table to have an honest discussion about what users might be able to expect in return for granting Google access to their social graph. Our social data is going to help drive search-- social is going to influence how much of that fabled "Google Juice" a site or a post might have. When will that weighting data fall under the company's commitment to data exportability?

And when will that commitment lead to them using Google+ as a platform to help create open data standards for social? Because exportability without standards is of very limited utility. Once I can export my data and migrate it to another platform-- maybe even one that could still interact with Google+-- that's when we've really got data exportability that means something.

Google has a good record with standards, and I think that this would undergird Schmidt's point. I think it would be in their interest, as traditionally defined-- keeping people on the net by making the internet better-- and it could potentially force Facebook to rethink its closed approach or risk irrelevence.

So yeah, Google-- let's get this conversation started. I'm ready to switch.

The 2nd Annual Lake Anne Ukulele Festival will take place on Saturday, July 9, 2011 from11:00AM-5:30PM at Lake Anne Plaza, 1609 Washington Plaza, Reston, VA 20190 (at North Shore Dr. & Village Rd.). The free music festival will feature performances by several internationally known and local ukulele musicians, music demonstrations, open to the public jam session, beer/wine garden, festival vendors, and other family friendly activities. The event will kick off during the ever popular Saturday Farmers & Arts/Craft Market. Headlining the festival on Saturday will be acoustic blues queen Del Ray. Del will also offer fingerstyle blues workshops for ukulele and guitar on Sunday (see below).

Del Rey plays concerts worldwide and also conducts concert/lectures on women musicians called Women in American Music. She has contributed to projects in honor of The Mississippi Sheiks, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Johnny Cash. Del Rey has recorded five solo albums, Blue Uke (2008), When The Levee Breaks (2006), X-Rey Guitar (2000), Hot Sauce (1995) and Boogie Mysterioso (1993).  The festival will also include special guests and Grammy award winning artists Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer and other performers such as Hoa Mele Wakinekona (Hawaiian), Bruce Hutton (old-time, folk), Marcy’s Potted Plants, The Aloha Boys (Hawaiian), and local duo The Sweater Set.

Performance Schedule:

11:00AM Hoa Mele Wakinekona

11:30AM The Sweater Set

12:15PM Bruce Hutton

1:00PM Marcy’s Potted Plants

1:30PM Aloha Boys

2:15PM Fink & Marxer

3:30PM Del Rey

4:30PM Open Jam Session (public participation welcomed)

Admission is free.  Festival takes place Rain or Shine.  www.lakeanneplaza.com

Ukulele and Guitar Workshops with Del Rey “Seattle-based queen of fingerstyle blues”

Sunday July 10, 2011 -- Lake Anne Plaza (North Shore Drive and Village Road, Reston Virginia 20190)

Introduction To Fingerpicking the Ukulele, 1:00-2:15 pm
For you strummers, here's a song that will get you started using your right hand in a different way. Papa Charlie Jackson's "Mama Don't You Think I Know," a funny old tune in C with an easy-to-hear fingerpicking pattern, will get you started picking out ragtime and blues tunes on the uke.  Students should be able to play C, C7, F, F7 and G7 without hesitation.

Blue Uke, 2:30-3:45 pm
Intermediate (be comfortable with first position chords and be able to keep time)
Blues, rags and old songs for the  ukulele, with a focus on fingerpicking the melody. Tunes like the Mississippi River Waltz, Tappin’ That Thing (Memphis Jug Band) and Tired Chicken (Gus Cannon)...by ear, no TAB.

Moving Bass lines for Fingerstyle Guitar, 4:00-5:15 pm
Intermediate-Advanced
Want to play like a pianist? Walking and boogie-woogie bass lines for fingerstyle guitar. Learn the positions where you can find both chords and  moving bass. Standard tuning. Recorders ok.

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Workshops are $25 each.

For information, or to register, contact Ann Granger at 703-470-3038 or AnnThePotter@gmail.com.

Space is limited so sign up early.  You will be given the exact location when you register.

Tomorrow marks the birthday of Fiorello La Guardia, 99th mayor of New York City.

In the opening monologue of his 1958 play Comic Strip, George Panetta turns almost immediately to one of the most powerful cultural memories of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia:

Now, I was a kid in the days of Fiorello LaGuardia-- remember him, LaGuardia? The Little Flower? Maybe he's one of the reasons I grew up. He loved all us kids in New York City, used to read the comic strips to us on Sundays-- worried and looked after us all the time.

On June 30, 1945, New York's newspaper delivery drivers began a strike that would last 17 days, refusing to distribute any paper in the city except for the leftist (and highly pro-labor) PM... a paper that might be best remembered by comics lovers for publishing the wartime political cartoons of Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel.

For those who don't mind reading between the lines, there's an excellent contemporary account of the strike from the newspaper publishers' perspective that can be found in the Prelinger Archives collection at The Internet Archive. Obviously very biased, but an interesting account of how a city dealt with a major media shutdown.

On July 1, La Guardia was scheduled for his regular Sunday broadcast of Talk to the People, a weekly radio show he held on WNYC. At one point in the show, he encouraged his listeners to gather their children around the radio, and commenced to reading that day's "Dick Tracy" comic from the Sunday Daily News. With obvious relish, the mayor described the action in the panels, impersonated the voices of various characters, and reminded listeners of the plot that had led up to that moment. At the end of each strip, he would explicate the moral of that week's adventure to his young listeners.

(In the above clip from the next week, the moral is described in no uncertain terms: "Say children, what does it all mean? It means that dirty money never brings any luck! No, dirty money always brings sorrow and sadness and misery and disgrace.")

He also promised that he would read the Sunday comics on the air every Sunday as long as the strike continued, and that someone from WNYC would read the dailies every day. The next Sunday, when he came in to broadcast, there were camera crews there to record his reading. The story took on a life nationally. And it became one of the things La Guardia was best remembered for.

Such a move by a major politician today would smack of a paternalism and pandering that would make cynical observers tear him apart. But in 1945, La Guardia reading the comics over the radio really seems to have been seen fondly by a great number of people.

Part of this was likely La Guardia's personality-- he possessed a gentleness, kindness, and an air of genuine benevolence that was a huge change from the last multiple-term mayor in New York, the slick and corrupt "Beau James" Walker. He was a genuine uniter, running in opposition to machine party politics, and seemed to many to have the commonwheal of the city in mind.

He didn't lash out against the strikers or against the newspapers-- he just expressed a concern that the children shouldn't have to go without their comics just because of "a squabble among grown-ups."

I genuinely do believe that La Guardia thought that this might just be a nice thing to do-- I don't believe it was necessarily a cynical or calculated move. But I do think that there is one part of this story that needs to be read with a skeptical eye.

I don't think he was doing this simply "for the children." I think that reading the comics was targeted at adults as well.

By all accounts, La Guardia read and enjoyed the comics himself. Born in New York in 1882, he was a member of the first generation to grow up with comics in the newspaper. (Although he was old enough to be working by the time comics started appearing in New York papers, in his early teens.)

While the reputation of comics as a medium for children had fully developed by midcentury, adults actively read and discussed the events in the daily comics page. Based on research conducted around the same time, sociologist and media theorist Leo Bogart argued that newspaper comics were important to working-class urban readers because they provided noncontroversial (but still debatable) subjects of conversation in situations of urban semi-anonymity. You might not want to talk to the guy on the bar stool next to you about religion or politics, but you could debate Dick Tracy with him.

By reading the comics, he was actually not just providing entertainment for the children of his constituents. La Guardia was finding a way to insert himself into the everyday street-corner conversations of millions of New Yorkers. I would argue that this, just as much as appealing to the children, was key to why this was such a defining moment for the memory of La Guardia's career. He had understood the social function of comics to its adult readers, and had joined in that discussion. It's the mark of a true populist-- to actually understand what's important to people, even the stuff they wouldn't normally admit to.

Interestingly, while this event has faded somewhat from the public memory, and more people know La Guardia as an airport than as a politician, the recording of La Guardia reading the comics has taken on a strange and wonderful second life: the "what does it all mean?" that can be found at approximately 1:27 in the video above has become one of the most widely-used and best-known non-musical samples in hip-hop.