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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: February 8, 2008
Latest Update: February 13, 2008
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
patriciaacone@yahoo.com
Yahoo Discussion Group: Building Communities

Topic of the Week:

How Will I Know What the Big Stuff Is?

As homegrown terrorists have begun to slaughter innocents on our campuses (Virginia Tech) and in other public places (a Lane Bryant store) we have blithely assumed that we, in a country of free press, have access to the news. But Virginia Tech didn't have access to a means of warning its community quickly and efficiently. And only a multiplicity of reliable news sources and reliable news reporting can guarantee our ability to tell truth from paranoia and rumor and outright deceit and falsehood.

Scary reading, right? But surely, I exaggerate. Do I? In recent elections (Presidential primaries) in California, Proposition S, a Los Angeles City call for additional taxes to support our emergency services (police and fire) relied on "market advertising" to convince voters to pass the proposition. They called it "tax reduction." In fact, it was a retroactive justification for a communications (phone) tax that the city had illegally imposed and that had been declared illegal by the courts. The Los Angeles Times, though approving the need for emergency service suppport and urging a "yes" vote, deplored the loss of confidence most of us felt in a public administrative body that refused to tell the truth. How can I know what the big stuff really is, if I can't trust the election officials to tell me? Luckily, we still had the Los Angeles Times.

Against this background, please read An Industry Imperiled by Falling Profits and Shrinking Ads by Richard Pérez-Peña, New York Times, Thursday, February 7, 2008. At p. C1. Backup copy with comments and discussion questions. Notice that the article is in the Business Section. Not in the general news section. Scary, hmmmm?

How often do we ask ourselves how it is that we "know"? What about the snowfall on Monday, February 11, 2008, in Kenosha, when the Kenosha Public Schools chose not to close? What access did the public have to that decision, to the possible consequences, to the reaction of the public to that decision? Newspapers have been with us so long, we are scandalized when a reporter tells an untruth, or makes up a story. We have developed a trust in "all the news that's fit to print."

How has the Internet affected our confidence in the news media? Read the teaching essay, Telling All the Truth, As Well As Nothing But the Truth.

References:

• An Industry Imperiled by Falling Profits and Shrinking Ads by Richard Pérez-Peña, New York Times, Thursday, February 7, 2008. At p. C1. Backup copy with comments and discussion questions.

• See No BiasBy Shankar Vedantam. The Washington Post. Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page W12 . "Many Americans believe they are not prejudiced. Now a new test provides powerful evidence that a majority of us really are." Backup of See No Bias with commentary and discussion questions up soon. Highlights are already up. jeanne

Announcements:

• Happy Valentine's Day
  

  From jeanne

  And now for Susan's valentine:

  

  jeanne's valentine for Susan on Susan's afghan

  It's still not pink, Susan, but my scanner doesn't believe me. jeanne

• Love Yourself

  Check out the article on keeping love alive. The author in The New York Times article, Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples, is talking about romantic love, but the idea applies to many types of love, including love of learning and love of self (self esteem). See the backup for comments and discussion questions. Taking on new experiences works to help you love yourself. And Susan and I figure that if you love yourself, and keep yourself happily growing and learning, you'll like us better, too. jeanne

• Join Our Discussion Group

  YAHOO DISCUSSION GROUP: Building Communities
  This link, directly under the Dear Habermas Logo, takes you directly to the message board which you can read without joining the group.

  THERE SHOULD BE A "Join this group" MESSAGE ON TOP OF THE RIGHT HAND COLUMN OF THE MESSAGE PAGE. Look for it. That's how you join. jeanne

  This link, found with the other e-mail links under the date of the file, Yahoo Discussion Group: Building Communities, will link you to the e-mail address of the group. You have to join the group to post messages.

  One of Susan's students tried to join Write-Free. That's another of our groups, on writing our stories. Good practice. But no one has come to join it recently, so I was about to delete it, but didn't know how. If you'd like help with writing your projects up, I'd be delighted to start it up again. Let us know. jeanne

• Updating Online Sources for Spring.

  Revision of Online Sources.

Issues

• Learning to Keep Love Alive, Including the Love of Learning

  Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples By Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times, Health Section, February 12, 2008. In a backup file, Loving Self May Keep Self Loveable of the article above, I have shown how googling the issue can lead to excitement and help keep us engaged as we try to link our excitement to related learning.

  By engaging you and ourselves in projects, like exploding boxes and knitting or crochet, and by relating those projects to what we are trying to learn and teach, Susan and I are keeping the excitement and novelty in our teaching and, hopefully, in your learning. We understand that teachers who are "different," are disconcerting in terms of "What do I do to get an A and get out of here?," but getting an A and getting out of here is not the real goal of education. Keeping curiosity and novelty and excitement in your life is one of the real goals of education. Education, actively engaged, can strengthen the creativity we all have, and can ward off dementia as you grow older. Oh, yeah. It seems to help with keeping romantic love alive, too.

  By the way, just for the record, Susan and I prefer "different" to "whacko." love and peace, jeanne

  References:

  Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples By Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times, Health Section, February 12, 2008.

• How Shall I Know the Truth?

  Telling All the Truth, As Well As Nothing But the Truth Teaching essay on the social issues we encounter as newspapers downsize, become national instead of local, and succumb to the profit motive.

• The Displaced Find Voice and Action

  • Indymedia :: Patras The Independent Media Center in Patras, Greece, reports on a demonstration by a thousand migrants who have been told by local authorities leave the migrant camp in Patras.

  • Indymedia :: Patras An introductory report telling that

    "the city of Patras has recently been utilised as a transferring hub in the long journey of many migrants, primarily of Kurdish and Afghani origin. The migrants will arrive to Patras having crossed most of the Turkish mainland, and after boarding modern-day slave ships to cross the Aegean. Alternatively, some will enter Greece via the European Union's "arrival hall", i.e. crossing the minefields next to river Evros, by the North-eastern Greek border. Those lucky enough to survive will arrive to the city of Patras (or the port city of Igoumenitsa, in the North-East), from where they will try to secretly cling on the back or underneath of one of the lorries boarding the vessels to Italy. From there, they will try to make their way up to Northern European countries (typically Germany or the UK) where they can reunite with relatives and friends."

    Chances are you didn't read about this in your newspapers. I didn't. I wouldn't know about it, unless I checked with Indymedia. This is a good example of how social construction theory illustrates the effects of our social baggage, even when we're not aware of how advertising subtly senses what we see and hear. The U.S. has its own special immigration problems. Our local concerns color our view of immigration. In the Indymedia Patras account of Kurdish and Afghani immigrants crossing the Greek border into refugee camps on their way to Italy, and from there into Germany or the UK, I was particularly touched by this report of the immigrants banding together with local activists to demonstrate, and to raise their voices in a cry for help. It had never occurred to me that such was a possibility.

    That's one of the advantages of Indymedia. It can help us see a different perspective. Where the U.S. stresses mostly the inconvenience of illegal immigration, here were people saying "We're human, too. Help us!" Yes, they're fleeing a war. But many immigrants are seeking asylum. How unfortunate that their cries are kept from us by media that cater to our own concerns, which serve advertisers better. Look at the New York Times charts on how much of their income is based on circulation, and how much on advertising. jeanne

  • Jacob Riis on the Displaced of Our Own Country. Poverty will always be with us. jeanne

  Visual Sociology
  

  • Photography Works

    Check out one of Jacob Riis' photographs. Assume that you don't have access to a camera. Figure out a project in which you could use a photograph of Jacob Riis, provided on Bartleby's and newspaper or magazine pictures to provide a stimulus for sharing our concerns about any of the legal ramifications of poverty. Consider a time comparison from the turn of the 20th Century to the turn of the 21st Century. Consider using Indymedia.

    Susan could show you how to upload your images to Building Communities for discussion. Sorry, Susan. jeanne

    

    Jacob Riis, STREET ARABS IN SLEEPING QUARTERS. Taken from Bartleby.com

  • Working on the Small Stuff for Peace of Mind
    

    I'M DETERMINED!
    or Another Try on that Popcorn Trefoil for Susan's Afghan.

    

    One of the ways that art and creativity work in helping us to deal with life's injustice and disappointments is by letting us focus on things that please us, things that provide us with a sense of competence and caring. At the top of this last photo you see my disastrous motif, that looks nothing like a triangle. I put it aside and went on to make the one shown at top. It's still not exactly like the pattern for a popcorn trefoil. I can't bring myself to follow patterns. That doesn't center me. Doesn't make me happy. So I cheated a little, by decreasing along the sides of the triangle until it looked straight enough for Susan's afghan.

    Then with that one to inspire me, I took up again my pitiful first try. Cheated a little more. Tugged in here, pulled out there. And by the end I got it looking good enough to satisfy me. I DID IT! I made some triangles for Susan's afghan.

    Sometimes doing a small thing makes doing the big things easier. Because we learn along the way. By doing. Not by thinking about doing. But by actually doing. And it doesn't seem to matter what we do, as long as it's something we enjoy, something that satisfies our need to make things our way, do learn new things, to adapt to new things to make them work for us.

    Working on Susan's afghan last week motivated me to come in and do another issue. Linking things we love to do to things we want and need to learn makes them more doable. When Dewey said we learn by doing, he didn't mean we had to run a newspaper office to understand about newspapers. He meant we needed to stretch our minds around the ideas of newspapers. Most of all, we need to stretch the corners of our minds. Projects capture our interest. And if we come together to share exploding boxes, or metal work, or fiber arts, whatever, and we talk about issues that really matter, we center ourselves in our "together communities," and centered, we can talk about even things that scare us, like the future of gathering information and news in a profit-driven economy.

    Projects give us safe places in which we can explore as a "together community" how we feel about the big stuff that matters. And the little stuff helps us stay together as a community, and expand that community to friends and neighbors, so we can all talk about the big stuff that matters.

  Resources For Governance Discourse Online
  (At Least Some Free Access):
  Finding Issues that Matter and Reliable Access to Information on Those Issues

  • Newspapers:

    New York Times - Los Angeles Times - The Wall Street Journal
    The Washington Post - Arts and Letters Daily
    

  • Magazines:

    The National Review - The Economist

  Still working on restructuring. February 12, 2008, jeanne

• A Range of Scholarly Sources
  on Issues that Matter from Many Perspectives, Left, Right, and Other

  Left/Right Perspectives - Cursor -
  Arts and Letters Daily - The Economist - The Sierra Club - The Guardian
  Wall Street Journal - The Weekly Standard - The Nation
  The Cato Institute (Libertarian) - The Open Society
  BBC NEWS | Americas - truthout - Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles
  - La Opinion - The Washington Post
  Cursor's Al Jazeera Archive - Ha'aretz - Palestine Monitor - Palestine Report
  - Web Sources Linked from Dear Habermas
  Concept Index - T.R. Young and the Red Feather Institute
  The World Wide School - Free access to important early works.

  The Slought Foundation: New Futures for Contemporary Life
  The Church and Postmodern Culture: A Conversation

  Independent Media Center Alternative news, not from private media corporations.

  Wikipedia

  Old Source List of Online Sources

   

   

   

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