Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

Permanent Record: Technology in Schools

That’s going on your permanent record is a phrase that people from my generation anyway are  likely to read as satirical.  We’d say it today in mocking reference to those anachronistic threats made by teachers or school administrators to record indelibly some transgression or truancy we committed as children. The permanent record, they said, would follow us throughout time.  College admissions boards would know the trajectory of every spitball ever fired, or future, prospective employers would read every intercepted love note ever passed.  Of course, unless a kid committed an actual crime (and sometimes even then), the proverbial permanent record was usually a monster in the closet to be ridiculed in hindsight. But today, as technology is increasingly integrated into K-12 schools around the country, the idea of the permanent record returns, not as a fictional specter, but as a very real and pervasive concern for parents and the current generation of school kids.

This past August, California became the first state to enact a law that prohibits educational websites, apps, or cloud services used by schools from selling or disclosing personal information about students; from using collected data to market to students; and/or from compiling dossiers about students.  According to Natasha Singer writing for The New York Times, “The law is a response to growing parental concern that sensitive information about children — like data about learning disabilities, disciplinary problems or family trauma — might be disseminated and disclosed, potentially hampering college or career prospects.”

California is not the only state to begin to address the issue of privacy or to impose regulations on data collection or data use via technologies deployed in schools; but this recent law does appear to be the most comprehensive to date and may serve as a roadmap for updating federal laws to address these concerns.  Critics say the existing Family Education Rights and Privacy Act is antiquated, “written for the file-cabinet era,” writes Singer. Other states have passed some narrowly targeted laws restricting, for instance, the use of biometric data collected in schools where student fingerprints or handprints are used to pay for cafeteria lunches.  Or as Singer’s article points out:  Kansas forbids districts from collecting biometric details on minors, and from surveying them about religious, moral or sexual beliefs, without parental consent.  And that sounds okay I suppose, but I’m trying to imagine the technology that is both an educational enhancement and a collection point of information about personal data like sexual orientation.  This does beg questions regarding which technologies are being deployed to what purpose, and what kind of student data is part of the interaction?

It goes without saying that state-by-state, district-by-district, we are bound to see a broad range of adoptions or rejections of various technologies used in schools, either for educational or administrative purposes.  And it’s a safe bet that the employment of each technology will be a manifestation of the often-absurd alchemy of politics and economics that drive all decisions within schools, usually with mixed academic results.  As is the case in all other aspects of modern life, I suspect certain technologies will help students succeed and others will help students fail even faster and more stunningly than ever before.  We won’t really know for a generation, at which point analysis becomes somewhat Heisenbergian as the observers themselves will have been altered by the catalysts, and the catalysts remain in constant motion.

Considering the broad spectrum of potential uses and abuses of the data associated with education technology, it seems essential that federal law mandate the broadest possible protections for students and their families.  Marketing to kids is a concern, but it’s penny-ante poker compared to the potential hazards of over-reliance on technologies to track behaviors, trends, or strengths and weaknesses of individual kids from kindergarten through high school.

In principle, I imagine the primary benefit of technology tools in education should be to make more efficient use of limited resources in order to increase benefits for more children; but these technologies should have to prove their effectiveness and should never come at the price of mass data collection for use by either the private or the public sector.  American education is already too bureaucratic.  Politicians hobble our best teachers and reward our laziest ones with state-mandated tests and curricula that have little to do with actual learning; students apply to college now via computer and are lucky if human contact is part of the application process; and certain regions and economic sectors are still diagnosis-heavy, overeager to rely on psychotropic pharmaceuticals to address behavioral challenges that might not warrant drug therapy.  With these and other trends, we often do treat contemporary students as compilations of data, sometimes forgetting to see the children. So, if we already take too much of a bean-counter’s approach to education, and we pair that with technologies sold by companies that commoditize the counting of beans, don’t we risk fostering a generation of bean dip?

Dawn of the Prankster

About two weeks ago, some disgruntled friends shared a story about Urban Outfitters apparently marketing a faded and blood-stained-looking Kent State college sweatshirt.  Then, in a follow-up story reported by Jordan Sargent in Gawker, an email sent by the retailer’s CEO Dick Haynes explains that the sweatshirt shown in their marketing materials was not representative of a new, purposely designed line of clothing but was a legitimately vintage item purchased at a Rose Bowl flea market and that the red stains on the shirt are not in fact blood.  The photo of the Kent State sweatshirt, according to the email, was being used to promote a new line of faded looks being offered by UO.  Assuming Mr. Haynes is telling the truth about the sweatshirt (and there is no reason to think he isn’t), the story is a pretty good example of so much that is wrong with marketing in the digital age.  In short, does the campaign reveal stupidity or ignorance?  And at what point do such distinctions cease to matter? Do the economics of the Internet expect everyone to become a prankster in order to win?

As Sargent rightly implies, the marketing team at Urban Outfitters almost certainly knew they were courting negative reactions by using the image of this sweatshirt because in the age of social media, controversy can be a great way to get campaigns to go viral. Still, it is not yet clear that “any press is good press” is a universally wise tactic for all brands.  Certainly, a brand can align itself on the side of certain issues, which can be a great link to customers whose values correspond with the brand.  But in the bizarre dynamics of social media, even a hater becomes an evangelist of sorts when he/she shares a story for the purpose of denouncing it.  If the story or campaign offends ten thousand people but appeals to one thousand customers, cha ching.  Not only does this achieve market penetration for pennies, but the people who hate your brand did your selling for you for free.  That said, this can be dangerous territory for a brand looking to build customer relationships over time. Being a shock-jock can backfire.  More importantly, brands and their marketing campaigns are themselves creators of culture and thus feed public consciousness, which is part of why I believe our reaction is so strong against this apparent trivializing of the Kent State shootings.  It becomes a form of revisionist history, which brings us to the question of ignorance in this story.

Jordan Sargent raises the possibility with regard to this sweatshirt campaign that “…various people involved in the transaction were too young to even realize the implications of selling a Kent State sweatshirt that looked like it was bloodstained”  This may be true, and if so, it is yet another unfortunate phenomenon of our times.  Despite the fact that we treated the dawn of Internet access as a great boon to education, we do seem to encounter frequent examples of digital natives achieving adulthood woefully ignorant of some rather significant cultural icons and events.  That anyone in the United States might enter the workforce, let alone in a communications role, without ever hearing of the 1970 shootings at Kent State is both extraordinary and, at this point, not the least bit surprising.  In fact, I personally wondered many years ago whether or not a glut of data (which is not necessarily information) might result in a decline in general cultural literacy.

It was the late 1990s, and I was creative director on a photo shoot in New York.  The photographer and I were joking around, making references to the Marx Brothers, and our comments were sailing over the heads of the models and assistants who were a good decade or so younger.  Who doesn’t know The Marx Brothers, I thought?  Their films were hardly contemporary when I was growing up; they were 40 years old.  Driving home from the shoot, I wondered if the volume and rate at which we were increasingly consuming sounds, words, and images might not have a deleterious effect on long-term memory of important cultural and historical items.  Add to this the ease with which information can be manipulated through the web, coincident with a general distrust of traditional news sources, along with marketers willing to gin up controversy to sell tee shirts, and you get a digital age Tower of Babel.

Perhaps one of the worst phenomena to manifest from all this is that it feeds moral absolutism, which believes the ends justify the means.  For a business owner, those ends might be selling some product, but in the world of civic affairs, this psychology produces more serious results.  We’ve occasionally seen hacktivists identifying as Anonymous meddling self-righteously in politics or in events like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and they’re free to make a mess of things once in a while because they can’t be held accountable.  It is the same psychology that produces the bottom-feeders at Reddit and 4Chan who would share stolen nude celebrity photos and produce rape and death imagery of Emma Watson in response to her speech at the UN on feminism.  But, interestingly enough, it is also the same psychology that produced a bizarre attempt to attack 4Chan.

In case you missed it, a site was created called emmawatsonyournext.com, which was purported to be the work of anonymous users at 4Chan and appeared to be hosting a countdown to the distribution of revealing photos of the actress.  But according to this story by Rich McCormick in The Verge, the countdown site was in fact a hoax and PR ploy designed to drive traffic toward a campaign to take down the 4Chan site for its exploitation of women.  Now, I personally don’t care if 4Chan disappears; it is of no value to anyone, and the only people who spend time on the site are either losers or FBI agents.  But this hoax of a campaign against the site is likewise exploitative of Miss Watson and the values of feminism, and even if its rather murky ends are anti-misogynist, its means are unacceptable.  Coincidentally, according to McCormick, it was Redditors who apparently identified the companies behind the hoax.

“Some Reddit users were able to sniff out the hoax before its countdown expired, and linked the company behind it to FoxWeekly, a site that plagiarizes from other news sources to solicit views and Facebook likes, and Swenzy, a company that sells followers, likes, and views.”

BUT . . .

According to other sources like The Huffington Post, the organization behind the Emma Watson leak hoax is called Rantic Marketing, except that there doesn’t appear to be any such company because, writes James Cook for Business Insider, “Rantic Marketing is a fake company run by a gang of prolific internet spammers used to quickly capitalize on internet trends for page views.”

So…

I guess what I’m driving at is that the Internet can be kind of a cesspool of idiocy, self-aggrandized hackers, and exploitative opportunists all filtered through the manipulative algorithms of social media’s walled gardens.  And I think the truth is that, even as adults, we are not innately good curators or editors of the fragments of information with which we choose to be bombarded. If nothing else, who has the time?  When I think about the digital native generation growing up in this environment, it’s hard not to wonder if the biggest hoax of all might not be credited to whichever prankster first called this “the information age.”

Unrepentant Bad Thinking on Piracy

Jenna Wortham, technology writer for The New York Times, offers this article in which she questions the illegality of IP theft online.  Titled, The Unrepentant Bootlegger, Wortham begins with a description of what some may consider an unjustifiably heavy-handed raid by DHS officers in the arrest of Hana Beshara, a co-founder of the illegal media site NinjaVideo, shut down in 2009.  One can argue that non-violent criminals should be arrested in a less dramatic way (though I wonder how that sentiment might apply to insider-trading felons), but that isn’t the point of Wortham’s article.  No, her thesis asks wether or not Beshara’s actions ought to be illegal in the first place; and I’d like to jump to her quote about SOPA near the end of the article because so much of her inquiry poses naive questions based on false premises like the following:

After the seizure of NinjaVideo and the other sites, the M.P.A.A. pushed federal legislation to continue to crack down on illegal downloading. But the bill, SOPA, was so loosely worded that it could have required all websites to be responsible for monitoring their services for potential violations — an expensive and nearly impossible challenge — prompting sites like Wikipedia, Tumblr and Craigslist to rally online sentiment against the legislation. Outrage about the bill came to a head in 2012, and lawmakers backed off.

This narrative about SOPA has been repeated so many times that even a writer for the NY Times can get away with presenting it as fact. But it just ain’t so. There was nothing about the wording of the SOPA/PIPA bills that could be used to hold US-based websites any more responsible for infringement than they already were in 2011, or than they still are at this moment.  In fact, language in the bills explicitly stated that they do not trump precedent, domestic law. The bills were specifically designed to starve foreign-based sites, dedicated to piracy, of their revenue streams strictly because the site owners themselves operate beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.  Wortham’s own emotional introduction to her article, describing the flack-jacketed arrest of Hana Beshara ought to indicate to anyone how utterly unnecessary it would be to have introduced SOPA/PIPA as domestic-focused laws.  Clearly, what Beshara and her NinjaVideo colleagues were doing is already enforceably illegal in the U.S., hence the guys busting into her condo and the 16 months she spent in prison.

The notion that SOPA could have shut down Facebook, et al was the result of well-orchestrated, and well-funded fear-mongering; and I stand by the assertion that (issues of piracy aside) the anti-SOPA campaign was the most successful corporate-serving bamboozlement of the electorate in my lifetime.  The campaign was holistically corrupt in that the very tools being employed to manipulate the political process simultaneously created the illusion that people believed themselves empowered through information to take action.  Never have I seen so many intelligent friends motivated to reaction based on such illogical, let alone unsubstantiated, claims.  Did it not occur to any of my progressive, educated colleagues at the time that in all likelihood no member of congress, no matter what we may think of his/her other politics, would sign the “shut down Facebook and Twitter” bill?  Yet, here we are, almost four years later, and NY Times writers are behaving as though the Internet industry talking points are historical facts.  And that brings us to the crux of Wortham’s article, summed up in this quote:

 Ms. Beshara, however, still can’t accept that what she was doing deserved the heavy hammer of the law. She served 16 months in prison for conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement, but she still talks about NinjaVideo as something grand.

Something grand indeed.  It is astonishing that even when independent artists recite their stories of working for years on a project only to have it hijacked by a pirate site, they’re accused of whining; but when profiteering site founders are busted, they’re treated like martyrs to the cause of culture and smarter business practices.  This narrative that we should credit the NinjaVideos and Megauploads of the world for giving us iTunes and Netflix is another false premise; and it is always perplexing to read declarations about the public “wanting 24/7 on-demand everything for free or really cheap” as though those making such statements believe they’re revealing some profound ethnographic discovery. Really?  People would like instant gratification and would prefer to pay next to nothing for it.  That is a shocker.  If only there were a Pulitzer Prize for the Numbingly Obvious.

The problem is that when writers like Wortham, under the imprimatur of venerable publications, repeat this self-evident observation about consumers and then pose the rhetorical question about the illegality of piracy, they fail to recognize through the fog of their own presumed humanism that they’re in fact promoting an anti-fair-trade market.  This is because it simply isn’t possible to produce all major motion pictures and television in a manner that makes all of these works instantaneously available in every market worldwide and for prices that compete with the unlicensed option of free.  To make such a demand on motion picture producers, both great and small, implies that the stake-holding subcontractors whose skills, labors, and constituent products used to produce these films must have their interests (i.e. means of living) subverted to the exigencies of black-market economics.

Going forward, I expect we will see more and more film projects organized at the contractual stage of development to facilitate early release on legal, web-based platforms — we’re already seeing this occur in some cases — but the conclusion Wortham implies is that the attitudes about piracy are so socially ingrained at this point that we ought to simply accept them and perhaps even praise them as enlightened. This isn’t surprising of course.  Normalizing negative behaviors or trends does have a tendency to screw up perceptions about the consequences of those behaviors.  Articles like Wortham’s remind me of a moment back in college when I bumped into a fellow film major — he wasn’t  the sharpest tool in the shed — one afternoon and he told me he was bummed because his friend had been expelled.  I asked why, and he said that the friend had “set his dorm room door on fire.”

“Um, Dude, that’s arson,” was all I could think to say.

“Yeah,” he replies, “but there’s so much other shit he did that the school never caught him for.”

This was sound reasoning in his mind.  His friend’s miscreant, even dangerous, behaviors had become so normalized that it seemed entirely unreasonable for the college to take disciplinary action.  And that’s the thing about the many thousands of words at this point that have been dedicated to re-contextualizing media piracy.  Call it what you want, but, at a certain point, all we can conclude is, “Dude, that’s larceny.”