Binge Drinking (16/365) by chrisie.b, on Flickr

Good to see an anthropologist engaging with the ‘old’ (i.e. public health and medical) evidence on the problems associated with alcohol consumption, but her suggestion for a new message seems to throw the baby out with the bath water:

I would like to see a complete change of focus, with all alcohol-education and awareness campaigns designed specifically to challenge [erroneous beliefs that alcohol is a disinhibitor] – to get across the message that a) alcohol does not cause disinhibition (aggressive, sexual or otherwise) and that b) even when you are drunk, you are in control of and have total responsibility for your actions and behaviour.

This seems to be a case of new evidence being used to replace one narrow view with another narrow view by ignoring old but still relevant evidence.

There are three reasons why Fox’s call for a new message is misplaced and why the existing message, in Australia, of drinking in moderation needs to be continued.

Firstly, alcohol is associated with poor health outcomes for social binge drinkers and long-term drinkers (e.g. increased risk of heart disease, certain cancers and liver disease).

Secondly, many things you do under the influence are not out of your control, as Fox points out, but they are based on impaired judgement. The effects of drinking are such that certain functions of your brain are no longer able to operate as per normal (see here and here, for example). You still have enough brain function to make decisions about things, but you might not be able to execute them properly. Plus, how this manifests itself as behaviour, as Fox rightly indicates, is culturally and socially determined. Rather than engineering cultural shifts that make drunkenness safer, why not make people safer drinkers by encouraging moderation? It reduces overall risk in the end.

Thirdly, it’s easier to craft and communicate a message of moderate and responsible drinking. What Fox suggests is rather convoluted, but I think I know what she means: if you’re going to drink until your wits leave you, fine, but don’t expect to use this as an excuse for the bad decisions you make whilst under the influence. In the end, it’s easier, more efficient and probably more effective to simply say: drink responsibly, drink in moderation. You can attach a variety of other messages in educational and awareness campaigns, but I seriously doubt you can engineer or even spark off the sort of cultural change that Fox hopes will happen by changing the focus of the message.

Given we are unlikely to completely eliminate problem drinking, I think the research that Fox is citing is useful as a complement to existing public health explanations and recommendations. And this is despite her overly naive suggestion that alcohol regulation along with harsh messages about the effects of alcohol is driving people to desire it more. As an anthropologist I would have thought she could have relied on, say, the concept of ritual as a better lens through which to explain cultural patterns of social drinking (e.g. TGIF). In the end though, yes, cultural change needs to be part of the solution, but not as the dominant focus.

In Australian Indigenous communities, alcohol consumption is so problematic that it can have fatal consequences (i.e. massively increases risk of death due to external causes). I’m sorry Dr. Fox, but we’re struggling to keep these people alive for long enough to hear any message to begin with, let alone your complex one. And, as the research cites, reducing the supply of alcohol and tough messages about the ill-effects of alcohol are doing their job to provide some relief from the consequences of problematic alcohol consumption in Indigenous communities. I think Fox’s suggestions have limited applicability (e.g. middle-class binge drinkers). The other problem with Fox’s suggestion is that it lets governments off the hook when it really boils down to dealing with problem drinking: rather than pouring money into treatment and rehabilitation, governments are happier to make legislative changes. I would add to d’Abbs’ critical observations that another cheap and easy way for governments to deal with any type of social problem is through educational campaigns designed to raise awareness. Fox’s suggestions fit into this suite of armchair policies that hopes for change rather than facilitates it.

Stefan Merrill Block (2011) The Storm at the Door, London: Faber and Faber

Block is clearly a talented writer. This book impressively weaves together two narratives – that of a husband, Frederick, and his wife, Katherine – into a story about loss. The most impressive element is how Block tells a story of loss without allowing the characters to descend into maudlin sentimentality. Frederick is a bright man with a mental illness. Katherine, his wife, comes from a privileged background and struggles to cope with Frederick’s problems. There is certainly a dramatic unravelling of this couple’s story in the end, but Block’s tone in the conclusion does not betray his project of rendering this couple’s life as an everyday struggle to exist, to simply be. Frederick’s story is particularly interesting because most of his story takes place in a mental home where he was staying throughout the 1960s. There is a particular talent Block displays in rendering madness as something coherent, yet elusive – you can understand it, but you’re never sure if you fully grasp it. The way his writing subtly changes tone helps to keep the transitions between Frederick and Katherine’s stories smooth. However, there are times when Block’s writing feels overwrought. The first half of the book seems far less fluid than the second half. One noticeable aspect of Block’s writing are his sometimes jilting, exorbitant and confusing use of metaphors. For example, in one scene from the mental home just after Frederick has taken his tranquilliser, Block gets carried away in this passage:

The Miltown is a warm, calm front pushing aside the bracing bluster of his mind. Frederick rises from his bed, paces around the room, in a small fit, trying to will the medicine out of his awareness. But his words are trapped. Even his body feels trapped. An invisible molecular net has descended.

The first metaphor about the calming of the storm in Frederick’s mind is beautiful and poignant. But, the last metaphor just feels excessive, out of place and a little contrived. It is a beautifully constructed passage – as the tranquilliser kicks in the clauses/sentences get shorter and simpler and you feel the story slowing along with Frederick’s mind. But, a ‘molecular net’ descending is a terrible metaphor to conclude with in this context. It is far too cold and scientific to provide the sort of closure Block seems to be aiming for: the static in the air along with the calmness after a storm.

Here’s another disappointing metaphor:

Like an MTA train making its scheduled stops, every six minutes, Canon’s thoughts arrive, again, to memories of last night’s sex.

Canon is the head psychiatrist at the mental home. He is a cold, calculating and authoritarian rationalist whose affair with a staff member exposes his inner yearning for love and tenderness. But, to compare one’s thoughts to the rhythm of the public transport system is underwhelming and too literal. I think Block was trying to convey the cerebral character of Canon and he fails in this because he lets the impression slide towards callousness. It is a slide that undermines Block’s attempts to show how equivocal and ambivalent Canon really is.

But these faults are not the sort of terrible jolts that bump you entirely off the story. They made reading the first half a little more effortful than it needed to be, but thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless.

In any case, there are more hits than misses. Some of my favourite moments in the book are seemingly unimportant, but profound: the way he describes a schizophrenic as being ‘engaged in hysterical congress with the Absurd’ or the way he conveys Katherine’s discomfort and ambivalence of wanting to unburden herself of the secret of Frederick; or even the way Block captures the mood of the mental home in his depiction of a cow’s ‘sceptical gaze’. But, Block is equally at home with the momentous: the way Frederick finds out that Rita, the psychiatrist who he thought was his friend, is having an affair with Canon; the chaos that reigns as a suicide contagion explodes and authority breaks down in the mental home; and other events that unfold towards the books conclusion.

The story and tone lacks a certain intimacy that some readers might find heartless and detached. I tend to find some intimate and sentimental portrayals of tragedy to be suffocating (e.g. Sebold’s The Lovely Bones). Not here, however. Block places us at a distance to the loss of one’s mind, one’s loves and one’s livelihood in such a way that offers a fresh perspective on the human condition. Yet it is also familiar perspective. Frequent, gentle tugs from the intimacy that lies just below the surface of the characters and narrative keeps you emotionally engaged despite the distance.

Furthermore, it helps to remember that The Storm at the Door is based on the true story of Block’s maternal grandparents. In the preface Block indicates his grandfather had indeed spent time in a mental institution. Other than this it is not clear where else in the story he relied on the factual evidence of his grandparents’ lives. Nevertheless, there is a certain sincerity throughout the book that makes me feel as though this is more than just a work of imagination.

The complex social and cultural determinants of the health of Aboriginal men are given coherence by McCoy through the desert society concept of kanyirninpa. Whilst the term ‘holding’ provides a succinct rendering of kanyirninpa into English, it fails to capture the full range of meanings associated with this idea in desert society culture. Put simply, kanyirninpa is a concept that describes the normative system that balances the opposing forces of nurturance and authority, relatedness and autonomy in a bid to ensure the social, cultural and material reproduction of desert society as a series of relationships to family (walytja), land (ngurra) and ancestral dreaming (tjukurrpa).

After explaining its post-settlement history, McCoy uses the concept of kanyirninpa as a lens through which to understand the paradoxical nature of the social and cultural determinants of the health of Aboriginal men. He uses the particular sites of male sociality within petrol sniffing, prison and football as a way to show how kanyirninpa and its absence can impact healthy outcomes. Petrol sniffing, for example, provides a bridge between childhood and adulthood where young boys can explore the extremes of the value of autonomy, albeit at the expense of their own physical health. Initiation into manhood offers the countervailing force of relatedness that tends to untether boys’ dependence on petrol sniffing as a mode of exploring their autonomy. However, similar problems can be reproduced in adulthood where alcohol presents itself as a substitute for exploring adult male autonomy. As this example demonstrates, the male praxis that both gives expression to and is expressed by the normative system of kanyirninpa can produce adverse health outcomes, in both black and white terms, as much as it produces improvements.

McCoy's model of kanyirninpa (p. 21).

It is a frank account of both the positive and negative dimensions of these sites of male sociality that avoids narrowly normative claims associated with diagnoses of pathologies. Nor is it an endorsement of any sort of relativism. Rather, it is a work founded on a deep sympathy with the lives of Aboriginal people in the desert and their perspectives of what health means to them.

Although, ethnographic in approach, McCoy’s reliance on theory is at times wanting. In particular, McCoy fails to adequately explain the conceptual basis of the embodied geography of kanyirninpa through the idea of ‘folding’. The explanation of this concept and its application to life crises and rites of passage is an important element of how McCoy tries to connect the embodied self with the social self in relation to space/ngurra without reducing one notion of selfhood into the other. As much as this aim is clear and valid, McCoy’s explanation does not sufficiently provide the reader with enough of the conceptual logic of ‘folding’ to support his interpretation of the relationship and interaction between the physical and social body of the Aboriginal male that bridges the biomedical and the social/cultural constructions of health. In the end, the discussion of this concept suggests very little in addition to what is already communicated in his presentation of the ethnographic evidence. Had this concept been better explained it would have added clarity to the way McCoy connected Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal notions of health throughout the book.

Notwithstanding, what this ethnographic work offers speaks volumes above its minor conceptual shortcomings. It is a work that expands our understanding of desert life as it pertains to men’s health. Given this approach and objective, McCoy offers no solutions to the health issues faced by Aboriginal men. He does, however, point to the importance of collaboration between Western biomedical and traditional Aboriginal ideas and practices of health.

Implied by this is the need for change, both within and without desert society. As McCoy himself says, traditional and Western ideas are unable to respond on their own to the health issues facing Aboriginal people in remote areas. In many domains the interaction between the traditional and the modern engenders productive changes when properly supported and based on mutual understanding. If the true purpose of Australian society’s interventions in desert life is to care for the most vulnerable and needy in our midst, then the most fruitful point of departure is to consider the problems as we understand them from their point of view. Ensuring appropriate intersections within the normative systems of Aboriginal people ensures the efficacy of necessary but disruptive interventions into desert life. Doing so better guarantees that Aboriginal people retain and foster the means by which their society may reproduce itself in more healthy ways.

Importantly, this has to include a creative and fruitful engagement by Aboriginal people with Western cultural constructions of health. Undoubtedly, the historical balance sheet of such engagements with the other would probably show Aboriginal people in credit. Not simply because of the historical imposition of Western culture on Aboriginal people, but because the rights-based and reconciliation movements have narrowed the opportunities for such engagement.¹ Maybe it’s not so much the grand ideals of cultural respect and cultural recognition that will get us there but something far more basic and ordinary: inter-cultural understanding. McCoy’s work is exemplary of such an effort and what it can produce.

1. Marcia Langton’s 2009 Berndt Foundation Biennial Lecture provides a concise overview the problems I allude to here and more. Put simply, she discusses how progressive and conservative discourses have colluded to substitute ideology for the facts in Indigenous policy-making over the last three decades.

In response to a young reader’s question about why he was motivated to write the book, Pullman says:

I’ve always been fascinated by the difference between the man Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, who I think almost certainly existed, and the idea of Christ, the son of God. The vast bulk of what people say about Christ seems to me nonsense, impossible, absurd. About Jesus, on the other hand, we can say many interesting things.

The master stroke of Pullman’s book is the way he realises this fascination by casting Jesus and Christ as twin brothers. Pullman humanises the New Testament by making Jesus and Christ imperfect and partial reflections of Jesus Christ. The biographies of Jesus and Christ are woven together by Pullman such that they illuminate the other’s flaws and strengths in a complementary way – the flaws of one highlight the strengths of the other and vice versa. This complementarity tends to work itself out productively, in the end, towards an overcoming of their flaws and a combination of their strengths. It’s a sort of cleverly carried out translation of Aristotle’s aphorism into a literary device: “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In the beginning, Christ is cast as the bookish, but intelligent and benevolent child bound for greatness. Jesus is the energetic but mischievous and careless brother. But their lives take a twist as they enter adulthood. The erudite but somewhat impotent Christ watches on with some jealousy as the practical-minded Jesus discovers God and becomes a renowned teacher and prophet. However, not long after Jesus starts his ministry, Christ is visited by a mysterious stranger who, after some time, he believes to be an angel sent from heaven. The stranger charges Christ with the task of chronicling the life and teachings of Jesus. This task is deemed vital, Christ is told, because it will provide the foundation for the church of God which, by maintaining the legacy of Jesus, will see to the coming of the Kingdom. And so the rest of the book is then a re-telling of the biblical story of the adult years of Jesus Christ through the life of Jesus as chronicled by Christ right up to and just after the crucifixion.

The beauty of the story has to do with the way Christ is given the task of chronicling the words and deeds of his brother. When first visited by the stranger, Christ is told that his name will be remembered, perhaps more than Jesus’, because he carries the ‘word of God’. Put simply, Jesus was the deed and Christ was the word. As the stranger said to Christ later, Jesus was the history and Christ was the truth. Christ’s task was to find the true meaning in these imperfect words and deeds of Jesus – his job was to properly convey the word of God. It is here that knowing what the Bible says adds some depth to Pullman’s story-telling. Enter my Catholic up-bringing…

For example, we know in the Bible (Matthew 16) that Peter declares Jesus to be the Messiah. Jesus responds by telling Peter that he is the rock upon which his church will be built. However, in Pullman’s re-telling, Jesus was so concerned with the distorting influence of his increasing fame that he scolds Peter for this declaration. Compared to the Biblical rendering, we see Christ as an emotional and political being. So, how does Pullman reconcile the words of Jesus with those we know in the Bible? Well, he delicately conveys the internal struggle that grips Christ as he tries to discern the true meaning of Jesus’ reprimand. Pullman has Christ question the moral and ethical implications of having to navigate the terrain between what Jesus says and what he thinks Jesus truly means, which is what we know in the Bible.

Pullman shows even more deft in a short chapter called Feeding the Crowd. This is a re-telling of the well-known miracle of the five loaves and two fishes. In the Bible, Jesus seeks solitude on an island after hearing of the death of John the Baptist. Instead, however, he is greeted by a crowd of some 5000 of his loyal followers who, in following him to this island, now have nothing to eat. Jesus is given five loaves of bread and two fishes for which he gives thanks to God before breaking it up and distributing it amongst everyone gathered. The miracle is that everyone is able eat to their satisfaction. In Pullman’s rendering, though, Jesus collects all the food from his disciples and shares it between those around him. He then tells everyone in the crowd to do the same. In this chapter, I believe Pullman captures the same essential message: Jesus is the bread of life (I think that’s in John), have faith and you shall not go wanting. But, by implying that the reality of the event we know from the Bible is something far more prosaic and less dramatic, Pullman adds something extra and more profound: that (earthly) human needs and wants are satisfied by the benevolence of those willing to share.

My favourite is perhaps the way Pullman portrays Jesus’ prayers in Gethsemane (Matthew 26). In the bible, I was taught that in Jesus Christ’s prayer to God that evening he sought comfort and solace, that he was doing the right thing in submitting to his looming death by crucifixion. Pullman, however, turns this into a dramatic moment of radical doubt and loss of faith by Jesus. At this point the story takes another gripping twist as we learn how Jesus is betrayed, but I won’t give that one away. In a way, I find Pullman’s version adding an extra layer of meaning to the message of the story from the Bible. It is not despite his doubts and loss of faith that Jesus accepts his fate, but rather because of it. Jesus was not passively accepting what lay ahead as a faithful and submissive servant of God. Pullman’s Jesus showed those uniquely human qualities to doubt and all the feelings that come with it. And in doing so, his resolution to accept his fate at the cross was borne of a conscious desire and a will to carry out what he had trouble believing – that God needed Jesus to sacrifice himself for humankind. If anything, Pullman’s version of Jesus Christ’s prayers to God in Gethsemane touches beautifully on the very essence of a Christian idea of faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

Pullman’s sensitivity to the distinction between the empirical-historical and Biblical Jesus Christ animates his book on so many levels. Central to this is the dialectical relationship between Jesus and Christ being played out by Pullman’s economical storytelling. We see Jesus as a pragmatic and active servant of God who’s dogmatic narrow-mindedness leaves him rather insensitive to the full range of influences and consequences his words and deeds may have. It is in this way that Pullman creates an ingenious dramatic opening: the gap between the fictional life of Jesus and the Biblical account of Jesus Christ that needs to be reconciled. And this reconciliation is played out by Pullman’s Christ. In this way, Pullman not only succeeds in humanising the Biblical story of Jesus Christ, but he alerts us to the timeless and powerful pull of stories on human affairs, especially that of the Bible.

It’s not surprising to know that Pullman’s book has received a lot of criticism. His reputation as ‘one of England’s most outspoken atheists’ according to a New Yorker feature from 2005, may have preceded sober judgement of this book. For example, The Telegraph previewed the book’s publication with an article titled ‘Philip Pullman book denies Jesus was son of God’. The fuel for this fire comes from his most renowned works, the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials described here in the New Yorker feature:

In the trilogy, a young girl, Lyra Belacqua, becomes enmeshed in an epic struggle against a nefarious Church known as the Magisterium; another character, an ex-nun turned particle physicist named Mary Malone, describes Christianity as “a very powerful and convincing mistake.”

Not to mention, a ringing endorsement of the book by Christopher Hitchens goes a long way to fanning the flames. But, this reputation is sustained by his non-fictional work and social commentary. Again, from the New Yorker feature:

Pullman once told an interviewer that “every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him.” Peter Hitchens, a conservative British columnist, published an article about Pullman entitled “This Is the Most Dangerous Author in Britain,” in which he called him the writer “the atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed.”

Add to this his signature of an open letter in 2010 critical of the British government for granting Pope Benedict the honour of a state visit to the UK and it makes Pullman’s own resistance to such labelling seem a little futile.

This makes the fact that I was touched by the humanity of Jesus Christ in this story all the more surprising. As much as I think Pullman intended to humanise the Biblical story of Jesus Christ, I don’t think he was interested in generating sympathy for him. I’m not sure the imperfections were meant to initiate affinity for Jesus Christ, but to disturb any pre-existing ones. Fortunately or unfortunately for Pullman, I think that this bald interpretation of Jesus Christ and the story of the Bible has too many elements that I idealise and, when present, admire in contemporary Christianity: an aversion for perfectionism that engenders humility and, along with it, tolerance and forgiveness; recasting the use of independent will and human agency as a virtue; Not that I am of the opinion that these qualities are either prominent or prevalent in contemporary Christianity. But, they are certainly the sorts of qualities that an atheist, a humanist like myself would have no choice but to respect and admire.

And this is a point that many reviews seem to miss and obscure. This LA Times review was quite scathing of the book. For Rutten, it was an average work of literature, especially compared to Pullman’s Dark Matters Trilogy, which he considers to be ‘a genuine work of literature written from a provocative point of view, not a mere provocation seeking literary expression’. Put simply, what Rutten finds disappointing is that Pullman thinly disguises his contempt for religion and ambivalence regarding Jesus Christ in a literary work:

He’s apparently fond — even admiring — of Jesus the defender of the poor and scourge of hypocrites. On the other hand, he loathes what Jesus’ followers and the generations that came after them made of his teachings in the form of an institutional church.

Moreover, Rutten does not think there’s much substance in the Jesus and Christ characters beyond a cliched ‘evil twin’ storyline. I don’t see the basis for this myself and Rutten does not really offer anything himself. In the end, Rutten seems to be implying that Pullman’s typically intelligent and engaging storytelling has been corrputed by his rabid atheism – a case of creative talents being held hostage by political beliefs.

Ironically, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is somewhat more perspicacious. For the Archbishop, Pullman’s ‘very bold and deliberately outrageously fable’ contains familiar arguments against corrupted organised religion. But, it does so from the believable and valid perspective of the humanised form of the spiritual authority of Jesus Christ. The Archibishop is sympathetic to Pullman’s complaints, but unlike Rutten sees the book as a piece of literature first and polemic second. This does not mean the Archbishop is uncritical of Pullman’s arguments: he finds fault with Pullman because…

…one or two passages feel like easy point-scoring – the Annunciation story told as a seduction, or the mechanics of a fraudulent resurrection. At only one point does he break the flow of this narrative, in a long soliloquy by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest.

I would definitely agree with the Archbishop concerning the monologue at Gethsemane – it feels a little too didactic. Pullman’s limpid and economical prose gives way here to a raw and visceral passion that seems a little out of place for Jesus and whose source seems a little obscure. But, I also feel that this is a glaring example of another weakness in the story – the heavy load that the character of Christ has to carry. Not only is Christ a partial reflection of the Biblical Jesus Christ, he also seems to take on the historical mantle of Jesus Christ’s chroniclers, especially the apostle Paul who is given most of the credit for establishing the Christian Church. There’s another Biblical personage taken on by Christ that I won’t talk about lest I give away too much of the plot, but suffice to say that it sometimes feel like the character of Christ is spread thin across other Biblical figures and, therefore, occasionally strays from an empirical-historical centre that holds. But, if we treat the book as a piece of fiction first and polemic second, then everything else makes perfect narrative sense and is not easily interpreted as point-scoring unless judged on religious hermeneutic criteria.

Put simply, I feel Pullman has been a little hard done by. Maybe he is a rabid atheist, but I also think that he is capable of containing that voice within a literary vision of Jesus Christ and the New Testament. Here is what Pullman actually told The Telegraph in that story with the sensational headline:

The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.

As a work of fiction, it masterfully weaves together these different forms of storytelling. I don’t think Pullman was able to contain his atheism when it came to writing about the night of Jesus Christ’s arrest. Not that I would agree that this signals Pullman’s unchristian perspective. I honestly believe that he was first and foremost guided by the twin ideas of the dual nature of Jesus Christ and how stories become stories. So, maybe this book is for people like me: atheists who are still curious about and respectful of religion and spirituality. And being this way, I was easily impressed by the way Pullman erected, mounted and resolved the tension between Jesus Christ the man and Jesus Christ the son of God and saviour of humankind.

But, I’m not sure I would have been much impressed by this element of Pullman’s storytelling were it not for a dear friend, Marios Elles, whose own work on Jimi Hendrix/James Marshall Hendrix has subtly but profoundly altered my own questions and views on what a single life might mean. I wish the smart yet entertaining piece he published in the AFR last year was not locked away behind the Fairfax paywall, otherwise I’d link to it here. But, if you ask him nicely on his site he might reproduce it there for you. The title of my own post, borrowed from Marios’ piece, is a small homage to this influence. Put simply, what Marios’ own work is doing for Hendrix, Pullman has done for Jesus Christ (albeit unintentionally in the case of the latter): to give new life to the myth by exploring its basis in reality without reducing the one to the other.

This cerebral pleasure aside, it has to be said that I’m quite sympathetic to Pullman’s humanist rendering of religion, including the anti-church elements – not for myself but for those who today try to use religion as a weapon. In the end, I don’t think this book can possibly be enjoyed by anyone who does not treat it first and foremost as a ‘story about how stories become stories’ that, secondly, explores the ‘tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ’. The irony, of course, is that in doing this I have allowed myself to feel – probably to Pullman’s disappointment – a renewed reverence and respect for the faith I long ago left behind.

Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

– Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society

What lies behind our obsession with childhood at a time when the birth rate has been in steady decline for over four decades? Earlier this year Joanne Faulkner argued in The Australian that our adult fixation on childhood is driven by a distorted view of childhood innocence. She blames Rousseau for this. It seems Faulkner believes that Rousseau fastened the grip of innocence on childhood in the way he accorded childhood with the purity of nature and the child with a blank slate. But, this combination is threatened by the menacing influence of culture – by society. Men are not evil, they become that way. As society becomes more complex, so does the task of protecting children against such a fate. And this complexity makes parenting more fraught and the task more urgent. In sum, childhood has not simply become a ‘central focus of adult hopes and anxieties’ but an ideological category that shapes all forms of moral and political discourse and action.

It is increasingly difficult to criticise policy or speech enacted in the name of children’s innocence without being labelled heartless or a pedophile sympathiser. The emotional investment in childhood hides manipulation.

The appeal to childhood innocence reveals far more about adults than about the nature of children. Children become a screen on which adults play out fantasies of a world without work, conflict or competition. This permits an “innocent” enjoyment of their “simple” attitudes.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the idea that adults are living out childhood fantasies through children, but there’s no doubting childhood is a powerful ideological category because of the distorting influence of its imputed innocence.

Having said that, Faulkner seems to fall into the trap she set for these ideologically blinded adults.

First, it leads us to underestimate what children can do, understand and take irresponsibility (sic?) for.

Her example: Junior MasterChef. Rather than seeing children as mere vehicles for their parents expectations and pawns sacrificed for TV ratings, Faulkner suggests that if

…we assume these children have their own desires and abilities, including a genuine love of cooking, they can be seen to be in healthy competition, even collaboration, with one another.

But, the assumption of adults let alone children having their own desires seems mistakenly asocial. It denies the importance of recognition. Moreover, it seems rather ignorant of the fact that even if children have their own desires and abilities that they are still significantly influenced by their parents. How children seek to realise these desires and make use of their abilities is more often than not controlled by their parents.

Second, the focus on childhood innocence leads us to give up on children who are seen to have lost their innocence.

Really? But, earlier on in the piece Faulkner was railing against the way that innocence lost or threatened was often an excuse to intervene in the lives of both children and adults. Having said that, I also think she’s right in that some parents see other people’s children as bad and in need of avoiding. Faulkner doesn’t resolve this contradiction, but leaves it dangling on the bed post like a wet sock. Perhaps, though, these two contradictory responses – giving up on/avoiding hopeless children or helping bad children – stem from the same ideological view of childhood. It is the reason why child welfare is such a hot button issue and why at the same time most people seem relieved that it is someone else (like UNICEF, Mission Australia, Smith Family, teachers or Child Protection services) that are picking up the mess.

Finally, equating childhood with helpless innocence prevents us from taking responsibility for our own vulnerabilities and how we may address them.

Here Faulkner is saying that the fragility is children is often felt by the adults responsible for them as their own. It is often expressed in the phrase/unspoken sentiment “What sort of a parent am I if I can’t protect my child from blah?!?!” But, the problem Faulkner points to is an important one: that adults may confuse their own fragility with those of their children.

Faulkner believes that the most effective change we could make as adults is to include children more in the decision-making processes that affect them. It not only encourages them to be themselves but prepares them for a world that demands this type of individual responsibility.

But, as much as I agree with Faulkner’s assessment of the ills of fixating on childhood innocence, I’m not sure I can easily swallow her prognosis. As much as the nostalgic, romanticised view of children irks me, I’m not sure that idealising them as ‘little adults’ does them any favours either. Many of the famous developmental psychologists – Freud, Piaget, Winnicott, Erikson, etc – have come up with the same types of theory about childhood: it is a stage of life marked by exploration and learning. But, how much does the individual responsibility of decision-making that Faulkner endorses and encourages undermine these important activities? Don’t children need some protection from these adult concerns to learn more about themselves and the world? Moreover, Faulkner herself seems to idealise parent-child relations as democratic and egalitarian. But, don’t children need parents more than parents need children? Isn’t that why we’re so concerned about children to begin with? I’m not against what Faulkner is saying, but it has to be founded on an ethic of care that recognises the dependence of children on adults. Otherwise we might just end up replacing one romantic fixation with another.

Out on the wastes of the “Never Never,” That’s where the dead men lie, There where the heat-waves dance forever, That’s where the dead men lie; That’s where the Earth’s lov’d sons are keeping endless tryst – not the west wind sweeping feverish pinions, can wake their sleeping - Out where the dead men lie! – Barcroft Boake, “Where the Dead Men Lie”

Driving through Keep River National Park, NT

There’s no doubting I’m a city slicker – an urbanite par excellence. But there’s something special about surrendering yourself to the rhythms of nature. On the few occasions I go out camping it never ceases to amaze me just how natural it feels and, by contrast, how contrived my normally urban life seems: there’s no need for chronological time let alone alarm clocks; I eat when I’m hungry but it seems to always occur at proper meal times; I’ve got lots of energy despite having to labour more to get anything done; I have no need for my reading glasses because I’m seldom looking at anything in close range. This surprises me because I know so little about camping or nature (beyond the basics of what dangers it presents), but it doesn’t take very long to start to feel at ease and to have a certain competence in the outback. I doubt the same basic competence could be achieved with such ease if one were ignorant of urban life and had to navigate the city landscape – I find myself, three days later, still adjusting to being back in Darwin and wishing I were back in East Kimberley.

But, there was also something perturbing that seemed to lay submerged just below the surface of the wild beauty of East Kimberely. It wasn’t until I visited Lake Argyle that it occurred to me. In 1965 as the debate was raging over the development of Northern Australia (especially in East Kimberley), Bruce Davidson, an agricultural economist, produced a clinical economic critique of trying to develop the north through irrigation and farming. He titled this book The Northern Myth. Interest in the book was revived especially around the 2006-7 plans for water reforms and the establishment of the Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce. It came amid responses to the drought crisis of the noughties that produced similar debates to those Davidson rallied against in the 1960s and 70s about developing irrigation and farming in the north. During this time the potency of the book seemed to lie not in its economic arguments but more in the way that it exposed the purely ideological motivations driving the push for developing Northern Australia. This prompted various people to take up the analysis of what Davidson exposed and so the concept of the Northern Myth has expanded with it beyond the merely economic to also capture the way the Northern Australian frontier has been romanticised. The natural beauty and abundance of East Kimberely is certainly awe inspiring, as I as fortunate enough to experience first hand. But after I share some of the photos of the trip that hopefully captures a glimpse of this I want to revisit quickly the sense of sadness the Northern Myth elicits.

One our way to East Kimberley we had planned to camp out and walk around Keep River National Park. The problem is we got there late and the camp grounds were full so we went on to Kununurra where the best we could do was a cabin. Not a great start. The next day we drove down Gibb River Road through the Cockburn Ranges to get to El Questro.

We were fortunate enough to score a private camp site.

After soaking up our spot we headed out to do the Amalia Gorge walk where we had a well-deserved and refreshing swim.

The next day we hit the more challenging Champagne Springs walk.

So challenging was the walk that I had my shoes were destroyed by the time I made it back. So were my legs and back, but it was worth it.

In any case, our camp site provided the most relaxing refuge – a place where we would sit back and watch the rising or setting sun continually change the character of all living things touched by its rays.

Therefore, the next day we planned to do some less intensive sight-seeing. So we drove out to the port town of Wyndham. The unfortunate thing for Wyndham was that we visited Kununurra first – it’s hard not to notice how dishevelled this little town is compared to the seemingly prosperous Kununurra. Not that I minded or that I was judging – hanging out at the Five Rivers Cafe and the petrol station/tourist info centre shows you quickly how much charm Wyndham has. Rather, the contrast alerted me to just how much Kununurra was not what I expected of a small remote town. Anyway, I took a walk down to the foreshore and grabbed this panorama.

Wyndham Foreshore

From there we drove up to the Five Rivers lookout just outside of town.

And then we took the King River Rd to do some exploring…

We went to Kununurra afterwards for some supplies (including new shoes for me) and then back to our camp to rest up. The next day we hit the famous Emma Gorge. Located just on the other side of the Gibb River Rd to where we were staying it was noticeable just how much more lush and tropical the landscape was here.

The great thing about the pool at Emma Falls is that tucked away just to the right of the beach behind a rocky outcrop is a small area where warm water, presumably from a nearby thermal spring, leaks through a crack in the rock face.

Later that afternoon we took a rather ordinary cruise through the Chamberlain Gorge. I say this because we paid $65 to go about 300 metres from the jetty. Sure, the guides were great – when we anchored in a beautiful spot we were able to have a great chat with them. It was especially fascinating to hear about the effect the big wet has had on the area, including almost demolishing the El Questro Homestead.

That evening Sara and I decided we were going to pack up camp and head back east. We hadn’t really planned on staying so long at El Questro, but getting the secluded bush camp site kept us there. We thought it might be good to check out Lake Argyle the next day before trying the Keep River National Park again.

And so, to top off our stay at El Questro we prepared a bush feast cooked on the camp fire: sausages with baked potatoes and damper finished off with baked chocolate bananas for dessert.

Lake Argyle was, to put it simply, odd. It was an ambivalent experience. It’s an impressive sight.

Lake Argyle and the Ord River Dam

But there was something about Lake Argyle that seemed to resonate more deeply with my darker impressions of East Kimberley. It started to occur to me as Sara briefly told me the story of how the local Indigenous population were not consulted regarding the Ord River Irrigation Scheme (ORIS) and so ended up losing important sacred sites and connection to their country.¹ Some compensation has been granted since, but it reminded me of the same eerie feeling of ‘creative destruction’ I got every time I would drive along the shores of Lake Jindabyne on the way to the Snowy Mountains.

Anyway, we spent the night at Lake Argyle without much sleep. The camp ground is perched near the edge of the cliffs at the Lake and so is open and unsheltered. When the winds picked up in the evening we were exposed and the tent was starting to buckle under the pressure. Luckily our neighbour had lent us hard ground pegs for our tent after she watched me struggle with the crappy stock pegs that came with the tent. Without them I’m sure the tent would have been lifted out of the ground.

The next morning, with me being sleepless and Sara’s knee getting sorer, we contemplated heading straight back to Darwin. During the drive along the Victoria Highway we found more energy and stopped in at Keep River National Park to pause and think about what we wanted to do.

With the Jarnem site still closed due to damage from flooding we decided to press on home. A pit stop at the hot springs in Katherine provided relief at the half way point and a shower did the rest when we got home. Tired but refreshed with fond, vibrant memories of our travels through East Kimberley washing over us as we hit our comfy beds in Darwin.

Sifting through the photos over the next couple of days, I had similarly strong recollections of the ambivalence I felt whilst at Lake Argyle. The obvious reason had to do with the injustice caused to the Miriuwung and Gajerrong peoples. But there was also something that made me feel like perhaps the whole experience in East Kimberley was a little contrived. The natural and social landscape bore so many signs of economic development that it felt less like the outback than what I’m used to in the Territory where agriculture and tourism are quite underdeveloped by comparison. Yet, there’s still an abundance of beautiful wilderness to keep you continually in awe. It’s just that the economic development of the region occasionally punctuates the scene in peculiar, jarring ways: the Emma Gorge Resort is quite a sterile place despite it’s location, the Durack Homestead was actually moved to its current location from what is now the bottom of Lake Argyle, Kununurra feels like a remote outback town on steroids with the amount of tourists and money that seems to be flowing through it from the region.

Given the prosperity in the region (at least relative to the NT), is it possible that Davidson got it wrong in the Northern Myth? Well, he didn’t foresee the resources boom that is currently propping up the whole of WA. During the live export ban, I get the impression cattle producers in the Wyndham-Kununurra area were not complaining as much as their counterparts in the NT because they were not suffering the same devaluation of their land. And that’s probably thanks to the money that the mining and resources sector keeps pumping into the local economy. So high is the confidence in the WA economy that the state government is planning more development in the region, especially through an expansion of the ORIS.

So, why the absence of such confidence in the Northern Territory? Arguably there are some natural and political considerations working against the NT – for example, less productive land combined with a lot of Aboriginal land that remains ‘economically ambiguous’. What about tourism? Kununurra was bursting at the seams in a way that would easily be comparable to Alice Springs right now – even though Kununurra has only a third of the population of Alice Springs, it seems to have a lot of infrastructure. But, I think when you look at the recent fortunes of two comparable tourist operators – Yulara and El Questro – you get a better sense of how much mining may be artificially propping up East Kimberley tourism. GPT owned both El Questro and Yulara until recently. The GFC hit them hard and so they tried to sell off assets and scale back their operations. Both Yulara and El Questro went on the market. El Questro changed hands relatively quickly whereas the sale of Yulara has been quite protracted and concerns have been raised over its commercial viability despite, I’m guessing, being more popular than El Questro. I know there’s more to it than this – questions about the relative management and marketing of each site as well as relative proximity to other tourist sites come to mind as key differences. But, I think there’s a lot more volatility in land value in the NT compared to WA and I think the mining boom is the difference.

So, is the Northern Myth still alive and well and just being perpetuated on different terms – that is, mining rather than government subsidies? The level of visible economic development in East Kimberley made me think about what lay unseen – mining. There has been a lot of transformative development in the region and I think most of it has been made possible by mining in recent times. ORIS and tourism combine as a clever synecdoche for disguising the influence of mining. Recently, geographer Lesley Head argued that key elements of the Northern Myth persist in contemporary pushes for developing the East Kimberley:

Despite a context in which consideration of both Aboriginal and environmental issues is now integrated into the development process, three colonial themes persist in the rhetoric of [ORIS] Stage Two. These are the empty landscape, the invisible Aborigine, and the idealisation of agricultural land use. When expressed together these three help to naturalise the development process as both inevitable and strategically implemented. The contradictions inherent in this process enhance existing doubts about the social and ecological sustainability of continuing attempts to ‘develop’ Australia’s north.

As much as I agree with his argument on face value, the thing he ignores about a myth is that its currency and resonance is derived from its ability to obscure certain parts of reality. Mining is not a consideration in Head’s article and this is the power of the Northern Myth today. The inevitability of ORIS Stage Two that Head speaks of has to be underpinned by more than just rhetoric. Davidson’s argument was premised on how the rhetoric in his time was used to disguise the dependence developing the north would invariably have on government subsidies. Is the Northern Myth today based on a rhetoric that obscures our dependence on mining? I can’t help but think the differing fortunes of the NT and WA lend credence to such a view.

1. See Hill, R., Miriuwung and Gajerrong peoples, Hill, D.G. and Goodson, S. (2008) Miriuwung-Gajerrong Cultural Planning Framework. MG Guidelines for developing Management Plans for Conservation Parks and Nature Reserves under the Ord Final Agreement. Endorsed by the Yoorrooyang Dawang Regional Park Council. Presented by Miriuwung and Gajerrong peoples. Perth, Kununurra and Cairns: WA Department of Environment and Conservation, Yawoorroong Miriuwung Gajerrong Yirrgeb Noong Dawang Aboriginal Corporation and CSIRO. Section 2 contains a concise summary of the history. See also Shaw’s 1981 book My Country of the Pelican Dreaming which contains the life story of Gajerrong elder Grant Ngabidj.

This first part will address the specific points raised by Nicholas Gruen and part 2 will speak to the issues discussed by Ken Parish.

Before engaging with the specifics, I want to make a couple of general remarks.¹ Whilst technology cannot define education, its prevalence does allow us to reflect on teaching and learning in a new light. This is because technologies provide powerful ways to enable and, therefore, constrain teaching and learning. But, education is more than just the activities involved in teaching and learning – it encompasses the immediate social, cultural and political environment as well as the formal institutions designed for its administration. I have to restrict my focus to the latter lest I write a whole thesis on technology and education. But, this focus is guided by a belief similar to that of Nicholas‘: that small, incremental steps within the institution better ensures the success of changes and can also act as a catalyst and impetus for further change. However, I have a different diagnosis of the situation compared to Nicholas and, therefore, a different recommendation. I think Nicholas relies too much on outsourcing and individual innovation as the agents for change. My contention is that outsourcing would only solve part of the problem and relies on the sort of centralised bureaucratic approach to change that is stifling innovation. Individual innovation is certainly a good place to start, but the efficacy for individuals to promote change in educational contexts is very limited and unlikely. After outlining my concerns against the points Nicholas raises I will briefly put forward my own case for embedding individual innovation into voluntary networks of reciprocity and exchange as a way of providing the fertile grounds for broader change.

Let me start with Nicholas’ first point:

The internet and particularly web 2.0 should be revolutionising education in so many ways.

A normative statement like this has to address the empirical reality that it presumes: that the internet and Web 2.0 technologies could be revolutionising education, but are not. This statement set the tone of the discussion I had over at Club Troppo and, unfortunately, blinded me to the interesting opinions and insights that were being offered there. Having said that, I do believe that Nicholas’ reflections as well as those of Ken Parish have not adequately addressed the reality of why Web 2.0 has not revolutionised education. I know that Nicholas believes that sometimes you have to put the solution before the problem in order to generate the impetus for reflecting on problems and opportunities for change. I agree that such a form of pragmatism is useful for exploring small-scale changes and has certain advantages over larger-scale attempts. Nevertheless, there are shortcomings with this, too because without much support, changes for the better sometimes remain localised and contained. More on these points later.

As for Nicholas’ comments about how static the curricula remains today, I’m not sure I can provide detailed comments on this because I believe it applies more to secondary rather than tertiary education. Having said this, I know that many teaching associations are joining up with professional and academic associations to find ways of improving and refreshing what is taught in the classroom within the parameters of existing curricula. For example, I know the History Teachers’ Association of NSW does a lot of work with academic historians. I also know that the Australian Sociological Association has been reaching out to secondary schools to improve their teaching of social science. I wonder how many other teaching, professional and academic bodies are working together to help improve and renew teaching in secondary schools? I also wonder how much effect the national curriculum will have an effect on the ability for secondary schools to renew and refresh their offerings? But, in a more basic sense, I wonder how much change needs to be built into curriculum development and delivery for secondary education? Does information and knowledge that is needed for students at this level really date that quickly?

But, as Nicholas rightly notes, the web is increasingly becoming a “better, lower cost way to do simple research for assignments and so on”. However, this is very different to what Nicholas then suggests: teaching kids how to use and then giving them assignments involving Web 2.0 technologies, like doing mashups on Google Maps or developing iPhone apps. There are endless online tools that could be used for teaching, but there are innumerable offline techniques as well. I’m not sure I see the value of these particular examples for any subject area other than computing science – the gap between the practical knowledge to use these tools and their potential benefits is too great to be easily overcome in a course on a different topic. The web is a wonderful space for creative self-discovery – I think it is impractical to try to teach this other than by giving students enough opportunities to be creative online. My opinion here stems from my opposition to much contemporary pedagogical philosophy: make assessable everything and anything you want your students to learn as an outcome of your course. I think this sort of approach stifles individual creativity. However, if you don’t make ‘creativity’ assessable it seems increasingly hard to justify why classroom time should be dedicated to it. And, I’m not sure how this sort of a dilemma could easily be overcome in the current environment.

The other implication of encouraging the use of the internet for research and doing assignments is that students have to be taught how to develop a sense of judgement about online sources. There are good source and bad sources online, so how do you distinguish between them? As an academic-in-training, I’m biased towards peer-reviewed material. I have to be. But, I think students should be allowed to explore other types of sources online so long as they are taking the core material offered in their course as their point of departure. At university, students are often discouraged to cite anything that is not peer-reviewed. Nevertheless, I used to encourage my students to search the web for other sources taking the course material as their point of departure for evaluating online sources. Students also need a good set of basic critical questions for evaluating research material online, like this or this or this one for non-academic types of online sources.  Are these types of critical skills taught in secondary schools? I don’t think so. Should it? Well, considering the web (beyond academic sites) is increasingly becoming a useful resource, I think it should. Along with library skills, these types of internet skills are increasingly undervalued and taken for granted in many situations.

Nicholas’ next point is worth reflecting on at length:

Teaching methods are also changing at a surprisingly slow rate.  It seems so obvious that lectures should be both taped and lavished with some serious resources so that, for instance there might be a wealth of really good lectures that people can pull down at any university, with the university’s value add being in how they engage students with each other and with tutors. This is what’s happening in the Khan academy which is only at school level, so given that one of the problems cited with doing away with live lectures is the need to motivate students, if you can motivate them in high school with videos, you should be able to do it in universities. Ultimately this could be outsourced so that one would have a few providers of lectures which were given by people who were very good at it, with resources to generate multimedia of various kinds to illustrate what was being taught and so on.

Teaching methods are changing at a surprisingly slow rate, but not because of a lack of technology. I’m willing to accept that the lack of technological innovation in teaching is a symptom of an inertia, but this is very different to saying it is the source of the problem and the target of any solution. I think the more basic assumption behind Nicholas’ position is that outsourcing content production and delivery lets teachers focus on student-centred collaborative teaching and learning. Whilst this might be theoretically more easily achieved for secondary schools given their standardised curricula, the same cannot easily be said for universities. Sure, introductory courses could probably be better served by using standardised, pre-packaged content. But higher level, specialised and advanced courses might find this model too restrictive. If you want to take your students towards the bleeding edge then this model of content delivery is unsuitable. Not because of the method of delivery (e.g. podcasts, vodcasts, screencasts, etc.), but because the knowledge and evidence being disseminated can be in flux and an academic consensus may not yet have been reached. In other words, the knowledge cannot be standardised and pre-packaged in an uncontroversial and efficient manner. However, this does not mean that a two-hour lecture and one-hour tutorial method of delivery is suitable either. In fact, seminar or laboratory formats are probably the best options here. It’s either that or you only offer students what can be standardised and pre-packaged and I think that students will lose out if this is what we accept. And this is the risk if the rationalisation of education proceeds unchallenged – technology will be used to reduce the quality of education, rather than improve it.

But taking the opportunities for changing teaching methods out of theoretical space, there are myriad reasons for why this is not already happening at a university level.

Firstly, academic culture acts as a source of friction for innovative teaching. The outsourcing of content delivery is likely to meet resistance because it is an important source for cultivating an academic reputation. It is also often frowned upon as lazy teaching. Not only is teaching increasingly an important element on one’s CV, it is an important tool for recruiting postgraduate students and for defining the discipline to a wider audience. Even academics who loathe teaching have to pay lip service to its normative influence on their reputation. And sometimes, ego and professional reputation co-mingle in ways that are terribly unhelpful for students: ideological disputes over teaching can lead to contentious topics being left out or turning into a ‘shopping list’ (i.e. every ideological viewpoint is included, but in such a superficial way as to mean nothing more than things a student needs to ‘get’) (cf. West et al 2011). The most influential aspect of academic culture revolves around the cultivation of an academic reputation, which loathes standardisation. Whilst it enables and promotes academic research, academic culture militates against undergraduate teaching where some rationalisation needs to take place.

Secondly, using standardised, pre-packaged material tends to undermine the attempts by universities to differentiate their offerings compared to other universities. Again, the most promising opportunities for outsourcing content-delivery will only likely occur in introductory courses. And this will become increasingly unlikely given the government seems to be leaning towards promoting diversification in the tertiary education sector.

Thirdly, the opportunities for academics to develop their teaching methods are presently quite limited. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that individual and institutional research profiles are valued more than teaching profiles. With the increasing commodification of university education I would say that transparent teaching profiles undermines the information asymmetry that benefits universities. Not only is research less of an institutional burden for the university than teaching, it is also more valuable to the cultivation of individual academic reputations. The university has so few resources to really dedicate to developing teaching. My impression of university IT policies is that they are inherently conservative: investments in IT are only made if there is an immediate and visible return. Most IT developments and changes that could count towards a revolution in teaching and learning at universities has to do with improving qualitiative aspects and so only has an indirect return. Furthermore, these policies typically only allow academics to use what is made available by the university, often due to privacy or IP issues. Put simply, the room for innovation is very small and can only be realised at an individual level, much like Ken Parish has done.

This brings me to my fourth point: the revolution is likely to only happen with generational change. It seems as though Nicholas expects the rate of uptake of technology in educational institutions to be roughly the same as the rate of technological change. The problem is that, like most innovation, the uses for which technology is designed are not often in existence prior to or even after its development. The innovation spawned by technology, in my opinion, occurs in two ways: 1) sometimes the development of new technologies ushers in the uses for which it was designed, and 2) sometimes technologies find a home in places for which it was not originally designed. And the technologies that are commercially viable are often dated, large-scale but proven solutions. Innovation will come if universities dedicate resources in IT departments to it. Otherwise the delay between what is proven and what is possible will remain large whilst untrained academics fumble their way through the dearth of teaching technologies in between juggling their workload. Furthermore, like any other sector with an older population, you are going to find the rate of technological uptake and innovation slower. Not because older people are incapable of grasping technological change and innovation, but because they might be slower given their relative lack of immersion in such technologies for much of their working lives. All change needs a period of gestation. And while it is going to be slow within a generation, there’s no doubt more could be done to speed it up.

The responsibility and work of teachers falls onto the shoulders of individuals, but innovation – especially its dissemination – is the product of collaboration. Some of the best technologies have failed because their development has ignored the social, cultural and political environments in which they were meant to be operating.² No technology is immune to this. Technological innovation is only one factor of many that are in need of attention if the baseline quality of teaching is to be lifted. We can’t rely on individual innovation alone. What one person does, like Ken Parish, may work for them, but until experiences, methods and approaches are shared and deliberated over, the results will either be uneven or remain localised and contained by various social, cultural and institutional boundaries. A number of universities seem to be adopting the computing science model of cultivating individual innovation, by supporting informal, voluntary ‘user groups’ for different technologies. Unless universities support avenues for sharing innovative teaching methods and collaborating on their development, individual innovations will remain exactly that and nothing more, academic cultures will never grow to more appropriately accommodate teaching and institutional reform will always be out of sync with the expectations of the community of teachers and students. What we need is the equivalent of a civil society within educational institutions.

In part 2, I want to respond to Ken Parish’s views with a focus on how Web 2.0 technologies in particular could more easily change the face of education.

1. These general remarks, as well as many of the questions raised here are informed by a paper from 2002 by Benson et al which reviews sociological studies of technology in education and summarises the set of questions sociologists ask. It’s probably a little too old and I probably lean on it a little too much, but this really isn’t an academic reflection anyway. Still, I thought I’d let people know where I’m coming from.
2. To date, I still find Bijker’s classic text on sociotechnical change to be a compelling starting point for anyone interested in broadening their understanding of the human elements of technological innovation. The case study of the bicycle is by far the most illuminating and representative of Bijker’s approach.

Coming from what looks like quite an eclectic theoretical approach, these guys have been developing a concept of augmented reality to combat the fallacious and inadequate insights offered by what they call digital dualisms – those arguments that rely on problematic assumptions about the separation of the online and offline worlds.

Recently, they published a post about some recent findings from PEW about social networking in the lives of Americans. In particular, the author, Nathan Jurgenson, wanted to highlight how the evidence in this report that at once undermined claims based on digital dualism and supported those based on the concept of augmented reality. I had originally wanted to comment on the way this research into friendship was conducted: that had its own set of problematic assumptions (e.g. equating friendship with connections and vice-versa) and how the concept of augmented friendship could and should offer a better way of exploring the changing character of friendship. To do this, though, I wanted to get a better sense of the concept from which augmented friendship was derived – augmented reality. In the end, the effort to do this took up all the spare time I wanted to dedicate to it and so I had to restrict my comments to my analysis of the theory of augmented reality without touching on friendship.

The comment I ended up leaving on Cyborgology was long and perhaps not so clear, so I offer a brief explanation here followed by a copy of the comment I left on Cyborgology.

UPDATE: It seems someone has anticipated part of my own analysis and Nathan Jurgenson has already offered his own response here.

The guys over at Cyborgology seem to have expended some time and effort to combat theoretical formulations that do not adequately account for the interactions between and enmeshment of the offline and online worlds. What they take exception to are those people who uphold too rigid a distinction between these social spaces. Instead they offer the concept of augmented reality as a way of sensitising us to the fact “that digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other.” The first question I often think of when theorists offer dialectical explanations or formulations is: how well do they presume that which they wish to refute? So, following this question, I wanted to explore some of the details of how these realities are dialectically co-constructed by offering some more theoretical flesh to what this might mean. Specifically, I wanted to offer some clarification about how they have presumed (or could presume) digital dualism without the fallacy and how this provides a theoretically more superior explanation than any form of digital dualism could offer.

Anyway, here’s a copy of the comment I left on their blog:

I’d like to share some lengthy thoughts about the question of putting digital dualism to bed. I’ve read a few posts on this blog and it has sparked my interest, albeit one from beyond this research area.

I’m not sure you can put digital dualism to bed – at least, not without significant cost to the explanatory value of your theory. I agree with the sketches I have read here about your concept of augmented reality, but elements of dualism will always creep in through the back door.

Why? Let me explore this by taking up one possible thread of what the concept of augmented reality seems to already imply: the contradictory, yet co-determining relationship between compartmentalisation and de-compartmentalisation.

Starting with Weber’s classic formulation, compartmentalisation has had a long life in social theory expanding into different areas of social analysis like identity and relationships, but still retaining its analytical value by referring to distinct social logics that are validated against people’s experiences. However, as a lot of social research into technology (especially) has shown, the compartmentalisation of social life is increasingly  and/or changing. Moreover, as a concept like augmented reality reminds us, the material and symbolic boundaries that have sustained these compartments are disappearing or becoming increasingly porous. The enmeshment of previously distinct social logics this implies does not, however, mean that they are subsumed, assimilated, integrated, etc. to the point of identity under one overarching logic or dispersed into chaos. Hence, why I refer to de-compartmentalisation as the contradictory yet co-determined parallel to compartmentalisation. The point is that, empirically speaking, compartmentalisation continues but is becoming more plural and diffuse because of the forms of de-compartmentalisation occurring through, for example, technology.

The PEW data you cite here, bears this out: the compartmentalisation of relationships (either online or offline) “contradictorily” coexists with de-compartmentalisation (both online and offline). I put “contradictorily” in quotes because I wanted to question the reference point of this in the conceptual notion of augmented reality. I put it to you that the conceptual notion of augmented reality partly depends on a version of digital dualism (e.g. as captured by my brief discussion of compartmentalisation/de-compartmentalisation), otherwise there would be no need to speak of a dialectical or contradictory coexistence of different phenomena.

I imagine a number of people who accept what I’m saying may also use this to be critical of the concept of augmented reality – how can you build a theory that relies on the very thing it seeks to refute? If compartmentalisation is the empirical and normative point of reference for the fallacy of digital dualism, doesn’t this expose the concept of augmented reality (as I have adopted it here) to the same fallacy? Not if we take up the other meaning of dialectical, put simply on the following formula: thesis + anti-thesis = synthesis. The concept of augmented reality realises that two seemingly opposed logics can be the basis of new experiences, relationships and phenomena as much as they can be the basis of tensions and conflicts over existing ones. Following my example, the concept of augmented reality asks us to realise that neither compartmentalisation or de-compartmentalisation alone offer persuasive theoretical accounts of the range of phenomena and experience in question. But, a dialectical approach asks us to loosen the totalising, absolute and monopolistic reach of the concepts in question. Not only does the modernist formulation of compartmentalisation lose this character by introducing its opposing logic, but we prevent the opposing logic from taking on a totalising, absolute and monopolistic character of its own by defining it against and with its opposite. Hence, the concept of augmented reality asks us to reach for something like de-compartmentalisation, rather than, say, integration or assimilation.

What are the benefits here? I see, for one, that the conceptual notion of augmented reality is leading us away from the type of theoretical overreach that actually tends to obscure reality instead of making it more perceptible. It also avoids the type of conflations between the empirical and the normative that usually accompany claims of digital dualisms – i.e. real friends are the one’s we have in real life. It avoids the sometimes comforting and other times oppressive certainty of over-simplification.

At the same time, I’m not sure I agree with everything that this concept, as it stands, currently represents. I don’t have the time or the knowledge to adequately comment on it now, but I’m sure other readers and possibly the author of this post will pick up my own position through my theoretical analysis. There is a dearth of criticisms of dialectical approaches to theory building that I agree with some opponents of this type of theorising that it may not have obvious practical purposes. But, then, I’m not of the belief that all theory must have practical intents and purposes. Good theory offers us a vocabulary for those things in our world that currently lack one. I’m hopeful of what the concept of augmented reality has to offer.

But, to come back to my original point. I don’t believe the answer to battling the fallacy of digital dualism lies in finding the evidence to prove the theory. Firstly, the evidence is likely to be ambivalent enough to offer ammunition to your opponents. Hence, you need to distinguish between the empirical evidence partly validating digital dualism, whilst refuting its theoretical manoeuvres to thoroughly assimilate or deny that which it can’t explain. In other words, I think it’s worthwhile distinguishing between digital dualism and the fallacy of digital dualism. Thus, I believe the argument against the fallacy of digital dualism has to be carried out on theoretical terms by making more explicit the assumptions involved in and by refining key aspects of the internal logic of the concept of augmented reality. Exposing the theoretical weaknesses of the fallacy of digital dualism should be used as the basis for adding theoretical strength to the concept of augmented reality, not by rejecting it in toto but acknowledging and incorporating those elements it refers to that are empirically valid and theoretically sound. I think this is already implied, it just needs more work.

P.S. Forgive me if I’ve misunderstood any work being published here – this is not my research area, but social theory is and I do have a personal interest in technology. Plus, I’m not a regular reader.

I should probably point out that there are two influences running through my response here. Firstly, my very, very limited knowledge of Andrew Feenberg’s approach, but especially his notion of democratising technology is for me an important normative point of reference because it asks us to seek out the contours and sources of agency. Secondly, the book Detraditionalization has always been for me a rich intellectual guide for thinking through and past competing theoretical approaches in a productive way.

• The internal storage on my phone continually runs out of space
• Limited app installations
• Battery life sucks
• Some software bugs
• Buggy volume buttons

There are also a number of features that compare poorly to the iPhone – comparisons that are inevitable given how much I enjoyed the iPhone.

But, in the end, my HTC Desire and Android performs really comparable well to the iPhone on a number of fronts. And there are some unique features which are starting to appeal to me as ‘must have’. Sure, Android has taken me some effort to get used to, but it’s been worth it. See my detailed overview of problems, workarounds and highlights over the fold…

The internal storage on my phone continually runs out of space

My HTC Desire came with only 512MB of internal storage. Like many HTC Desire users out there (see here and here) I have quickly run out of space after installing a number of apps. The first and best way of dealing with this in a standard way is to move the application from being installed on internal storage to being installed on your SD card. But, not all apps allow you to do this – application developers can remove this option if they so wish. Moreover, if your app comes with widgets that you use then these apps cannot be installed on the SD card unless you are happy to stop using these widgets. From what I can find on the web, this is because Android does not mount the SD card early enough in the boot process to load widgets from apps installed on the SD card. In other words, it’s a constraint of the operating system that you can do nothing about. The second and more extreme technique is to clear the cache and data your apps store. Clearing the cache might help with freeing up memory, but it often slows down the performance of apps. Clearing the data gets rid of all data stored by the app. But this becomes a pain since this particular function on Froyo is a fairly blunt instrument because it includes all current settings, like login details. It’s like continually re-installing the app on your phone. Every app works executes these functions differently, so there’s no way to really judge this. Plus, some apps have disabled the ability for users to clear their data. In the end, it’s a poor option anyway. The third and most extreme option is to continually clean up your messages – that is, mail, SMS and MMS messages. There are settings that set up some automatic deleting, but I just think it’s appalling that so much effort has to go into managing space on a smartphone, especially when there is an SD card that is usually pretty free. It feels like the late 1990s.

Limited app installations

Because of the OS limitations described above and because not all apps are developed so that they can be installed on your SD card, you end up reaching a limit to how many apps you can install on your phone. I have 39 apps installed. Two of them are very useful utilities that help me to manage the limitations of my phone (Norton Mobile Utilities and Advanced Task Killer). Ironically, they can’t be installed on the SD card and so take up valuable space on the phone’s internal storage. Three apps are updates to system applications (i.e. applications that came with the phone): Facebook, Maps, GMail. Two of them are replacements for system apps: Twitter and Business Calendar Free. These five apps I just mentioned do not actually replace the pre-existing system apps, but must be installed in addition to them: you cannot uninstall any system apps. So Friendstream, Footprints, Peep, Facebook for HTC, etc. must stay installed on my phone taking up precious internal storage even though I don’t use them. This means you have to be really meticulous about which apps you choose to install and, most probably like me, you will have to make some compromises. For example, I have opted to stick with the default mail client since it has quite a small footprint even though I don’t particularly find it to be that great.

Battery life sucks

I can barely get a day out of my phone with normal usage. Luckily I spend most of my day stuck in front of a computer and so I can always be charging my phone via USB. But, whenever that’s not the case I need to deploy my strategy for reducing battery usage. In order of priority, here’s my contingency plan to preserve battery life:

1. Regularly kill running apps. Once an app is started it stays resident in memory and some apps also perform background operations. It is especially unnecessary for those apps that do not perform any background operations (usually syncing) to remain resident in memory, for even this takes up battery life. But, unless you want to make your way to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications and then manually kill each app, then you’ll need a utility that does this more efficiently. I use two apps for this that have a one-click ability to automatically kill running apps: Advanced Task Killer and Norton Mobile Utilities. I use Application Task Killer when there’s still a fair amount of battery life, because you can set up a list of apps that are quarantined from automatic killing. I use Norton Mobile Utilities when things are more desperate and I need every app that can be killed to be killed. Both apps provide widgets to conveniently allow you to do this in a single click.
2. Turn off GPS-based location services. Not a massive inconvenience for me since I don’t use a lot of location-based services.
3. Turn off Wifi. I do this especially if I don’t need it for internet. Otherwise, it’s one of the last options.
4. Dim the screen brightness. But, in sunny Darwin, this can result in a completely blacked out screen outdoors. Rather than going through the several screens of settings to do this, I use the settings widget. But, the brightness function does not offer fine-grain control – you only have the choice of bright, very bright or very dark. Either way, it’s a pain.
5. Turn off syncing services. I’ve had to resort to this a couple of times now. The problem is that syncing your phone with data in the cloud is quite possibly the most significant and unique feature of Android phones. Turning off sync means turning your phone into a generic smartphone.

This strategy is pretty helpful. But what’s annoying is that I am forced to even have a strategy. I know that the HTC Desire does not have the best performing battery of Android phones on the market, but it reflects a common complaint about many, if not most, Android phones. In the end, my phone doesn’t feel so smart because it needs a lot of attention and thinking from me.

Some software bugs

Because of the wildly different hardware platforms supported by Android, it seems that some apps struggle to work consistently. Many apps have caveats regarding which phones they work on. Some apps don’t even tell you and so you find out the hard way. I’m especially annoyed that the Amazon Kindle app does not seem to be syncing properly.

But what is most frustrating are the couple of small but niggling system software problems. For example, Peep, the HTC Twitter client, does not allow me to login. This meant I could rule out using Friendstream, which annoyed me because it is the only app that integrates feeds from different social media sites into one timeline. Anyway, many people have had this complaint and there seems to be some convoluted methods for getting around the issue. Believe me, it’s easier to just download a Peep replacement. Also, some apps seem less responsive to touches and gestures than others. Some of them are games, but a couple are apps. Then again, this could be poor application design or it could actually be my phone’s performance given I have not seen other similar complaints about these games and apps. A final example: the Settings > Applications screens often stop responding to touches. It’s more like this settings app freezes – not do touches go unrecognised, but the lists of applications in these screens stop being populated. Most of the time exiting settings and re-entering them solves the problem. Once, however, I had to reboot the phone.

Buggy volume buttons

Much like the iPhone, the HTC Desire has context-sensitive volume buttons – the volume button controls the volume for whatever app/function you are currently in. If you are listening to music, the volume buttons control the volume of the music; if you are on a call, it controls the volume of the call; etc.. Some programs also allow you to program different functions for the volume buttons, like controlling scrolling instead of volume if you are in Google Reader. But the context-sensitivity of the volume buttons can sometimes get really buggy. In many games, it takes a couple of pushes of the volume button before you start controlling the media volume instead of the ringtone volume. Same with listening to music.

These are the more serious complaints that I think exist independently of the fact that I was an Apple iPhone user. Having said that, I can’t help but feel like my HTC Desire is in the same slightly buggy stage of evolution as a 1st generation iPhone, rather than being a 2nd or 3rd generation Android phone.

I should probably also point out that ‘rooting‘ the phone (hacking the phone to give yourself root access on the OS) can help to fix some of these problems, like freeing up internal storage by moving system apps to the SD card.

The following are things that I’ve found frustrating because of habits I’ve developed on the iPhone or because I think the iPhone just does it better:

No decent social media apps

Sure, there’s TweetDeck and Seesmic, but I’ve never really liked these apps because they offer an integrated social media experience at the cost of limiting access to specific features of the social networking sites you connect to. Yoono is the best integrated social media app out there. Unfortunately, you can only get it as a desktop app, a Firefox plugin or as an iPhone app. Nothing yet for Android and they do not seem to be in much of a rush. I’ve got Seesmic installed because it provides me with the nicest way of updating Twitter and FB simultaneously. But I actually use the FB and Twitter apps for checking in. Until Yoono or something similar is developed for Android I’m going to consider it inferior for social media.

Convoluted system settings

Sometimes, changing one thing requires modifying more than one setting. For example, there are a couple of places you need to go to turn off keyboard feedback.

There are too many levels of settings. Sure, there are only a small set of intuitive categories of settings on the main screen, but after that you often have to drill down up to an additional 3 levels of menus to get to the settings you want. The way Apple iOS flattens out the hierarchy of settings is, for me, much more preferable and simple.

Voicemail messages do not get threaded

Call me pedantic, but I find it annoying that none of the SMS voicemail alerts I receive end up being organised under the one thread. They all appear to come from the same number since it always comes up as ‘Voicemail’, so why don’t these messages get threaded?

Favourite contacts cannot be sorted

There’s a cool widget that provides quick dial functionality for any contact you place in the ‘Favorites’ group. However, you cannot set the order in which those contacts appear in the group or on the widget. By default it sorts contacts alphabetically by their display name.

But there are many Android/HTC features that have me salivating and starting to feel like I can’t do without:

• The syncing services to the cloud work really well and seamlessly on most apps, especially if the ‘cloud’ is Google.
• Impressive range of personalisation and customisation features and apps: I’m using Go Launcher EX but there are others out there.
• A great default mobile browser: not simply because it provides Flash support, but because they’ve done a great job providing a really intuitive set of gestures for controlling the viewport.
• A really powerful, yet simple address book: the address book, People, automatically links contacts from different accounts and social networking sites. Having said this, if you do not like the way People organises your contacts there are limited ways of customising its behaviour.
• Despite not having the best camera, the default app for taking photos and videos is feature-packed and easy to use.
• Widgets! Need I say more? I will anyway. These things really allow you to pack your home screens with lots of ways to conveniently access often used features and information.
• Unlimited home screens and circular navigation: not only can you go crazy with widgets, apps and shortcuts on your phone, but once you reach the end of your home screens, you can just continue to scroll and it will wrap around to the first one.
• Scrollable dock (GO Launcher EX): a neat way to have an expanded number of items on your dock.
• An intuitive back button: Every time you tap through to a new app and/or screen, the back button will actually take you back through that same sequence across apps and/or screens until you reach your home screen again. For example, when I first launched Google Navigation, it asked me to install a TTS plugin for voice-activated navigation. After I did tapped OK, I was taken to Android Marketplace where I started the installation of the plugin. When I hit the back button I was taken straight back to Navigation. Neat!
• A pretty decent range of apps available: Most iOS apps (or clones) available for Android now.
• Google Navigation is one of the best navigation apps going around: turn-by-turn, different views, really responsive and uses the already familiar Google Maps and its engine…all of this for free!

There’s a lot to love about the HTC Desire and Android – it’s a pretty good phone for a pretty good price and it’s based on a platform that is continually evolving in the right direction. I think it lacks the slickness of Apple’s iPhone and iOS – they really set high standards when it comes to releasing a product that works like it says it will (OK, except for that pretty sizeable antenna snafu with the iPhone 4). With my HTC Desire and Android I feel, in some ways, like I’ve gone back to the unnecessary complexity of Windows which tries to hide its flaws behind a deceptively pretty and simple interface (e.g. Windows 7). I think I need the time to adjust after so deeply becoming an iPhone user. But Android are doing plenty to convince me its worth the effort and the patience.

My aim was to correct Chandler’s interpretation of the collective protective factors against suicide (i.e. culture) in order to account for the fuller implications of any political measures that could be based on them. By opening up Chandler’s study to the possibility that a measure of cultural change is implied in his markers of cultural continuity, I also wanted to recognise the difficult adjustments Indigenous communities have had to make in order to sustain some semblance of their way of life that is their right. In other words, as much as we seek to support cultural continuity, we need to be aware of any consequential cultural changes this implies. My point is that cultural preservation and rehabilitation in response to a rapidly changing and possibly threatening post-colonial context tends to involve some change in social organisation for which there are ‘cultural implications’ (i.e. some form of cultural change). So, I raised the question of whether or not cultural continuity is inherently valuable as a protective factor against suicidal behaviour. Instead I was suggesting that maybe it’s the type of social change and the quality of cultural adjustment this implies that is most important. What I’m afraid of is the argument that because Indigenous peoples are adaptable (and mostly quite adept at it), then they should adapt. This is quite contrary to the sorts of political implications I was thinking of and deserve some explanation.

Chandler’s study implies that the form of social change described as self-determination appears to support a certain quality of cultural continuity that acts as a protective factor against suicidal behaviour. Just because low levels of self-determination are present in a community does not necessarily mean that a certain form of cultural continuity is not observable. I say this because culture is not intrinsically dependent on self-determination, but self-determination can provide some defence against cultural disintegration.¹ Methodologically speaking, rather than treating self-determination as though it automatically implies cultural continuity, it needs to be treated as an assumption to be tested. In other words, I think there’s better and worse versions of self-determination on the ground, but the principle of self-determination is politically and morally valid. So, I think Chandler’s study is only a starting point for a more qualitative model of research. Again, I believe that we can assume that cultural continuity plays a role in moderating suicide, but this entails a qualitative measurement that Chandler’s study can only at best imply.

UPDATE: I finally found an Australian who questions the interpretation of Chandler and Lalonde’s measures as I have:

However, the measures used (selfgovernment, land claims, health services, cultural facilities and police and fire services) are also powerful indicators of local social and political control. It may be the interaction of disruption/ discontinuity with lack/denial of control or autonomous action that is particularly invidious and more important than the simple presence or absence of cultural identification (Hunter and Harvey, 2002: 16).

Hunter, E. and D. Harvey (2002). “Indigenous suicide in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.” Emergency Medicine 14(1): 14-23.

1. Read anything at all by Will Kymicka (or the secondary literature) and you will get the sense that this is his description of existing minority rights as well as his defence oftheir necessary extension – not for cultural preservation, but as protection against cultural deterioration.