A couple of years ago, my CWRL project group set out to determine how Second Life could be used in the rhetoric classroom. Starting with the tool, we tried to imagine an assignment that would fit--somehow--into our curriculum. Only one person in the group tried the assignment we developed. It was irrelevant to the rest of our courses.

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Two current debates about generations and what they mean. First, Siva Vaidhyanathan’s recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, expressing skepticism about the concept of Digital Natives.

Gomez writes. “For this generation — which Googles rather than going to the library — print seems expensive, a bore, and a waste of time.” When I read that, I shuddered. I shook my head. I rolled my eyes. And I sighed. I have been hearing some version of the “kids today” or “this generation believes” argument for more than a dozen years of studying and teaching about digital culture and technology. … Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can’t deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. … almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life. College students in America are not as “digital” as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won’t read books are just not true.

Second, Matt Yglesias on whether it’s important that the kids love Obama.

I used to sometimes think that the relatively left-wing views of the under-30 generation were basically just a reflection of the fact that the under-30 cohort contains many fewer non-hispanic whites than does the over-30 cohort. This new report from Amanda Logan and David Madlan makes it clear that’s not right — young whites have substantially more progressive views on a whole range of key issues than do older whites … if you hunt down a copy of the current issue of The Atlantic you should find … a piece by yours truly observing that the present day conservative coalition seems to mostly be stuck with the shrinking slices of the demographic pie. This data shows us one of the major driving factors behind that.

I’m quite skeptical about the ‘digital generation’/’digital natives’ argument. First, I’m skeptical because of the reasons that Siva outlines. Second, I’m skeptical because I and my contemporaries were supposedly members of ‘Generation X,’ a purported cohort which seemed to have been whistled out of a gaseous combination of bad sociology, mediocre novels and marketing concepts, and which certainly had nothing that I could identify as relevant to my own life experience.

I’m also uncertain as to whether Matt is right in suggesting that young voters’ identification with Obama is necessarily evidence of a secular shift. Political scientists who study party identification often try to distinguish between cohort effects, age effects, and period effects – this short paper by Andrew Gelman is a good introduction. In Gelman’s words:

If we were to make a graph, similar to Figure 1, but based on data from 2002, would the red and blue lines simply be shifted four years to the left, so that the party identification of 40-year-olds in 2006 matches that of the 36-year-olds in 2002? If such a pattern happened consistently over time, this would support the hypothesis of a cohort effect.

Another possibility that could be revealed by additional data is an age effect: Suppose that the equivalent to Figure 1, constructed four or eight or twelve years earlier, looked identical to the 2006 pattern with no age shift. Then we would be inclined to believe that party identification is associated with age, rather than cohort, with new voters starting out as strong Democrats, moving toward the Republican Party in their middle age, and then moving back to the Demcorats. It would not be difficult to construct a story consistent with this pattern (were it to in fact appear in the data), possibly associated with life-course changes involving marriage, children, and participation in the workforce.

Finally, the 2006 pattern may be part of a period effect. Figure 1 shows, overall, a strong Democratic advantage, but these polls were taken during a period when the Republicans have been on the defensive. Did the Democrats have such an advantage five or ten years ago? Maybe not. In this particular example, we are less interested in period effects—our primary goal here is to understand the big difference between today’s young and middle-aged voters—but we certainly have to be aware of the possibility of period effects, if only to adjust for them in estimating age and cohort effects.

The point is as follows: what Matt (and others) are suggesting is that there is an important cohort effect – because young people are in a cohort that is disproportionately attracted to Obama, they are likely to start to identify as Democrats, and perhaps to continue to do so over their lifetimes, to the continued disadvantage of the Republican party. This is a plausible argument, and one that is quite compatible with Bayesian models of party ID formation, which seem to me at least to be intuitively attractive. But it isn’t one that we know to be correct and there is no very good way to disentangle these various effects from each other. High levels of Democratic identification among young people may also be the result of age effects (perhaps they will get crankier and more conservative as they get older) or period effects (this is clearly a terrible moment for the GOP). Disentangling these three effects is (as best as I understand the literature) damn near impossible given the kinds of data we have, and even tentative efforts to disentangle these relations require both lots of good longitudinal data and high powered statistical analysis. So perhaps there will be a long term generational shift towards the Democratic party – but only perhaps.

I think this deserves a caption. Any ideas?

"Wars, horrendous wars,/and the Tiber foaming with tides of blood, I see it all!" (Virgil, Aeneid VI) Read, and weep.

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Having a debate-watching party? 

Follow along with any of the FOUR McLiar Bingo cards created by John Sellers and Andrew Boyd of Agit-Pop Communications.

From Card 2:

“Obama “pals around with terrorists.” ACTUALLY: Obama was 8 when radical Bill Ayers planted bombs to protest Vietnam. Now a professor, he & Obama volunteer for the same charity. (CNN FactChecker)

From Card 1: “Obama wants to teach sex ed to kindergartners.” ACTUALLY: The bill Obama voted for in the Illinois Legislature helps protect children from sexual predators. (factcheck.org)”

You get the picture.

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Founded by Robert Greenwald, the creator of Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price, Brave New Films has become a powerhouse in the world of viral video.

Greenwald’s latest series of political microdocs, The Real McCain, have racked up millions of views on his YouTube channel and the Brave New Films homepage. The popularity has something to do with Greenwald’s decision to step out of the way and let McCain indict himself in his own words, such as “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

Attention Lambda Pi Eta and Sigma Chi Eta members!
As part of Free Speech Week (October 20-26 -- for more information check out: www.freespeechweek.org), NCA is sponsoring an essay contest. Participants must be current undergraduate LPH or SCH members. The winner will receive $100 and the winning essay will be printed in Spectra. The essay topic is outlined below and is due by noon on Monday, October 20, 2008. Submissions should be in emailed to bmello@natcom.org in word format.

Free Speech Week Essay Topic:

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