Bottomfeeder

James Fallows talks about Andrew Sullivan and the “ecology of news” on OTM.  Here’s the blurb:

This month saw the launch of a multimillion dollar ad campaign meant to sink President Obama’s as yet unannounced health care plan. James Fallows covered the first round in the fight over health care in 1994. He says the 1994 plan failed in large part because of a single wildly inaccurate magazine article.

[Official White House Photo by Pete Souza]

President Barack Obama reacts to seeing speechwriter Cody Keenan outside the Oval Office on May 8, 2009. Keenan dressed up as a pirate for an Oval Office photo shot for use in the President’s speech to the White House Correspondents Association dinner May 9, 2009.

This official White House photograph is being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way or used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Esperanza Spalding started off an evening of performances at the East Room of the White House on May 12, 2009. [Photo by Ozier Muhammad/NYT]

Rachel L. Swarns reports in The Caucus Blog - NYT 051309:

The candles flickered, the bassist strummed and, one by one, the writers and poets seized their moments in front of the microphone.

James Earl Jones served up Othello, his sonorous voice rumbling through the East Room. Mayda del Valle, a poet from Chicago, conjured her grandmother from Puerto Rico. Joshua Brandon Bennett, a poet from Yonkers, N.Y., delivered an ode to his deaf sister, his fingers flying as he translated his words into signs.

It was Tuesday night, time for the White House poetry jam. A pony-tailed disc jockey hovered over a pair of turntables in the hallway, guests sipped white wine and President Obama and his wife, Michelle, celebrated the power of the spoken word.

“We’re here to celebrate the power of words and music to help us appreciate beauty and also to understand pain,’’ Mr. Obama told the crowd.

Mrs. Obama urged her guests to “enjoy, have fun and be loose” as they absorbed performances from Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Jewish and African American writers in an event intended to showcase the diversity of American talent.

The crowd, which included the director Spike Lee and the television broadcaster George Stephanopoulos, among others, enjoyed the music of the pianist Eric Lewis and the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding along with the writers. And while the poetry jam may well have been the hippest performance staged by the Obamas in the White House, it was just one of a series of events they have put on to celebrate the arts.

Since January, the Obamas have played host to bagpipe and mariachi bands, Irish fiddlers and poets, pop stars and jazz singers. Performers have included Stevie Wonder and Earth Wind and Fire, Tony Bennett and Fergie, the singer from the Black Eyed Peas.

Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet from Northern Ireland, has recited his verses. The rocker Sheryl Crow and the rhythm and blues singer Alicia Keys have entertained cheering crowds in the East Room.

“Our goal really is to bring the house alive,’’ said Desiree Rogers, the White House social secretary. “We’re all American, but all of us come from different backgrounds. We want to expose Americans to other Americans that are doing brilliant work.’’

Laura Bush, the former first lady, also brought writers to the White House to highlight the works of Langston Hughes, Mark Twain and the women writers of the West and others. (Mrs. Bush was forced to cancel her poetry symposium in 2003, however, when it became clear that several participants planned to protest the war in Iraq.)

It is probably safe to say that Tuesday’s event may well have been the first White House poetry jam, the fast-paced presentation of spoken verse that has become popular among young people in cities across the country. (This should not be confused with a poetry slam, which is a poetry competition.)

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, a young Hawaiian poet, talked about the struggles of finding her own identity, of living in her own skin. Lin Manuel Miranda, the creator of the Tony-Award winning Broadway musical, “In the Heights” rapped his way across the stage.

The writers, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, who are husband and wife, described how words break down barriers.

Ms. del Valle, the 30-year-old poet from Chicago, said she never dreamed that she would be invited to perform in the White House.

“To be able to go in the White House and to represent my grandmother and my ancestors, it really means a lot,” she said. “It’s a
generation of women that don’t often get heard, you know, these old Puerto Rican women that no one ever really thinks about. To be able to use my voice to represent them on this kind of platform is really powerful.”

[Source: Google Images/Henry Jenkins]

Steve Daly writes about this conflation of heroes in We’re All Trekkies Now | Print Article | Newsweek.com 050409:

It’s the Spock plot strands that give the new “Trek” its best shot at once again commanding the zeitgeist. Spock’s cool, analytical nature feels more fascinating and topical than ever now that we’ve put a sort of Vulcan in the White House. All through the election campaign, columnists compared President Obama’s unflappably logical demeanor and prominent ears with Mr. Spock’s. But as Spock’s complicated racial backstory is spun out in detail in the new “Trek”—right back into childhood—the Obama parallels keep deepening. Like Obama, Spock is the product of a mixed marriage (actually, an interstellar mixed marriage), and he suffers blunt manifestations of prejudice as a result. As played by Zachary Quinto, the young Spock loves his human mother, but longs to assimilate completely into his Vulcan father Sarek’s ways, eschewing messy emotions the way all Vulcans do. Young Spock is constantly being told by Vulcans and humans alike that he’s either seething with inappropriate emotions—indeed, he takes Kirk by the throat at one point—or that he’s not emotional enough and shouldn’t be so repressed. Obama may or may not be a fan—the White House says he isn’t, but Trekkies have claimed him as one of their breed ever since he said, “I grew up on ‘Star Trek’—I believe in the final frontier,” at a campaign stop last year. If he does check out the new movie, I can imagine he might feel a special empathy for Spock’s position, given the chattering class’s insistence that he needs to show more emotion, too.

Henry Jenkins writes in Confessions of an Aca/Fan: “Geeking Out” For Democracy (Part Two) 050409:

The Obama campaign was able to create an ongoing relationship with these new voters, connecting across every available media platform. Log onto YouTube and Obama was there in political advertisements, news clips, comedy sketches, and music videos, some created by the campaign, some generated by his supporters. Pick up your mobile phone and Obama was there with text messages updating young voters daily. Go to Facebook and Obama was there, creating multiple ways for voters to affiliate with the campaign and each other. Pick up a video game controller and Obama was there, taking out advertisement space inside several popular games. Turn on your Tivo to watch a late night comedy news show and Obama and his people are there, recognizing that The Daily Show or Colbert are the places where young people go to learn more about current events. This new approach to politics came naturally to a candidate who has fought to be able to use his Blackberry and text-messaging as he enters the White House, who regularly listens to his iPod, who knows how to give a Vulcan salute, brags about reading Harry Potter books to his daughters, and who casually talks about catching up on news online. The Obama campaign asked young people to participate, gave them chances to express themselves, enabled them to connect with each other, and allowed them to feel some sense of emotional ownership over the political process.

What has all of this to do with schools? Alas, frequently, very little.

Let’s imagine a learning ecology in which the youth acquires new information through all available channels and through every social encounter. The child learns through schools and after school programs; the child learns on their own through the home and family and through their social interactions with their peers. They learn through face to face encounters and through online communities. They learn through work and they learn through play. The skills they acquire through one space helps them master core content in another. Through the New Media Literacy project, we have been developing resources which can be deployed in the classroom, in afterschool programs, and in the home for self-learning, seeking a more integrated perspective on what it means to learn in a networked society. Yet, right now, most of our schools are closing their gates to those cultural practices and forms of informal learning that young people value outside the classroom and in the process, they may be abdicating their historic roles in fostering civic engagement.

… many young people, as the Digital Youth Project discovered, work around these restrictions (and in the process, find one more reason to disobey the adults in their lives). Yet, many other young people have no opportunities to engage with these virtual worlds, to enter these social networks, on their own. These school policies have amplified the already serious participation gap that separates information-haves and have-nots. Those students who have the richest online lives are being stripped of their best modes of learning as they pass into the schoolhouse and those who have limited experiences outside of classroom hours are being left further behind. And all of them are being told two things: that what they do in their online lives has nothing to do with the things they are learning in school; and that what they are learning in school has little or nothing of value to contribute to who they are once the bell rings.

This article was written for Threshold Magazine’s special issue on “Learning in a Participatory Culture.” Read more about Project New Media Literacies.