A Hazy Story of Disciplined Citizens in a Technological Society

The PSI is at 170 today*.

Do you know what that means? What is a PSI? What does the number 170 imply? According to Wikipedia:

“The Pollutant Standards Index, or PSI, provides a uniform system of measuring pollution levels for the major air pollutants. It is based on a scale devised by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) to provide a way for broadcasts and newspapers to report air quality on a daily basis.

The PSI is reported as a number on a scale of 0 to 500 and is the air quality indicator. These index figures enable the public to determine whether the air pollution levels in a particular location are good, unhealthy, hazardous or worse. The PSI is used in a number of countries including the United States and Singapore. However, since 1999, the United States EPA has replaced the Pollution Standards Index (PSI) with the Air Quality Index (AQI) to incorporate new PM2.5 and ozone standards.”

I’m not sure how many people have actually tried to find out how the PSI is calculated. But by now, everyone knows that 170 is not good. How do they know this? Among other things, the National Environment Agency website provides updates every few hours and these are reported across various news outlets and other sources trying not to look like news outlets. Why does the number matter? If you look at the NEA website, there are guidelines provided for the public based on the readings:

 

These descriptors group the readings such that each range of readings cumulatively means a new level of danger is reached, an additional segment of the population is deemed vulnerable, and more precautions need to be taken. For example:

But the NEA is not the only source of information related to the haze that Singapore is now experiencing, its dangers and how to cope with it. This infographic by the Singapore General Hospital educates the public about how the haze is harmful:

And numerous posts circulating on social media sites suggest ways to counter the effects of the haze, such as wearing a mask and staying hydrated. The PSI is chanted like a mantra, and in typical efficient Singaporean fashion, schools and many offices heed the warnings. Less lucky are those who for various reasons are compelled to be outdoors. The haze is dangerous, but apparently not yet so dangerous that the economy comes to a standstill.

In his book, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age,Toby Miller uses two broad examples – food and weather – to show how the media, state and corporations have been complicit in turning what could be sites of citizen information and engagement into trivialised consumer moments that keep people in a state of ignorance and narrow-mindedness. Thus the Food Network, for example, turns food preparation into a visual spectacle that covers the number of labour hours that go into it, the inequalities and injustices that are built into it, and the vehicle that it has become for turning people into the sorts of consumerist citizens that most effectively support the neoliberal project. Miller suggests ways in which the Food Network might break out of this negative social role, by addressing issues such as genetically modified products, the effect of industrial models of food production on the Global South, the impact of fast food on national health, both physical as well as psychological, human rights violations of American food corporations in third world countries and even non-food issues such capital punishment using food as a link. In short, food can and should be politicised in order to activate cultural citizenship at its higher levels. Or rather, it is already being politicised, but in a way that is kept hidden from citizens. Miller advocates making the politicisation visible and reorienting it towards more responsible referents.

The Weather Channel is similarly explained as a site for hidden political projects that must be revealed and reframed for the purpose of informing and engaging citizens. Here Miller describes how weather updates are used to discipline citizens: “The time discipline inscribed by weather organizes key social institutions and their personnel around risk, in keeping with cultural citizenship. The message reads – get to work on time by allowing for nature, so that the sale of your labor power is not interrupted; dress your children appropriately, so that they can turn up and obey the dictates of school as preparation for work; plan your renovation to allow for climatic variations and safety costs.” Yet there are larger issues that citizens deserve to be activated to consider, such as the link between daily and local weather patterns on the one hand, and global warming and climate change on the other. Miller argues that the Weather Channel is perfectly placed to raise the level of weather presentations by turning them into real sources of information at higher levels that allow citizens to make connections and take action.

Miller is perhaps optimistic in his assumption that the conditions are in place for citizens to make politically constructive use of this higher level information once they are given access to it. He may have been talking about a society with a longer history of democracy, but if we accept Chantal Mouffe’s argument about the closing of political space effected by the spread of liberal democracy, then there is little difference now across countries with varying political histories.

The PSI functions as a mechanism that turns the haze – something we cannot control at an individual level – into a set of descriptors and measures that we can calibrate a response to. It disciplines us into internalizing not only a sense of pervasive danger that we are helpless against, but also a sense of individual responsibility to care for the self. Both these disciplinary effects have consequences for our ability to imagine alternatives, and for our comprehension of the scale and the dimensions of the problem. Thus a minister responded to criticisms on his Facebook page in the following manner:

“Many have commented about the haze situation, some have said – why keep talking. Why can’t you do more? Some like Mr William Sin uses expletives (against the PAP). I suppose for some people like Mr Sin, every occasion is an opportunity to make a political attack – doesn’t seem to matter whether there is rationality in the comments.
I will ask Mr Sin – what more do you think we can and should do ? Look at the map, see where we are. Every country is sovereign and we can’t intervene in the actions in other countries. The burning is taking place in Indonesia. What do you think Singapore can do about that? Singapore has raised it with Indonesian Ministers, and over several years, we have offered technical assistance, expressed our deep distress at what is happening, and have also raised the issue internationally. The problem recurs, nevertheless. The reality of international law, international relations must be recognised. That is what we have been saying – in every field, our size and geography means that we are often price takers, not price makers – whether it is economics, geo politics, or the environment. But despite that we have done well, much better than bigger countries with more resources – because we have managed to deal with most situations by anticipating them. But the haze situation is quite outside our control. If Mr Sin or anyone else thinks we can do more about the haze that is caused by burning in Indonesia, perhaps they can tell us – but I suppose, for some, the temptation to direct expletives and use this occassion to attack the Govt and the PAP is too great. I thank those who have noted the reality of the situation, and the limitations within which we operate.”

It is a very informative post that clearly lays out the bind that the Singapore government sees itself in. By turning the question “what do we do about the haze” back on the questioner, it positions him as being an irresponsible citizen, because he asks the question in the first place, because he asks it in a dispreferred form, and because he not only does not provide a solution, but does not seem to understand – or indeed trust – that there is no solution to be had. This questioner has not internalized the discipline of helplessness in the face of risk that extends beyond Singapore, and has not disciplined himself into equating limitations with reality.

When Jacques Ellul wrote about the technological society in 1964, he argued that such a society was one in which the human was subsumed by the technological, such that the logic of technology came to exert a force of its own with a totalising effect:

Source: 
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jacquesell347020.html

Since then, many attempts have been made to support this argument as well as deny it. In the case of the former, the most recent example is Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything Click Here: the Folly of Technological Solutionism, in which he argues that much of modern technology evolves to satisfy its own paradigm, and not to solve pre-existing problems. The result, according to Morozov, is that many problems that actually need attention never get it. Attempts to deny this position usually aim at proving that some form of agency within a technological paradigm is still possible. In fact, there are those who argue that it is the technological paradigm that makes new forms of agency possible. Frankenfeld, for example, argues that there is a role for laypeople to play in a “new social contract of complexity”.

What all this seems to point to is that still, there is no space for imagining an alternative. It is all very well for Morozov to excoriate the technologists, for Miller to scold the media, and for the Singapore government to say “citizen, save thyself”. The sense of helplessness has been well and truly internalized on a global scale. InThe Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Weiner argued passionately that the problems of the world had reached such a stage that the uniquely human potential for innovation was urgently needed, rather than the waste of that potential by using humans for work that machines could do. The conditions necessary for drawing out this human potential are nowhere in existence today. With our education, we know enough to understand the global scale of our problems. We also know enough to stop questioning when we are told that the purpose of this understanding is to see that there is no solution. It is perhaps a political solution that is needed, but we – both state and citizens – are ill-equipped to imagine it. All we can do is check the PSI, and post about it on Facebook. Technological citizens par excellence.

*Note: The reading WAS 170 at the time of writing. The number is immaterial for the argument.

Psst. Victoria’s secrets are nothing. You should hear THIS!

There is a Salon article that has been making the rounds on Facebook, in which a man writes of how much insight he has gained into women’s lives and psyches by working in a lingerie store. I know it’s an amusingly written article. The writer is described as a “humorist” who “performs a one-man show about his time at Victoria’s Secret called “The Lingerie Diaries.”" And it’s hard to deny what he claims – that entering spaces that are new to you, or even entering familiar spaces with a new perspective, teaches you something about other people. Indeed, this is what underpins journalism at one end of the spectrum of “understanding the other” and ethnography at the other end. I can’t seem to find this article as funny as some of my friends do. That’s actually been happening to me a lot lately as I skim through my Facebook newsfeed. I think it’s because I’m developing a particular lens that immediately zooms into certain types of meanings. When I first started getting this annoying particle of glass stuck in my eye, I used to respond by commenting when my friends posted links to articles like this one: “But don’t you think…” Which of course must have pissed them off. Because it’s not like other people don’t always see these things. And even if they don’t, why would they appreciate having it pointed out to them on their Facebook wall when all they wanted was to focus on the funny? So here I am, on my blog, saying what I really think, and not forcing anyone to read it (even inadvertently on a newsfeed).

The reason I don’t find the article so funny, or heartwarming, or whatever, is because my first thought was this: he would have learned so much more if he had trained himself to listen to the women in his life,  being reflexive about his subconsciously held and unconsciously displayed judgments. Of course this would not have resulted in half as much attention, at least not without twice as much intellectual effort. Mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins…women talk (big surprise), and in my experience, they don’t talk less just because men are around. They talk less (or self-censor topicwise, in any case) when they feel they are being judged. Also, when a man enters a “women’s space” as an outsider – more than in a family situation – he has to be aware that the women are to a greater extent consciously performing for him. [Note: everything I am saying here probably holds true if it were the other way around and a woman were entering a "man's space".] Also, Victoria’s Secret may be filled with women, but it is a space created out of patriarchal logics (it’s telling that the first place he considered was a brothel). If a man wants to go deeper into women’s interaction patterns or whatever, and doesn’t think he can tap on his family for whatever reason, there are plenty of women’s spaces that exist outside of sexy (although, admittedly, not outside of other structural boundaries, but I don’t think that’s really possible anyway).

So you know, if a guy wants to work at Victoria’s Secret, that’s cool. But this seemingly amusing article actually points to a lot of missed opportunities, given what the writer said his motivations were. Of course, it represents  a huge UNmissed opportunity in the form of a comedian’s schtick. The article also exemplifies the continued mystification of women’s communicative worlds, which absolves men (if they were so inclined) of the need to examine their own thoughts, words and actions when they interact with the women in their lives. When I say this, I am not criticizing the writer. Obviously people can write what they want to, and if they feel they learned something and can make some money out of it, more power to them. I am merely reflecting on what this particular genre of writing means for the stated project of understanding women. My conclusion: not much. I’ll leave you to think about how this picture is relevant:

Dove: Manipulating Reality and Falsifying Women

At first glance, Dove’s ‘Real Women’ campaign seems like it has found a solution to what has thus far proved to be a cast iron contradiction in terms: ethical advertising. But my purpose with this post is to suggest that in fact this campaign might have hidden dangers in the form of even more deeply and therefore less easily detected assumptions about women and their relationship with social standards of beauty.

If we take a look at Dove’s ‘social experiment’, we see that it appears to be quite touching, enlightening even. And it draws upon discourses of science – psychology and forensics, no less.

What’s not to trust? By the time you reach the end, to the strains of inspiring music, you realise that you were wrong all along: you ARE beautiful after all! You ARE! And there you were thinking you were some sort of troll. Forsooth! Tears fill your eyes and you resolve never to fall for media messages that play on your guilt and insecurity ever again.

But hang on. Dove has certainly done its best to take you away from feeling guilty about not meeting unattainable standards. Kudos to them. What they have done instead is to make you feel guilty about feeling guilty. And this guilt-ception takes place within the same framework of external standards of beauty. Only now the standard is not set by an airbrushed model on a glossy magazine, but by an ordinary person – no more famous than you. This person’s fleeting contact with you makes her more of an expert on you than you, with all your years of living with yourself. In case you haven’t noticed, YOU still don’t get to decide how you look. No matter what Dove says, the ‘real beauty’ is still not something you get to decide.

When someone first sees me, they may notice that my eyes light up when I speak, or that I have dimples. But if you ask me to describe myself I may point out the age-wrinkles on my neck or the fact that my teeth protrude a little. These are as much a part of me as my dimples. What gives Dove the right to deny that the way I see myself IS real beauty? Why is my own perception less valid than someone else’s when we are both susceptible to cultural stereotypes and their arbitrary application? My worries, my insecurities, my experiences, my hopes – they all go into the way I see myself. Just because some new acquaintance sees only the surface, and just because that surface view irons out the nuances to make me closer to some social standard of beauty, I don’t agree that that is more real than my own perception. If anything, it is less real.

That is why I believe that Dove is manipulating our concept of reality, and falsifying us as women. This is more insidious than  setting an unattainable standard that we know we can never reach. This is taking the sort of people we come into contact with everyday and turning them into potential judges of our beauty, with the possibility ever present in our mind that they may find us wanting. How does that make us love ourselves more? The concept of beauty comes with the baggage of judgment and external appraisal.

But you know what? At the end of the day, Dove is a corporation. Tapping into our insecurities is what they DO. Otherwise how can they sell anything? Even if you do accept that someone else’s idea of you is more valid than your own, you are still stuck with not being smooth-skinned enough, floppy-haired enough or clean-smelling enough. Luckily, those are problems Dove DOES have solutions for. Did you see what they did there?

Do what Katie Makkai does in this poetry slam. Reject the idea of physical beauty as a frame of judgment altogether:

“This, this is about my own some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?” I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, “No! The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters. You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. But you, will never be merely ‘pretty’.”

Technocapitalism with a chance of social collapse

The movie “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” came out in 2009. I just saw it this evening. Waaaay behind. I know. But wow when I watched it, it was like being immersed in a dark, dystopian vision of a very possible future. Of course at first sight it seems ridiculous – food falling from the sky? Pfft. But look again. Look deeper, beyond the steaks slapping themselves down on tables in a roofless restaurant and the Technicolor icecreamscape and the overgrown baby who ends up wearing a chicken suit (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d type!).

According to The Telegraph, it’s “a disaster-movie parody that’s a delight for children and adults alike”. Roger Ebert chose to focus on the techniques of animation. Channel 4 film’s Catherine Bray is cited by the Guardian’s film blog as saying the following (and I hope you’ll forgive me for the double-citing, because the link the Guardian posted didn’t go anywhere so I couldn’t find the original article. But it actually doesn’t matter. Let’s move on):

“Animation and comedy have always been a good way of slipping in broadsides at social norms without looking like a preachy so-and-so, and there’s more criticism of global warming, sexism in the media, obesity issues and capitalism in this one film than many an earnest documentary – but only if you care to look for it; Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs never forgets its primary function as a very funny romp.”

Yes, this. This is what I’m talking about. I don’t care about the funny bit because I am not reviewing the movie (in the sense of evaluating it). What I AM amazed by is how clearly the issue of technological ethics is brought out. If you’re running any sort of class that deals with problems in modern society, I really think you should consider this as a resource. Questions that you could ask would include:

1. just because something CAN be done, does that mean it SHOULD? Especially when the motivations are not always brought out into the open and dealt with at the level that they should be. At the root of Flint’s drive to keep innovating was a self-esteem issue. Not the good of society.
2. What is the value of an education in the humanities for a society that seems bent on finding technological solutions for problems that are either non-technological in nature, or which exist in the first place because your technology makes things look like a problem? If Flint had had some exposure to philosophy, might he have been quite so hubristic, or indeed quite so uncritically accepting of the incremental demands being made upon him?
3. How does capitalism co-opt technological design to create an upward spiral of obsessive consumption?
4. When governance is seen through the lens of this technocapitalism, what implications does that have for citizenship?
5. And just to add another layer to this question-ception, what happens to the ability of citizens to imagine alternatives for themselves when the circle of thought is increasingly getting sealed shut by instant gratification – because, you know, Marx.

Perceptions of Efficacy and Futility: If Rosa Parks could tweet

As someone who studies new media and political identity, I find this tweet (and it’s popularity – apart from all the RTs and Favorites, no one contradicted it) very interesting. It taps into some assumptions about the link between platforms, messages, contexts and effects. To start with, there was no Twitter around when Rosa Parks did her thing. If there had been Twitter, then she may either have been overtly excluded on the basis of race (eg Black people not allowed to have  a Twitter account), or she may have been excluded by poverty (eg poor people  don’t have money to own a computer in the first place), or she may have been excluded by a skills deficit (eg even if she had a computer, her use of it may have been limited to mundane tasks that disciplined her as a technological subject without necessarily expanding her scope for empowerment), or indeed she may not have had voice/power/influence even if she had known how to use Twitter, simply by dint of being Black/poor/female etc.

 

So if Twitter had been around back then, if Rosa Parks had been  on it, if she had posted her support of civil rights, that might already have signified access to technology, access to education, access to political identity and a whole host of other legitimations of personhood. Of course, this may still not have meant that desegregation would have occurred. So there is one more assumption that this tweet embeds, which is about the political efficacy of expressions of political identity on Twitter. Which highlights yet another assumption, this time more generally about the efficacy of any action: that one action by one person can make a difference in the way in which we expect many actions by many people can make a difference. Without taking away any of the deep meanings in Rosa Parks’s courageous act, it seems reasonable to assume that it took place, and saw its effect, in a context of other acts of resistance by many other people. And these acts took place within, as well as by their expression constructed, a context in which a collective identity was able to develop. The 1960s version of “oh, so you think posting on Twitter is going to change anything” would have been “oh, so you think sitting on a bus is going to change anything”. At the time, many people – Black as well as white – may have doubted the efficacy of that individual action, especially if they were not able to see the wider context in which it occurred. But its effect (riding on as well as helping to add to the wave of growing sense of certain efficacy – in itself linked to the ability to envision a desired end point) may have made the act look efficacious in retrospect.

 

So yes. If Rosa Parks alone had tweeted, and nothing else had changed, then I guess desegregation would never have happened. But if she had tweeted, and others had tweeted, and other actions were taking place, and because of all this there was a growing vision of what that other world might look like, and the wider sociopolitical context also contained conditions ripe for change if they could just be harnessed by waves of action, identity and imagination, then maybe – just maybe – that tweet may have been the one to break the camel’s back. But we must remember that the camel is powerful precisely because it is metaphorical. Because as long as we think only some very specific thing counts as breaking the camel’s back, we will always be ridiculing the straws of human action.

 

On Literature education in Singapore

It is no secret that education in Singapore is Serious Business. I have written about citizenship education (see for example Unexpected Opportunities, Youth Citizenship: Balancing The Equation) and education in general (see for example The Pedagogical Fallacy, School Should Be Like This, I Dream) in previous posts . Lately, there have been questions raised about the fate of literature education in Singapore. I provide a link here to this website. It has the contents of a Straits Times article which report on an MP’s response to a question raised in parliament about the drastic drop in number of students studying literature in the last 10 years.

In her response, the MP suggests that because there is more choice now in subjects, there are fewer students choosing each individual subject. There have been some (unsurprisingly) very articulate letters written in support of literature education and in opposition to the idea that greater choice is all that lies at the root of declining numbers of literature students. Everything that we know about the instrumental approach towards education in Singapore (and indeed everywhere in the world now) forces us to reject such a simplistic argument. There are so many things that shape particular choices. These are some of the factors that I have encountered in my experiences as a student, a parent, a teacher and a researcher:

1. Some fear that they lack the ability to do well in the subject. It is no secret, and certainly not an illusion, that the subject calls for a linguistic ability that many of our students simply do not have. This may be a chicken-and-egg situation. Downplaying literature may reduce language ability. Lower language ability makes literature less accessible. And so it goes on. I have marked so many secondary school compositions where the writers struggled to articulate their ideas. Students are asked to write narrative essays, but have less and less exposure to well-written narrative texts. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. That literature scores have not in fact gone down over the years does not really help the cause of literature in Singapore. Instead, all it proves is that smaller class sizes are better for learning.
2. Lacking the ability to do well may of course be tied to fears of low O level scores. But I think it is also tied to self-esteem and academic identity. We can argue all we want that once you are out in the working world, what you actually studied makes little difference. Your O level certificate just gets you a foot in the door. But while you are in school, it matters to you that you do well. Young people are resilient in some ways but fragile in others. They are sensitive to the stigma they feel when test papers are returned in class and their friends have done better than they have. These feelings accumulate over the years in school. This is something that needs to be addressed for reasons that go beyond literature.
3. Literature is perceived as having little relevance to the ‘real’ world, and no amount of arguing that there are invisible ways in which the subject matters will change this mindset. I am increasingly starting to feel that the privileging of some textual modes over others, some themes over others, and some ways of teaching over others has implications for how relevant the subject can be in a context where the ability to deconstruct texts in multiple modes, and to be able to imagine alternatives to dominant narratives, has never been more vital for a citizen.

There are ways in which debates over the power of new media and its role in the development of political identity can provide useful perspectives to the dilemma of studying literature in a context where numbers and facts are valued more and perhaps seen as less threatening. Good literature doesn’t just make you empathise with other people. It makes you question your own realities. But we have to be taught how to see this, because good literature is social critique in code. It’s coded for a reason. And therein lies the value of the Great Literature Debate in Singapore.

Diaspora and displacement

More than 20 years ago when I first got married, for various reasons, my social circle consisted of primarily Indian expat families. To be precise, they were all Indians who shared my mother tongue. This was despite my having grown up in Singapore. At every gathering, there was a very strong gender partition: the women would sit in a room drinking soft drinks, dealing with fractious toddlers, and talking about the mechanics of running a home; the men would sit in the living room nursing alcoholic drinks and talking about the economy, politics, etc. I was always warmly received (more because of my family connections I think) and I generally enjoyed watching the various vignettes with an untrained ethnographer’s eye. I had been brought up in a fairly traditional manner (see this post for example) but I was still Singaporean rather than Indian. And as traditional as my parents were, all their parties had been completely devoid of these gender divisions. Perhaps it was because they socialized with many non-Indians as well. Or perhaps because my mother was in many ways an unconscious (and therefore somewhat inconsistent) rebel.

In any case, my post-marriage socialization patterns were very different. The people were lovely in their way of course. And it probably says more about me than it does about them that I always left the gatherings feeling like I had reached the end of a poorly scripted play and couldn’t wait to cast off the limiting role I had chosen to play. Back in my own home, I could cast off the sari, change into shorts and t-shirt, and read a good book that didn’t have recipes in it.

But what really struck me about those gatherings, and the only thing that actually made me feel explicitly like an outsider, was the way everyone complained about Singapore. Of course a part of me knew that this was why they gathered – to share insights and experiences, and learn to cope in a foreign land that was culturally alien to them. In fact they had a perfect right to do this. I was the outsider, and no amount of pretending could make me one of them. I knew the language, I had been brought up with the all the same rituals and restrictions. But I called Singapore home and they didn’t.

So every time they criticized my country, my people and my home, something rankled in me. Why come here, I actually asked a couple of times. Why stay? Why not go back? This wasn’t done in an attempt to challenge. I really wanted to know. But in the grand tradition of the Hawthorne effect, my question would immediately turn the conversation around (and if I am to be perfectly honest, maybe that’s the effect I wanted, though wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it out of me then), and they would politely extol Singapore’s virtues. And I lost the chance to actually find out about the nuances of cultural displacement they were experiencing.

What reminded me of this now, 20 years on? Oh you know, debates about foreigners versus native Singaporeans, and attending recent gatherings where some things have changed and some haven’t. It’s not a new thing, my friends. It’s just new for some of us.

Petite, pink and perniciously prejudiced

Isn’t this pretty? Do you know what it’s called? It’s a Petite Sweetheart Cheesecake (part of Delifrance’s Valentine’s Day promotion this year). It tastes absolutely divine dahling. But that’s not what this post is about.

I had a fascinating conversation with a dear friend last night, in which she tried to explain to me her desire to analytically separate gender from sex, because the conflation of the two leads to labels being placed on people that they have to wear even if they feel uncomfortable with the fit. The example we used to think this through was walking. It seems reasonable to believe that the way a woman is structured – with generally broader hips and narrower shoulders – leads her to walk somewhat differently than a man – with his narrower hips and broader shoulders – does. However taking this example to its logical extent forces you to admit that while these may be average forms, there are undoubtedly men who have broader hips and women who have broader shoulders. Presumably, the way they walk changes accordingly. So far so good. If there is no value judgment attached to any of these parameters, then the matter can rest here. You may not agree with the theory that body structure influences gait, but that is a different issue altogether.

The problem, according to my friend, comes in when one type of walk is labeled ‘feminine’ while another is labeled ‘masculine’. Immediately then, it becomes clear how insisting on a rigid binary framework can lead to trouble. Labels like this are artificial, arbitrary, and culturally intertwined with many other intersecting impositions of behavior and belief. Biological patterns, on the other hand, tend to be more fluid. Within the form labelled ‘feminine’ there is a range of actual configurations of body ratio. Likewise the ‘masculine’. There is indeed a continuum, whereby one segues into the other so smoothly that it is only through great force of purpose that the grid of labels may be imposed. In fact to do so requires a whole culture of contiguous structures that enmesh themselves with the human psyche so irretrievably that most of humanity cannot even recognize the imposition. We call this culture Patriarchy. Woe betide the woman with the narrow hips or the man with broad ones. She is derided for being ‘masculine’ while he is equally ridiculed for being ‘feminine’. Both are seen as insults in the context of their discursive power.

Which brings me back to the confection you see in the photograph. Of course Valentine’s Day is a marketing gimmick. And all the pink targets women as consumer and as commodity. But just think of a boy who approaches the counter. A teenage boy, who is sadly all too conscious of the impressions that his choices convey to a wider public that he has learned makes judgments on those who don’t wear their labels. He just loves the flavor of the confection, and he might even love the violently pink look of it. But the fact that pink is associated with the ‘feminine’ makes him think twice about ordering something he knows will taste like 50 shades of heaven. That he orders it anyway is proof that he is reflecting and trying not to let the labels dictate his choices. But there are so many examples like this, where labels force us into certain choices and away from others. And the use of these labels for marketing adds an extra layer of complexity that further locks us into these uncomfortable positions.

I’ve ruminated on this gender vs. sex issue before on this blog. Interestingly, in that post, I suggested that new forms of communication might be introducing some changes. I’m not so sure about that anymore, but I’ll give it more thought before I write about it. Something along the lines of appropriation of feminine styles by masculine logics of technology and business without appreciation of feminine substance. But even that’s a bit dicey because it contradicts the post-gender way in which my thoughts above seem to be leaning. I’d blame my friend for confusing me, but I’m too grateful to her for giving me something to think about

Meanwhile if you have anything to contribute to this, I’d love to hear it.

Youth citizenship: balancing the equation

I refer to this letter that appeared in today’s Straits Times: http://www.straitstimes.com/premium/forum-letters/story/one-party-system-works-spore-20130130

In it, the writer argues, among other things, that we need the one-party system because otherwise the government is reduced to pandering to populist sentiments. I will leave aside for now the counter arguments drawn from anti-fascist literature, because I have a different focus for now. I will also leave unquestioned for now the assumptions that seem to be embedded in the writer’s position.

What I do want to focus on is my belief that the argument takes into account only one side of a very complex equation. So far we have not had to prepare citizens for multiple political positions. We did not even need to prepare them to understand the nuances of governance. We only needed to prepare them to be economically useful and politically untroublesome. But if we look at the citizen side of the equation, and think about how we can develop within the young the ability to discern political views, to think about the role of humanity, and to be able to imagine alternatives, then why not two parties? Or more parties?

I am not saying that citizens do not need a more varied political scene as is. But the concerns some express about variety for variety’s sake are worth considering. Another aspect to consider of course is that it is not just an abstract issue- if there is the perception that policies don’t work, that a previously existing connection with the citizenry has been lost, that the ability to be self critical rather than to blame the citizenry for not appreciating policies has not been demonstrated, then more political options may be needed. But even here it is possible to see the relevance of thinking about the education of the young as citizens. Maybe we have been more successful than we realize in all our years of citizenship education: we have been trained to recognize good governance.

My point is that it is high time we looked at how to prepare young people not just to be economically useful, but politically inventive as well. This does require a shift from thinking about education through an instrumental lens, to using a more teleological approach. But I think it is well worth the effort. Our only hope for a peaceful and enlightened future is the intellectual nurturing of our young citizens.

Social justice before media literacy: a case study

In a previous post I wrote about my conviction that we need to highlight social justice as primary, with media literacy as a necessary corollary, when speaking about educating the young (educating older people is a bit difficult, which is why any perceived need to change social behavior converges on young people and the process of socializing them). Not everyone will agree with me. People sometimes forget when they argue at abstract levels that context matters. So I want to make it very clear that I am only speaking about Singapore for the moment. I haven’t amassed the empirical resources to extend my argument beyond this scenario that I know firsthand and care so deeply about. Social justice means something different here in Singapore than it does say in the US. Media literacy, likewise, means something different. To try to transcend these differences is to ignore the very mechanisms that produced the inequalities.

The ‘media literacy as prime’ position comes, I think, from the perspective of duality, where the media is seen as separate from the contexts of its use.  One might argue that the ‘social justice as prime’ position that I take assumes the same duality. In fact what I am advocating is based on an assumption that the cultural logics of the media that young people engage with so deeply are inseparable from the cultural contexts of their everyday lives. This is not to say that young people are experts in using social media platforms and therefore can never get into dangerous situations online. Obviously they are not experts and do get into trouble, because the world of the technological extends beyond their screens, keyboards and smartphones. They cannot control or be aware of many parts of this extended world. But they have internalised a particular mode of engaging with the world around them, of re-presenting themselves forward to other people and backward to themselves, of developing new identity narratives and frameworks, of connecting with other people, and of encountering new forms of life. In the context of this encompassing digitality, arguing that the answer to social problems is media literacy education is somewhat counter-intuitive. Instead, we need to draw on the technosocial logics that young people have internalised to re-frame solutions to social problems. If inequality does not come from poor awareness of media literacy, then expressions of hostility that stem from inequality cannot just be a media literacy problem. Likewise, revelations online that upset social conventions based on discrimination cannot be framed as media literacy problems.

I found this post by Alex Au interesting because it provides a useful comparison to the discourse that arose around the Amy Cheong incident. Way back in 1996, the revelation made online that a boy was gay did not prompt immediate calls for media literacy education. Instead, the focus was on his sexual orientation and its social incorrectness. So having a well-documented case like this allows us to compare then and now. What was different? Among (many) other things, the political climate was different. One openly gay boy was no threat to anyone except the school that felt he was dragging them along with him down into some imagined moral abyss. But thousands of people questioning the national narratives and foundation myths on social media platforms (some with much more finesse and discretion than others, I must point out) is another situation altogether. Now media literacy education becomes very important. I cannot help thinking that this comparison highlights the fact that lack of media literacy is not the most urgent problem, although it is true that many more people are online than was previously the case, and so the number of factors to be taken into consideration has increased.

This is why I refuse to let go of the argument that social justice education must be the primary ‘operating system’ that underscores all other’educational ‘apps’. But I do accept that making this argument puts the onus on me to articulate what I mean by social justice education in the Singapore context. That’s going to take some time. I think it’s worth it.