Asking Questions First

When scholars and pundits write about “systems thinking,” they’re often connecting the idea to something like basic STEM (science-tech-engineering-math) competencies. Cathy Davidson suggests adding the “R” of ‘Rithms (algorithms) to the traditional reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Meanwhile, when critical literacy scholars write about “systems thinking,” they often wave toward something usually referred to as deconstruction—in these contexts often a code word for dismantling systems of power intellectually so as not to be “blindly” under their influence.

The concreteness of the first vision of systems and the unworkable vagueness of the second lead me to wonder whether or not it might be possible to teach more casual understandings of how particular systems work. I’m thinking primarily of some of the theory coming from Duncan J. Watts about the way networks and macro social events/phenomena operate.

In his new book, Everything Is Obvious* *Once You Know the Answer, Watts systematically (no pun intended) problematizes or flat-out dismisses many of the most tempting, but misguided, theories in the operation of collective behavior. He particularly skewers Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (which I’ve never read — Gladwell’s Blink, which I love, is actually closer in its spirit and examples to Obvious) and the whole concept of “influencers,” noting that “ordinary influencers” (which is to say, anyone within a particular social network), not extroardinary individuals, are most likely to be the “spark” of particular phenomena like popularity, information dissemination, memes, etc.

He also raises objections to any conception of particular objects being more suited for dissemination and virality than others — there are probably implications for the concept of the “spreadability” of a media object, except I haven’t studied the concept well enough yet to know whether this trait actually applies to media objects or media landscapes. (If the point is that “the Internet makes it easier to spread information,” though, it wouldn’t seem to be that revolutionary of an idea.) He discusses his own study on how music becomes popular, which showed that although social influence allowed some songs in a controlled experiment to “cascade” (that is, people downloaded songs that were being downloaded by other people, and in increasing numbers — the crux of a concept called “cumulative advantage”), which songs were picked was essentially random, and in “alternate worlds,” other songs could also become popular for unknown — and fundamentally unknowable — reasons. He writes: “Introducing social influence into human decision-making, in other words, increased not just inequality, but unpredictability as well. Nor could this unpredictability be eliminated by accumulating more information about the songs any more than studying the surfaces of a pair of dice could help you predict the outcome of a roll. Rather, unpredictability was inherent to the dynamics of the market itself.”

Often in educational literature, we engage in some equivalent of the “micro/macro” problem that happens when you try to psychologize behavior in a social event after the fact. In the Watts example, trying to figure out “why” some groups overwhelmingly chose Song X as their favorite while another chose Song Y is asking the wrong question, since almost anything might have “made the difference” in a given world. (Suppose that in Group 1, Song X was chosen as the favorite and the person who “made the difference” and tipped the scales toward Song X had deliberately chosen a song they did NOT like out of a sense of contrarianism. Can we say that it would have been possible to change this outcome had we influenced this particular person differently? But how could we even determine who this person was, when the “person” was likely a cluster of people, working with entirely different motivations?)

So in education, I find myself wondering about a parallel, which is, on the one hand, the way that social behavior expresses itself in mobs, bad behavior, and problematic social norms. On the other, I wonder about the ways that social behavior expresses itself prosocially in civic engagement and participation. We always teach at the micro level, student by student. Even when teaching many students, you make a unique relationship with each one, whether you understand that relationship or not. What we teach is occasionally an act of faith that our teaching will somehow influence future behaviors — in “critical literacy,” pulling the wool from students’ eyes ostensibly prepares them for some future decision or action that will be better for them and for society than if they could not or would not make that decision or action.

But this misunderstands how collective action actually works, which has at its heart many complex and perhaps unknowable interlocking parts, very few of which may involve the individual motivation of a person. The model for how we teach about things like social change, civic engagement, and participation errs in assuming that we can explain aggregate behavior by understanding (and shaping) all of the actions of individual players. Watts’s book effectively says “don’t be so sure.”

But what if we taught students precisely about the gap between what they think and feel and the way that things operate en masse? What if we taught that yes, it is personally beneficial for you to save money, invest wisely, etc. when it comes to your finances, but that you can’t explain “the economy” merely as a collection of individuals making more rational choices about their own money? What if we taught that yes, you could start a petition that, per today’s Nicholas Kristof column, has a real impact in the world; but that that is not because of any inherent strength of the particular petition and depends largely on matters of chance that you can’t control?

This has implications for school projects — namely, students need to find ways to continue making many petitions in many forms, and ready to accept defeat when their voices are not heard without giving up their hope that at some point their actions will make an obvious difference. (For every story like the 4th grade class who successfully got environmentalism into the Lorax website, there are countless others of K-6 classrooms who never “heard back,” as when one of our classes in a summer enrichment program wrote an eloquent letter to the news with no response.)

So, gaming the system, or more accurately, playing a game that more accurately reflects social systems as they exist. I’m skeptical of teaching the kinds of “short-cuts” that assume power in media production from past successes, which puts forward the circular argument that “X was successful because it had the qualities of X.” However, there is certainly power in thinking of media creation as an iterative process that “catches” in circumstances beyond the control of its author. Media production is a question of putting messages in bottles, and there are two big questions we need to ask:

(1) How many bottles are we willing to throw out?

(2) How big is the ocean we’re throwing the bottle into?

Re (1), classroom exercises can be very difficult to repeat. Once students have made a production, whether it’s a blog, a video, a podcast, etc., they are unlikely to do it again. We have found that using simpler production activities like “director’s commentary”-style screencasts for student analysis are one way to get students into a habitual process of creating and distributing work. In the case of video projects, one key is to be ready to plant your videos in lots of places, with an understanding of who might see it and why they might care about it. This is a difficult concept even for my undergrads, who routinely expect that their target distributor is a major network or cable outlet, and don’t know how to do research into smaller and more attainable venues.

Which brings us to perhaps the bigger issue of (2), which is that the internet does two things simultaneously, if not by design then in practice. First it makes the world appear larger, because we are more acutely aware of the number of perspectives — many of which we may not engage with — that are available. We can do country code searches on Google to limit information to specific regions of the world that may never come up in an increasingly “user-customized” search environment, say.

Second, the internet makes the actual world of likely communication effectively smaller, because we’re also aware of the limits of our comforts, boundaries, and friends (now more than ever in a more in-real-life [IRL] sense than at the dawn of personal internet communication). Often in approaching student work, then, we conflate our possible ocean of influence with our likely ocean of influence.

Gaming the system, then, depends on the game and the system. Younger students may take far more pride in a project that they know will reach parents and local community members (even including the school population, in an assembly, say) than in a project they can’t conceive will ever reach an actual person. (“Because it’s on YouTube,” say.) By teaching the way that adding more players complicates all possible predictable influence one might have in the game, students might focus on games where they can more easily visualize the players themselves.

These kinds of systems may become more important to students as traditional accounts of mass media manipulation are more transparently bogeymen for so-called pernicious “influencers” who, as Watts asserts, very often do not exist, or at the very least do not have the power that we tend to think they do in hindsight. Instead, students need to embrace their roles as “ordinary influencers” who need to better understand the contexts in which their own messages are being created — one of the foundational tenets of what I would call “bread-and-butter” media literacy intervention. Target audiences may be “kids” and “adults,” but they might also be “our parents” or “another school’s parents.” A recipient of your “message in a bottle” might be Obama, and it might be a local congressperson, or someone on the school board, or the head of the Parent Teacher Organization. Such systems are not limited to the internet, and thinking about them with more clarity, honesty, and respect for the ambiguous and sometimes arbitrary nature of the way all many systems tend to work may be actively helpful to students as they figure out where they might make a smaller difference in the world rather than holding out for winning the bigger lottery that comes with a bigger audience.