The story of a subverted subversive

28 Friday Dec 2012

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Pitbull in Kodiak

I have a confession to make: I helped exile rap singer Pitbull to a Walmart in Kodiak, Alaska. In participating in the Internet prank that achieved this, however, I also became party a social media campaign that could have resulted in a PR disaster had Walmart handled the situation poorly. Instead, what we saw was a celebration based far more broadly than Walmart could ever have hoped had the corporation and performer not been trolled as hard as they were. The moral of the story I’m about to tell is that due to the highly complex and chaotic environment created by the use of social media, companies cannot reliably predict the impact of online promotions and when or how these might go viral. However, with quick thinking on the ground (and quite possibly a sense of humour) companies can respond quickly and appropriately when they lose control of Internet promotions and even end up appealing to unlikely market segments along the way.

The chain events that brought Pitbull to Kodiak, Alaska started in the Spring of 2012 when Walmart and Sheets Energy Strips launched a campaign that promised a visit from the rapper to any Walmart store that received the most ‘likes’ on Facebook. It is probably important to note that while Pitbull may have no small number of adoring fans, he, Justin Bieber and all the members of Nickleback taken together comprise most of the top-10 list of musicians people love to hate. David Thorpe, one such anti-fan as well as a writer for comedy website somethingawful.com, heard of Walmart’s campaign and decided to start one of his own. Thorpe decided to hijack the contest in order to send Pitbull to the remotest part the USA possible. Kodiak fit the bill nicely, and Thorpe went to announce his devious plan to followers on Twitter using the hashtag #exilepitbull.

Thorpe’s twitter fans were quick to re-tweet his mischievous idea and soon it spread like wildfire on other social media sites such as reddit, 4chan and Facebook. Somewhere along the way I myself jumped on the bandwagon to cast one of the 71,000 or so ‘likes’ for the Kodiak Walmart. This number, incidentally, is many times higher than the town’s estimated population of 6,256. I was also gratified by having done so a few weeks later when I opened Facebook only to be greeted by a photo of an enormous stuffed grizzly bear looming over Pitbull’s shoulder along with the announcement from the local Walmart that the performer was indeed in Kodiak, Alaska. Celebratory postings soon followed on all the social media sites used to publicize the prank.

Thorpe himself reportedly said he was aiming “to disrupt a corporate social media campaign, since they really set themselves up for it.” Meanwhile online media blog The Gawker announced the visit as a victory for the Internet. The real winners, however, are Pitbull and Walmart. At any point along the way, either the company or the rapper could panicked or responded poorly to a promotional campaign spiralling out of control. They could have shut down the contest, tampered with the rules, or responded angrily on Twitter. Instead, during the voting period staff at the Kodiak Walmart posed for a picture while holding a banner proclaiming “We would love to have Pitbull.” A spokesperson for Walmart also reassured reporters regarding the Alaskan store that “If they do win, he is definitely headed there.” Pitbull himself, meanwhile, was tweeting “I hear there’s bear repellent at Kodiak, Alaska” and added Thorpe’s own hashtag #exilepitbull. In other words, everyone involved rolled with the punches and responded to the Thorpe’s prank with grace and good humour.

Now it was likely the case that the companies involved were aiming to appeal to a younger audience by showcasing a seemingly hot and hip performer such as Pitbull. However, by playing along with the joke and carrying through with their promise, Walmart and Pitbull also gained a certain amount of credibility, no matter how grudging, from an unlikely demographic. The kind of person who will find it appealing to exploit a corporation’s own advertising campaign for her own nefarious purposes is likely someone, such as myself, who is already skeptical and suspicious of most marketing activity. For instance, these are the sorts of folks who are currently abandoning Instagram in droves after news went viral that the company was going to use customers’ photos in advertising. And yet it is just these hard-to-market-to people who gratuitously shared photos of an extremely commercialized performer such as Pitbull posing inside a Walmart, a chain that is itself the quintessential beacon of corporate America if ever there was one. You can’t predict when it’s going to happen, but if you’re smart, you can make sure an Internet wildfire serves you instead of letting it devour you.

Finally, I’ll close with a couple more confessions, which is that although I’m still not crazy about shopping at Walmart, you can bet I’d go into the Kodiak one just to see the bear that posed with Pitbull. Meanwhile, I’m also just a smidgen less embarrassed now by the one or two songs by the guy that just happen to be on the iPod I use for the gym.

On the virtues of connectedness in the classroom

03 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by in Education, Relationships, Teaching

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It may seem a small and insignificant thing, but, with smaller classes, I always make a point of learning my students’ names early in the semester. Doing so starts to show them that I am interested in them as individuals. Knowing one’s teacher has such an attitude improves a student’s educational experience, as most people tend to flourish under the light of personal care and attention. Moreover, excellent pedagogy requires something other than a standardized approach. Connecting with students is the best way to get them to connect to the material we are teaching. Obviously, students come into our classes with varying goals, abilities and interests. One must tailor one’s delivery and feedback to meet students’ particular needs and thereby bring out their personal best. As I mature as an instructor, moreover, I have sought to expand my role in helping my students make the most of their time at university by realizing that I can do more for them than pass on course material and assess their assignments.

If new instructors are at all like I was, then many are more concerned to demonstrate that they know enough to stand in front of a classroom, than they are to learn about students’ backgrounds and abilities. Time and experience however has served to shift my focus from myself and onto my students and their particularities. In keeping with this shift, I have devised systems to track feedback on past assignments to which I can refer while grading current work. This allows me to identify obstacles unique to certain students, give them challenges commensurate to their abilities, and recognize when they have made progress in these areas. I also routinely set up one-to-one sessions with my students to learn about their background and goals so that together we can find creative ways to connect essay topics to issues that matter to them. When a writer takes a personal interest in her topic the work becomes less onerous and she is more inclined to focus on crafting an argument she cares about than merely producing the sort of rote 3-point essay students seem to have been trained to write in high school.

As much as good student/teacher relationships facilitate academic success, however, so do interrelations between peers. In interacting with one another, students become more aware of varying points of view and stand to benefit from one another’s knowledge. Hence, I devise class activities that are interactive while also encouraging students to take small social risks such as participating in formal debates, role-playing, or otherwise presenting the results of brainstorming sessions. Due to the attendant air of excitement such activities evoke, it is not unusual to see a class erupt into laughter at least once, say, while bringing the cast of Hippolytus onto the Jerry Springer show, writing online dating profiles for Odysseus, or perhaps while setting up counselling sessions in which Plutarch advises Roman couples. Moreover, when students participate in such activities I see them combing through their texts and animatedly discussing course material, called upon as they are to approach various works in a novel and interesting ways. I have come to understand, moreover, that friendships fostered while interacting in my classes have persisted beyond the end of term for many of my students, providing them with an important basis of support through the course of their university careers. As focused as good educators are upon presenting course content well, many may overlook other small and equally essential pieces of a satisfying and successful university experience. Cultivating a sense of belonging inside the classroom and a sense of relatedness that extends beyond its confines both enriches our students and enhances that scholarly knowledge we impart to them.

A winning rooster is still just meat: UFC champs, cock-fights and beauty queens

04 Sunday Dec 2011

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“I’m an old broken-down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone” — Mickey Rourke in ‘The Wrestler.’

You’d be crazy to call them a chicken to their faces, but broadly speaking, a UFC champion is just the winning rooster in a cock-fight. This is why a recent call to bring UFC themed programs into public schools should give one pause. Doug Ford may not know who Margaret Atwood is, but I bet he knows all about Randy (the “Natural”) Couture and Chuck (the “Iceman”) Liddell. Toronto’s esteemed city councillor is recommending that Toronto Schools look at a program that creates links between UFC (ultimate fighting championship) and school kids (see link below).

I have to admit, I’m of 2 minds here. On the one hand, I am a strong supporter of martial arts for kids. When I’m at the YMCA, I love seeing kids running around in their little karate suits, practising their flying kicks and katas, and crushing on their senseis. I was one of those kids, and martial arts did a lot for my self-esteem. I was also kind of excited when MMA fighting came to Canada, and I’m quite prepared to shell out some cash to go see a fight for myself. On the other hand, I also see how UFC fetishizes male violence and a caveman-style struggle for dominance (or perhaps the jockeying for status evidenced among our primate cousins). It’s a cock-fight writ large in which macho men give it all they’ve got in order to establish their spot in the pecking order. In the same way that beauty pageants make a spectacle out of selecting for the “fittest” females, UFC glorifies the macho competition for alpha status by turning it into a major mass media event.

Moreover, just as we see beauty pageants over-emphasising the importance of women’s physical attractiveness, UFC reinforces a stereotypical and limiting conception of masculinity. Namely, manliness is depicted as consisting merely of physical prowess and aggression. However, like the winning rooster in a cock-fight, any sense of superiority that can be won in such fights is largely an illusion. Socially speaking, for the vast majority of people, traits such as beauty or fighting prowess only get one so far in life. I would hazard that even champion fighters are but pawns of much greater corporate interests, while they have a grossly underwhelming impact on the sorts of socially significant decision-making that goes on in modern industrialized societies. Spartacus aside, these guys, these UFC fighters, they don’t influence modern policy any more than your average gladiator influenced the Roman senate.

Is this really a conception of success that we would want to be emphasising in our public school system? For one thing, I would predict that such a program will largely alienate young women. Apart from this, it valorizes a social role that is in reality, fairly limited. Even the fact that UFC programs are currently directed at at-risk (aka “poor”) youth worries me. It seems to reinforce the notion that if you’re low in the hierarchy to begin with, the best you can hope for is celebrity status based on your physical traits, minus any real empowerment. Moreover, and here’s the clincher, if you stop winning, your bloodied and broken body goes into the trash while your masters go shopping for a new bird.

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1096707–doug-ford-suggests-schools-explore-ufc-linked-program

Jerry Springer hosts Hippolytus: some pedagogical reflections

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Education, Ethics, Philosophy, Teaching

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There are certain parallels between Jerry Springer and Greek tragedy.

Unless my students have laughed out loud at least once, I typically consider my tutorials an abject failure. It’s not that I’m the funny guy or anything, rather, I try to induce laughter by design. That is, I usually try to devise something that is interactive while also encouraging students to take small social risks. Such risks, combined with an attendant air of giddiness and excitement, is such that students eventually make each other laugh. One of my favorites for creating this type of mood is my newly minted Jerry Springer activity, and, believe it or not, it’s got some demonstrated pedagogical value to it as well. Janice Rehner’s “Practical Strategies for Critical Thinking” inspired this activity which takes around 1.5 hours from set-up to finish. I use it to encourage students to look at a complex issue from various points of view and thereby enriching their perspective. Most recently I applied it to Euripides’ play Hippolytus, but, with enough imagination, it can be adapted for use with most moral issues.

In the play Hippolytus Aphrodite instigates a complicated plot to punish the young virginal man who gives the play its name. The goddess of love is miffed because Hippolytus not only fails to give her her due, but actively shuns her in favour of that uptight virgin-loving tomboy Artemis. A large number of characters play a role in the tragedy that unfolds, and all will have various degrees of culpability for the eventual death of Hippolytus and his stepmother Phaedra. (spoiler alert!). Aphrodite made the poor woman fall in love with her unresponsive stepson, such that Phaedra kills herself to avoid shaming her family.

Anyway, you get the picture, it’s a complicated plot but with just enough characters to make oh say, 5 or 6 groups, while assigning one character to each group. The first thing I do when I get to class however, is play a clip from Springer to confuse the students and set the mood. I love confusing my students for short periods as I believe that confusion is an essential state for learning, plus it’s just fun to watch the expressions on their faces.

After assigning a character to each group I explain that we’ll be recreating the Jerry Springer Show using the cast of Hippolytus. “Really get into character!” I tell them, “be Aphrodite!” Each character will go onto the show, pick out the character/s they blame most for what happened, and give these wrong-doers the ‘what-for.’ In other words students work together to draft up statements that they read when they confront the character/s they blame the most. What becomes evident through the course of the show, is that the nature of the tragedy will differ from each character’s perspective. For instance, Phaedra and her loving nurse are going to be much more upset about what happens to Phaedra and won’t be apt to care all that much that Hippolytus comes to such a violent end. Moreover, different characters will each have their own unique set of bones to pick with other characters.

After each character makes his or her statement groups reconvene and work to come up with responses to the allegations made against them. By now students will have warmed up to the activity and we start to see them acting the part a bit more and here is where you start to laughter breaking out. I don’t actually make them get up and act things out or anything (but, I wouldn’t stop them if they chose to do so!).

As I noted earlier, this activity has demonstrated pedagogical value. The reason I chose Hippolytus for this was that students had to write a paper answering the question “who is to blame for the tragedy in Hippolytus.” The trick to this paper is not only to identifying the main culprit/s, but also adequately describing the nature of the tragedy (a lot of students seem to forget that Phaedra dies in this story). According to one TA, typically in the past he ends up getting a pile of generic papers blaming the most obvious candidate: Aphrodite. Interestingly, when I got my students’ papers, only a couple picked out Aphrodite as the prime suspect. Admittedly, it became a problem because there were some who failed to even mention her role. But at least they were encouraged to examine the issue from different angles which I would say is a great start on the road to critical thinking.

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