The elephant in the classroom

[koganbot]

Dave over on his Tumblr:

I worry that people who are interested (and provocative, and good writers) in "other avenues" online tend to be exceedingly poor at transferring those skills to discussing music. I like several progressive writers in the political blogosphere, but in nearly all cases their ability to talk about music is fucked, because, perhaps by nature of what they "do," they don't take music very seriously. It's a "break" from the hard work of writing about politics and policy, and it's their only chance to be intellectually lax (or flat-out stupid). The only field in which I've seen any potential for overlap is education and pedagogy theory, where much of the more enlightened theory on media literacy seems to take up many of the things I'm most interested in in music criticism — especially how personal likes and dislikes interact with our ability to learn. Music can galvanize learners in both directions — engagement and disengagement — and bringing matters of personal taste into the classroom is a minefield.

. . .

A good internet convo or community, like a good classroom, is a site for questioning, accepts reasoned analysis, and actively discourages intellectual stasis and a reliance on unfounded assumptions. Also like a good classroom it includes all of the messy stuff, too — temper tantrums, joking, going off-topic, failed experimentation — and makes it part of the learning experience. The question I have is whether or not the elephant in the room in this comparison — the role of the teacher — is by and large what's missing from internet discourse. I want to say no (when you tell a group of adults that they need a teacher, you're on the express train to condescension-ville) but I do see an occasional need for a larger force that could more strongly redirect conversations when they begin to derail (derailing is not the same as going off-topic).

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Comments

Re: Woops

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, right -- the discussion of how and why specific performers are being misrepresented is exactly the kind of place where we might draw in writers and thinkers who have no personal interest in these performers' music necessarily, since this is something that doesn't just apply to one performer but instead indicates a set of behaviors on the part of the people doing the misrepresenting.

I think "narrow" is a good word for Yglesias's takes on pop culture (my argument in the "Summer Girls" thing was basically "why are you treating this differently than you treat other 'more important' stuff; why don't the intellectual processes for one thing seem to hold for another thing?" -- especially given the fact that he seems to be a pretty good & reasonably intellectual sports writer, another leisure activity), but this sense of narrowness really doesn't transfer to his political writing at all, which is quite evenhanded and rational. I also don't mean to conflate him with the more coalition/tribal-identification-hungry sites I read with far more ambivalence -- Huffington Post and the like, often including ThinkProgress, whose webspace he shares.