“Social Citizens” by Allison Fine

What is Fine’s purpose in writing? What goal(s) does she have for this text? Who is her audience? Find a sentence/passage where she communicates the rhetorical situation and paste it below.

I think there are actually two audiences for this piece. Fine was hired by the Case Foundation to research millennials and write this piece, so it is an immediate audience, along with other non-profit organizations who would like to recruit youth and young adults for their causes.

A secondary audience is millennials, themselves. On the opening page of the paper, Fine says the paper opens upon more questions than it answers, and she asks millennials to offer feedback.

Fine makes many, many assertions about “millennials” in her text. What is one assertion? How does she support it? Is the support effective? In other words, does it build her logos effectively? Explain. Based on your experience as a member of the “millennial” generation, do you agree? Explain.
One assertion is that today’s millennials are global citizens who embrace diversity. She explains this assertion by noting that this generation has moved around a lot; she also notes the paradox that at the same time, this generation is most likely to have lived, attended school, and worked in communities that lack economic diversity. Beyond these explanations that I can only assume are based on her field research, I don’t see a lot of support. Overall, I think her logos in the paper is weak. She uses some outside research, but it seems hardly adequate given the scope of her piece and the magnitude of generalizations she makes about millennials. Too, her field research is based on surveys and interviews with only 30 people.

How does Fine’s piece clarify some of the observations Spanier made in “Is Campus Activism Dead”? How does she account for millennials’ lack of interest in protesting?
Fine explains that while millennials are more trusting of the government, they feel disenfranchised by it; they don’t know how to access it; they feel powerless to evoke policy change. Given these attitudes, it makes sense they’d see little use in protesting. Instead, these students are interested in social change at the local level.

What are some of the dangers/drawbacks of online activism, according to Fine’s text?
One of the obvious dangers is that it breeds homogeneity and a narrowed scope of causes, according to Fine’s research. Millennials on facebook are likely to be friends with those who already share similar interests. Thus they aren’t likely to join causes they aren’t already familiar with. Too, I guess there is a credibility issue concerning the generation gap. There are still old school thinkers out there who are quick to dismiss acts of social citizenry because it is so early in the movement. We haven’t seen anything significant come out of it yet.



Overall, do you think online activism is an effective means to evoke social change? Explain.
I think it has great potential. Online activism is very “grassroots.” Millennials are operating on their own accord without being directed in a top-down, bureaucratic fashion. This makes what they are accomplishing very exciting and somehow more “real.” Most importantly, even though millennials aren’t working toward immediate policy change, they will be our future policy makers. They will come into such responsibility with a socially responsible set of values, which will make policy change well worth the wait.


What cause(s) are you considering for your class project? What makes these causes attractive to you?
One option I’d consider is doing some kind of PSA (maybe a commercial) on using wind energy to supply power to residential homes. I live in a small community that sits atop a hill. It is windy nearly every day (to the point that all my trees and shrubs have become wind burnt). It would be amazing to harness that wind and use it to power our homes, especially since the average electric bills during the winter months is about $350 (our houses range from 2500 to 3500 square feet). Economically, it would make sense in the long term, but the equipment is expensive and hard to come by. Tax breaks might make the technology more affordable sort term. My ad would offer an argument in support of the residential turbines and provide a list of sources for locating equipment and installers.
Another cause I am interested in relates to the lack of access to formal education in Afghanistan. I am a big fan of Khaled Hosseini’s books about his native Afghanistan. Even though his books are fictional, they spawned in me an interest in and concern for the children there who are growing up without ever having owned a book or been read to. I also read Three Cups of Tea over the summer, a book by mountain climber Greg Mortenson about his efforts to build schools in Afghanistan during the 1990s. As I read about his difficulties raising money and his ultimate success in building 78 different schools, I wondered what the state of the schools and education is today. My husband has a business associate in West Virginia who started a foundation called Sultan’s Daughters that raises money to build and furnish schools in Afghanistan. I think I’d include something about her organization in the project as well. As far as a medium, I think I’d use facebook or some kind of blog so that I could inspire young, educated people to become knowledgeable about and donate money to the cause.

Paper topic ideas for Cycle 2

Here are a few ideas to point you in the right direction for this second paper: (By the way, if you have some ideas yourself, please add them to the list by hitting reply)

• any perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict not offered by Said's "States"
  
• Iraqi or Afghanistan wars from perpective of native inhabitants or from the perspectives of Syria and Jordan (countries which are hosting most of the refugees from the war)
• modern immigration from perspective of an illegal immigrant or perhaps a legal one
  
• genocides in African countries
• Wet foot/Dry foot refugee policy from perspective of, say, a Haitian
• Deforestation of rain forests in Asia by British, American, and European logging companies from the perspective of indigenous peoples
• Fall of the Soviet empire from the perspective of the poor and children (Romani children, in particular, have had a difficult time accessing food, shelter, and education)
• Any seemingly negative consequence of the fall of the Soviet empire (we tend to hear about only the positives associated with this fall)
• The Georgian/South Ossetian/Soviet conflict--the US is supportive of Georgia in this conflict, but evidence suggests that South Ossetians actually want to reunite with Russia
• Sweat shops in Asia, South America and elsewhere from the perspective of a worker
• Chinese rule over Tibet from perspective of any involved party
• gang involvement, from perspective of a young member
• state of us agriculture from perspective of an American farmer

Overall, I think the best site to spark ideas is the MSNBC's Week in Pictures archive. Visit it at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3842331 .

Tompkins: lessons learned or a game of follow the leader?

I recently asked my students to read Jane Tompkins' piece on history and textualism, "'Indians': Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History." I was surprised by the responses of students in one of my two classes. I have taught this essay before and while students in the past have certainly found it challenging, they did not have the viscerally negative response that students in my one class this semester did. I've been trying to understand how and why this group of 18-20 year olds found the essay so inaccessible, so off-putting. Had my other group of students this semester responded similarly, I might conclude that it is a generational issue . . . Tompkins is rehashing what they already know, that her language is too foreign to them. Such was not the case, and so I am left to do a little research myself. I spent Wednesday afternoon reading through these initial posts more closely, taking in not only the rants against Tompkins, but also reading through comments to each others' posts. I set myself upon this task assuming that students were simply lazy and had not bothered to read the entire article. To an extent, I now believe I was correct. But I also discovered something else about my students that I find even more troublesome than insipid laziness. I came to such a discovery not through my reading of their blog posts, but by analyzing and assessing the comments they wrote on each others' posts.

Overwhelmingly, students admitted in the comments posted to their peers' responses that they didn't read the entire article--just as I had suspected. They were confused by the jargon; they were mad at the length (at 19 pages, it is certainly the longest piece we have read, but is certainly not the longest we WILL read this semester); overwhelmingly, they were bored. I rather expected to read these kinds of comments. I also assumed students had waited until the last minute (late night before the assignment was due) to read the article, despite my warnings against procrastination. But then I noticed the time stamps. At least two students had posted the afternoon/early evening the day before the assignmetn was due. Their posts were overwhelmingly negative. I noticed these posts had been responded to by quite a few of the writers' classmates, all agreeing with these early assessments of the article as worthless. I checked some of the posts written by those who commented. Interestingly, most of the students had commented about the reading before posting themselves. Okay . . . not much of a problem. I have, after all, advised students to read each other's work especially if they didn't understand an article.

But what if those earliest negative posts were authored by students who had evolved as leaders in the class. Is it possible these student's post spawned a class-wide backlash against the article, the author, and even me for assigning the piece? I think it is a possibility, though I certainly am uncorfortable admitting as much. Doing so would not be fair to those students who had every right to respond negatively to an article . . . and it isn't right for them to shoulder such responsibility . . . is it? Afterall, students have their own minds and chose to respond in a similar way to the article.

Still, I cannot help but think what happened with this article is a result of students reading the posts of these class leaders and feeling some how justified in responding likewise, even to the detriment of their grade. How else are we to account for the disparity in my students' posts from one class to the next? After all, students in my other class, as I mentioned, did not seem to harbor the resentment toward the article this group did though they also mentioned they struggled with the text. So what I find so troublesome now is not the apparent laziness, but the possibility that students in the class are using others (those class leaders) as crutches. They have stopped thinking for themselves and are now willing to adopt the attitudes and views of their peers. Okay, I admit this may be a generalization ... but what if it isn't?

I have no strong feelings towards' Tompkins piece one way or the other. But I assigned it because I felt students could learn a great deal from the experience of reading it. Yes, it is difficult. But in the experience of struggling with a text, don't we learn a bit about ourselves, about how we read, and how we learn? More importantly, in writing an essay that details the obstacles she, herself, encountered while conducting research, Tompkins sheds light on just how messy research can (and should) be. Often we approach research as a very linear process. We search for articles on our topics, we find them, we scan them, we pull out a couple quotes, we slap them in our papers, done. Right? Well, no, not exactly . . . certainly not if we are doing our jobs as research writers. Contrary to what we might have been led to believe, not everything has been said/written on a topic that could be. And what has been written about a topic in the past may not hold true now. More importantly, research, even quantitative research that yields numbers, must be interpreted and, as Tompkins tells us, interpretations are influenced and directed by the cultural lens through which we are looking. This is an important lesson to learn, one I fear many of my students may have allowed to pass them by.