Dave Gross…Every time you are confronted with choices and, instead of playing one of society’s designated roles, you choose “none of the above” and find yourself alone in a nameless category — you score a point for our team. He says that he looks at social roles the way that hackers look at network protocols — as brittle algorithms vulnerable to clever cracks. He is the proprietor of Sniggle.net , the “Culture Jammers Encyclopedia.” He’a also a student of the Yippie movement, which began with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner.
The video, Yippie! is a short documentary that describes the evolution of the movement, explaining how they used guerilla theater, political pranksterism, civil disobedience, and media manipulation as tactics for achieving political ends. The documentary isn’t an example of any of those, since it uses a conventional presentation style, but it’s fun to hear the music and look at those old photos.
According to Making Yippie, by David Farber, Hoffman’s idea was that “the best way to reach people and spread the new consciousness was by creating a “blank space” in the national media.” Hoffman’s idea was to use a new public art form that relied on weirdness and absurdity to grab people’s attention and make them think again and look at the world differently.
Abbie Hoffman was developing a theory of mass media based on his conviction that television had come to define reality for people, especially young people. He believed that “to get the kids right into the new consciousness you can’t just give them articles to read or speeches to listen to or even rallies to watch but instead you have to absolutely invent a whole new medium that begins with and depends on involvement and participation, that defines reality through immediacy rather than through passivity, that replaces explanation with actualization.
Enter edupunk.
Jim Groom’s been having some fun with this word, lately, as it seems he coined it. And, at Stephen Downes’ suggestion, he offered my post about Utah Phillips as an example of an edupunk anthem. I wasn’t thinking about any such thing at the time I wrote it, but what the hell? Sure.
I see that Stephen Downes today provides a summary of the discussion, and conscisely snags the main point I was going to make about the rhetoric, “I would like to think that true edupunks deride definitions as tools of oppression used by defenders of order and conformity.”
This is all good fun, and it may even serve to push the envelope a little where edtech evangelism is concerned. But i hope people don’t gravitate toward the word! Every other label with an ‘edu’ prefix has ended up a bastardized version of something we love to hate, bounded by social norms that inhibit anything new from happening. What we want to recognize is the need for a new consciousness of learning and teaching. And since Stephen and Jim both thought the Yippie movement had something to say about edupunk, (“The hippie is a romantic. The punk is a revolutionary.”) I wanted to toss out a little more background here on the Yippies, in case anyone else sees possibilities for them as an edupunk template.
Adding to Stephen’s “entire world literature on the subject,” Chris Lott’s question about edupunk’s relationship to hacking ethos reminded me of culture jamming, which might be a useful way to think of it also, since it relies on Yippie communication tactics. To reiterate Stephen’s comment on definitions, if edupunk, eduhacking, culture jamming, or whatever we want to call it is worth anything as an idea, it won’t depend on labels or movements for a power source.
Have fun out there.
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Well, I suppose anyone who’s been alive for at least 20 years would deride *any* kind of definition as either colonization or an impossibility anyway. I find Stephen’s sarcasm rather irritating in the face of a few people just trying to have some fun and remind people that it is possible, even now, to try something different.
*Depending* on labels and *having* labels are very different things. Is this some kind of strange concept of mojo, where a name renders an idea useless the way some worry that photographs steal the soul?
If the idea can be quenched by the word it isn’t much of an idea in the first place, is it?
Doug,
Wow, this crystallizes so many important points.
First, the theory behind Abbie Hoffman’s idea of media, reality, and manipulation is powerful, and the way you frame it as a “new consciousness” in which “you can’t just give them articles to read or speeches to listen to or even rallies to watch but instead you have to absolutely invent a whole new medium” is so powerful. Replacing explanation with actualization is the key, and the idea of pushing the envelope to disrupt, mobilize, and most importantly create has got to be part of both a consciousness and any new medium. Great stuff!
As far as the word “EDUPUNK,” I couldn’t agree with you more. I think it is already starting to trouble a few folks, and even annoy some that education (predominantly the realm of the state and all things unpunk) might co-opt such a term a make it a flashy advertisment for the same old nonsense. I think these critiques are fair, and I also think an obsession with a word over a “mashup” of ideas is a big mistake.
That said, what I like about it, at least for the moment, is that we have started tinking along a path that will necessarily be problematic, yet at the same time it forces us to think about what it is we are doing. Replace Abbie Hoffman’s TV with thoughtless, mindless programmed machines for teaching and learning that are more of an administrative tool and arm of a monied consciousness, and what do you have? I think you have the impoverishment of educational possibility for exploring consciousness and hacking away at that medium. For me, I think the term, as limiting as it is and as ephemeral as it may (and probably should) prove to be, may spark just a little bit of consiousness about what we are doing and why. That for me is a lot, and I like to think that little moments like this may provide a window of opportunity to just commune with others who work in this space and are faced with similar challenges and obstacles. To quote Jünger’s The Glass Bees: “A century of happiness does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and freedom in the moment.”
One of the things about this medium that fascinates me is that it is momentary and so many of the folks involved in this conversation are engaged a moment of education, we are pursuing these threads in some truly external and de-centered fashion that suggests we are searching for the connections and dancing to the dischord. These distributed publishing platforms provide us with the means to be both part of an institution (whether by necessity, desire, or otherwise) yet also within a strangely liminal space of autonomy and community. That is the space I am thinking about, and what we forge there (however we call this communal action) is where we bring back to our respective institutions with the support, various resources, and dreams of our disembodied communities. That’s weird, and its powerful, and it strikes to the heart of this notion of consciousness and new mediums that Hoffman is getting at.
I can’t begin to tell you how perfect your posts have been for pushing me to think about all this, and that’s why I want to keep going. Because the people around me are engaging and thoughtful and generous, despite the fact that we haven’t met, we aren’t at desks, and their is no credential and the end of this post or this comment. Strange, right?
But more than anything, the idea of having fun you mention is what makes so much of what I just tried to outline manifest. I enjoy it, I want more, and other poeple have been grooving similarly for quite a while.
So thanks a lot!
Chris, no disrespect intended on my part. Apologies to anyone who might have taken offense. The question you ask is a good one, though. And I’d say that, yes, a name can render an idea useless – most especially when it’s used to package and brand something. So I’m wary of the word. The idea is cool.
You didn’t offend me… I suppose where we differ is in whether giving something a name *must* destroy it. I guess I just don’t see the problem with edupunk, though the name ultimately doesn’t matter that much to me
Jim, I’m intrigued by your idea, and having fun thinking through some of the possibilities. The part of my other post that you pulled out in yours, that Hoffman saw himself as a “cultural revolutionary,” made me suspect that his ideas about consciousness and media might contribute additional meaning to what you have in mind. I can’t resist tinkering with problematic ideas that help me rethink what I’m doing. I’m grateful for your help there.
About the word, the Farber article tells about the genesis of the word ‘Yippie’ – and how they turned a war cry into a fake acronym for the news media. It was very savvy, but in the end they suffered from their own internal political struggles. Ideas gets stuffed into not-so-tidy little boxes so people can cart them around and do stuff with them. I’m curious to see where you take this. Carry it on!
I wasn’t being sarcastic, I was having some fun with the concept.
Good read~ mind if I stick with “shift the paradigm” though? Hope your summer has gotten off to a good start and you’ve been able to decompress after the school year.
“Revolutionary”? This means change, serious change. _Are you serious_, or are we just having a laugh here?
As soon as Abbie Hoffman declared himself a revolutionary, he became a romantic. We love the quotes, we smile at the useless bravado. But 99% go, who the f**k is he? Was he? May be?
Revolutionaries get famous long after the fact. If you want to change anything, stop congratulating yourself and dont label anything, even for fun. Go quietly, just tell what you do, and let it speak for itself.
“…instead of playing one of society’s designated roles, you choose “none of the above” and find yourself alone in a nameless category” ….having fun out there.
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