Is This What Dewey Meant by Active Democracy?/Characterization of the Characters

While reading Young's article, "Activist Challenges To Deliberative Democracy", I couldn't help but think of Dewey and his approach to active democracy and active education. Although both the characters have opposite methods or participating in democracy, they both participate. Young herself explains that "this essay constructs a dialogue between two 'characters' with these differing approaches to political action" (Young 670). So they take action in democracy - a pretty Dewian idea, right?

Okay. Let me move on from that for a bit. What I thought was interesting was that she chose to characterize the activist as male and the deliberative democrat as female. She explains her reasons for this and claims that she chose to characterize the deliberative democrat as a women because "this assignment more associates the female with power" (Young 671). I'm not sure exactly how she sees that. Is it because society sees those who engage in deliberative democracy was more powerful and women are so often portrayed as members of the downtrodden minority??

If I may delve into a discipline I am more familiar with (German Studies) for a moment:
Reading this made me think of the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion [RAF]). This a left-wing terrorist group in Germany founded in 1970. Now, granted, the activist in Young's article does not condone violence against people or animals, but the RAF was a pretty powerful group, and one could consider them violent activists. Where I'm going with all of this is that it was co-founded and by a woman, Ulrike Meinhof (although Gudrun Ensslin was more a leader of the group). My point? Women can be powerful activists and aggressive, too.

I find this characterization problematic because it still portrays women in a weaker light even though the deliberative democrat is associated with power, I think. Because, let's be honest, actions speak louder than words.

Community vs. Local Literacies

“Community literacy could be (but is not) another name for what Barton and Hamilton (1998) call ‘local literacies’ – the diverse, daily forms of reading and writing used by working-class people, often overlooked or dismissed in our preoccupation with the elite literacies of school or business” (Flower 18).

What???

I guess I was thinking of community literacy as local literacy - according to Flower's definition. I always thought that community literacy was being literate in the forms of communication of the community you are a member of, and with service learning, you bring a different type of literacy to a community. For example: Our lunchtime programs at local elementary schools. We go out into the East Lansing community - into elementary schools - and bring a new type of literacy, German, to the elementary school kids.

“Community literacy…is an intercultural dialogue with others on issues that they identify as sites of struggle. Community literacy happens at a busy intersection of multiple literacies and diverse discourses. It begins its work when community fold, urban teens, community supporters, college-student mentors, and university faculty start naming and solving problems together” (Flower 19).

However, this problem-solving approach makes a lot of sense, really, but I'm not sure how it relates to the service-learning I've done. My first experience with service learning was in the College of Ed. We went to local urban schools and helped a classroom teacher once a week. Sometimes I worked with individual students or groups of students. Other times I helped the teacher run experiments in the classroom. I'm not sure the College of Ed. really went out of the way to find a problem and a way to solve it. I don't think they really payed attention to the needs of the "customer" (as Flower said). So why did they call it service learning? I thought of it more as field work. Maybe they called it service learning because we were in an urban school helping the downtrodden minority.

Maybe I can make my work with German Outreach fit this definition. So it is increasingly important for students to learn a language other than English these days. There isn't a lot of money to fund these programs (problem identified by university faculty and community partners). So we go into the schools to expose the students to another language at an early age, and even if they don't end up choosing German, they have a positive experience learning a language and choose to study one in the future. Hmm... Not sure that fits either.

Flower does cite Dewey and his active approach to democracy and education, and I think that service learning fits right in with Dewey's approach of being an active participant.

So my question is why can't community literacy be local literacy, too? And don't we, when we go out into the community, pick up the literacy of that community?

Technology and Democracy

"'Invent the printing press and democracy is inevitable.' Add to this: Invent the railway, the telegraph, mass manufacture and concentration of population in urban centers, and some form of democratic government, is, humanly speaking, inevitable" (Dewey 110).

Add to that: TV, cell phones, texting, Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and Twitter.

I think democracy has increased even more with the development of social networking sites and other forms of communication. If Dewey thought information traveled quickly through the telegraph, I'm sure he would probably pass out after seeing how viral all those texts about donating to Haiti became in a short amount of time. News travels faster now, and people have more and quicker access to information.

"Our modern state-unity is due to the consequences of technology employed so as to facilitate the rapid and easy circulation of opinions and information, and so as to generate constant and intricate interaction far beyond the limits of face-to-face communities" (Dewey 114).

We are unified with people all across the world because of Facebook, etc. This forms new communities, and the chance for the opinions of others.

Thinking of this makes me wonder what would've happened had Sarah Palin had been running on the ticket with John McCain before SNL. I think Tina Fey and the SNL team played a large role in sinking Sarah Palin. Those videos were shared after broadcast on Facebook and blogs across the country. Sure, her faux pas would have been printed in national newspapers, but many people wouldn't have had access to that information for days or weeks afterwards.

My point in all of this is that democracy has increased because of technology - like Dewey suggested.

Susan Blackmore on memes and "temes" | Video on TED.com

Susan Blackmore on memes and "temes" | Video on TED.com

"We take our point of departure from the objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others, that some of these consequence are perceived, and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others"(Dewey, 1927).

"The moment we utter the words 'The State,' a score of intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision. Without our intention and without our notice, the notion of the "The State" draws us imperceptibly into consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one another, and away from facts of human activity" (Dewey, 1927).

Pragmatism seems to be beyond both a priori and a posteriori reasoning, though it also seems to be the next logical step from the Scottish and English Enlightenment, which influenced American Modernism and valued empirical reasoning. This seems to be why John Dewey is so focused on finding the public by moving from consequence to cause. His idea is that all social action has a cause. Find that cause and we will find the public. It is empirical and inductive reasoning. Record the most observable object and trace it to its natural origin.

I wonder though what Dewey say of the public, community, the social, and the state in a User-Generated World. Dewey suggests that ideas filter through the public and influence the meta structure of the community. Its metadata if you will. These ideas become instituionalized and determine action. For instance, red means stop. These ideas that become part of our metadata are often referred as memes. These our ideas that become part of genetic community. Memes is ofcourse a play on the work genes. The video above refers to something called temes. Temes are memes but with technology infused. Some refer to them as internet memes.

The Way I See It...

And I could totally be seeing it wrong.

So the way I understand the first two chapters of Dewey is that, as we discussed in class, there is no public. I think he's saying that the the state is confused with the public, and that the state is actually the will of one or two people, so it cannot be public...?

I think that this is an interesting way to look at society, if that is, indeed, Dewey's argument.

I'll come back to this later.