Assault With a Battery, or, 'It's Alive!'

I understand that there are certain native cultures in Africa where a person's wealth is determined by how many cows he owns. What's important isn't the condition of the cows, but the number. Ten scrawny, emaciated cows are preferable to five fat and healthy cows. We have the same thing in America, but we do it with cars instead of cows. Why have one flawless Toyota Camry when you can have a rusty Renault Le Car, a Ford Taurus with power-steering issues and a wheel-less Plymouth Duster up on cinder blocks in your front yard? That is true status.

For example, I own three cars. At least two-thirds of them aren't running right now. That's because I abandoned them for 10 months when we swanned off to Oxford. Now, there is a way to prepare a vehicle for an extended hibernation: flushing the fluids, raising the tires off the ground, disconnecting the battery, swaddling the entire machine in Barbicide-soaked canvas and parking it in a climate-controlled limestone cave run by Mormons. But I didn't do any of that. The Mini we left under a friend's carport. The Mazda MPV we paid to store in the parking lot of a place in Laurel that repairs recreational vehicles. It looks as if the Mini will--fingers crossed--just need a new battery. The minivan required more work to coax it back to life.

My Lovely Wife and I actually hadn't seen the place where the minivan was parked. After our hurried departure last year my friend Pat graciously agreed to bring it over there. Yesterday Ruth and I drove up in a rented car. The minivan was at the back of the weedy, gravel lot, sandwiched between a rusted trailer and a hulking pull-behind RV. It's hard to make a minivan look small, but small ours looked. And pathetic: dwarfed by the vehicles around it, grimy, leaf-strewn, the windshield wipers fused to the windshield, the doors stuck shut from months of disuse. It was the automotive equivalent of a person in an old folk's home: vibrant when it went in, brought down by its surroundings. Worst of all, the front left tire was totally flat. The rubber had, to use an English term I've always liked, "perished." You could see that where the rubber met the road, so to speak, it had split. The steel belts were poking through at the bottom like threads in a frayed pair of jeans. Out came the tire-changing tools.

Who invented the screw? Archimedes? Well thank you, Archimedes. There's little more satisfying than using the principal of the inclined plane to lift two tons of metal. Up went the MPV, off came the lug nuts. The wheel was stuck, of course, but the skillful application of a lug wrench (bang! bang!) and it came off. The space-saver spare was a little squishy but I stuck it on and it was time to jump start the slumbering beast.

Extremely prudent people will tell you that the proper way to jump start a car is by attaching the cables between the positive posts of the two batteries and between the negative post of the booster car's battery and a grounded location on the dead car. But that never seems to work for me which is why I do it old school: positive to positive and negative to negative baby! Which worked. We took back roads home, just in case any of the other tires decided to perish, and dropped it at the corner garage for a check-up. The Mini should get a new battery today.

As for the other 33 percent of our cars, it's a 1968 Datsun roadster that I consigned to a barn in Leesburg owned by a guy who stores old sports cars. He said he'd start it every few weeks and drive it around the block to keep the juices flowing. I hope to pick it up this weekend. I'll bring my jumper cables, just in case.

Show & Tell
If you're curious about what I was doing in Oxford, there's a little mention at the end of Sarah Laurence's blog. Sarah is an American writer blogging about her time in Oxford and her academic husband, Henry, came to my final presentation.

Running With the Dogs of Neo-Liberal Imperialism

"News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment" is the name of the new book from Daya Kishan Thussu. And Daya Kishan Thussu is the name of the University of Westminster professor who spoke yesterday to the Reuters Fellows. Just as one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, so one probably shouldn't judge a book by an hour-long seminar followed by an informal Q&A, and yet that's what I'm about to do.

Thussu isn't alone in his belief that television news--the main way the world finds out about itself--has become more concerned with entertaining its audience than informing it. It's a common trope. Thussu says that, owned by entertainment companies, desperate to hold dwindling audiences, eager to cut costs, news divisions have been lowering their standards, largely adopting the techniques of entertainment.

The world we live in is very different from the world that's depicted on TV news. "The world has very serious problems," he said. "Wars on TV are Hollywoodized. In the process we don't get the real picture." Thussu said that the "neo-liberal imperialism" of soft infotainment masks the reality of a troubled planet.

I had several reactions to this, the first of which was:
Mask away, baby! If what we see on TV news--which last time I watched included stories (non-Hollywoodized, in my opinion) about Iraq, global warming, genital mutilation, Darfur, dead dolphins and, yes, the occasional comic exploits of vapid celebrities--then someone's not doing a very good job of filtering out the death, despair and decay. I also wondered how his argument fares if audiences are still falling even though news executives have embraced softball journalism.

But what really confused me was that term "neo-liberal imperialism." I always thought imperialism was armies on a map, colonists on ships, administrators sweating in provincial capitals. I asked Thussu to clarify: Is neo-liberal imperialism the market? Does it mean allowing people to decide what they like to watch, whether it's a TV show on footballers' wives or a nature program about molluscs? Apparently it is the market.

I accept that global media has influence and that that influence may not always be a good thing. However, Thussu seems to be suggesting there is a specific mechanism by which western (mainly U.S.) media giants are seeking to pull the wool over the world's eyes. Bread, circuses, that sort of thing.

In his view, public service broadcasters such as the BBC are a bulwark against this creeping crapification. What's needed is global public service broadcaster, funded perhaps by a penny tax on each e-mail that's sent. How workable would that be? Here's your bill to support a Unesco-funded TV channel so we can bring you a program about unemployment in Chad.

The problem as I see it is that it's a short step from saying what people can watch to saying what people can't: No one's watching our story on Chadian unemployment! They're all watching "Hand Me the Defibrillator: TV's Funniest Onscreen Heart Attacks." Let's restrict their ability to do that.

What Thussu means, of course, is that there could be more, should be more, quality news programming. That's what he would like. I suppose I would like it too. But even a liberal like myself (I sometimes buy the Big Issue) believes that though the market may not be a perfect system, it's the best system we've got. Clunky as it is, it's preferable to a group of elites deciding what news would be good for me to consume.

And, lo! The market does seem to have hurled onto the beach something that would seem to fit Thussu's requirements. The web has made it possible for me to find news that, in his argument, the Rupert Murdochs of the world would like to hide from me. I can read foreign newspapers. I can sample foreign bloggers. I can access the fevered bleatings of various bloggers.

I agree with Thussu that journalism could be better. But I don't see its shortcomings as some sort of conspiracy. The media reflects the societies it covers while trying, in its imperfect way, to shine light into darkened corners. If some TV news program hasn't nailed down precisely how many Iraqi civilians have died in the war--80,000; one million; or something in between--could it be that this is a figure society (the market) isn't clamoring for?

It may be, as Thussu said, a chicken and egg argument: Do people become more interested in "important" news the more they're exposed to it? Or do we seek out that which we're interested in? Whichever it is, I'm uncomfortable with the notion that people make "wrong" choices and should be nudged in the "right" direction. I would call that neo-liberal totalitarianism.

The Aunt in the Attic
Well what about the BBC? The issue of whither the Beeb has felled more forests this year than a hundred Brazilian land barons. Thussu said he'd shudder to think what would happen to the respected current affairs program "Newsnight" if it had to compete on the open market, adrift from the safe bosom of the public service charter. I would say: Leave the BBC as it is. It may be a weird, anti-market anachronism, but you would have a tough time recreating its quality programming from scratch. Make it share its iPlayer on-demand technology with any other U.K. broadcasters who want it. (We all payed for it, after all.) But get it out of areas it seems to have no business being in. Travel books? Selling advertising on its international web site? What's that have to do with informing, educating and entertaining?

The Oxford Lecture: It's All Greek to Me

Oxford University has no classes. Note that I didn't say that Oxford has no class. It has class out the ying-yang. (Is it declasse to say "ying-yang"?) But for the most part students don't do as I did many years ago at the University of Maryland: Follow a set curriculum that forces their butts into desks at certain times on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Instead, Oxford undergrads have tutorials. Every week they're given a list of books to read and lectures they might want to attend. And every week they meet their tutor (solo, or with another student) to go over the paper they were required to write. The lecture, or seminar, is the lifeblood of Oxford and I've been to plenty over the last few months. What I find interesting is how confrontational they're supposed to be. Not confrontational in the sense of shouted threats, flying fists and the sweaty grapplings of post-doctoral fellows, but intellectually confrontational. Every lecture, it seems, is a thesis defense.

I went to one yesterday afternoon at the European Studies Center. The Reuters Institute's Antonis Ellinas (PhD from Princeton; Fulbright scholar; expert on European nationalist politics) was giving a lecture on Greek politics and the media, specifically on an emergent far right party there. I now know 3,000 percent more about Greek politics than I did before, including about the anti-semitic, anti-immigrant LAOS party. After Antonis delivered his 30-minute lecture--sketching the Greek political system, outlining the rise and fall of earlier nationalist groups, taking us through exit-polling data--it was time for questions.

It's traditional for the chair of the lecture--the person from the department who sort of commissioned it--to ask the first question, and that's what Othon Anastasakis did. He had four or five questions, in fact, but he saved the killer one for last: Given the strong conservative sentiment in Greece was it correct to characterize LAOS as a far-right party at all?

Anastasakis had basically just introduced the possibility that the central tenet of Antonis's argument--the very foundation upon which it stood--was flawed, was non-existent, in fact. I imagined what I would do if my life's work was questioned. I saw myself leaping from my chair, running into the street, flagging down a taxi, heading to Southampton and signing on as a crewman on a cargo ship.

Antonis acquitted himself just fine, and I'm not really interested in that question or that answer. What fascinated me was how mannered the debate that followed was. And how illuminating. At these Oxford seminars the lecturer delivers something that is picked at, pulled apart, poked and prodded. The idea isn't (usually) to score points or to refute. It's to explore. By communally navigating the distance between the lecture and the questions, the lecturer and the audience reveal hidden features of the landscape.

Party Hearty
I was also struck by how easy students of American political science have it. They only have to master the machinations of two major parties: Democratic and Republican. Antonis and others who study European politics have to keep tabs on dozens of political parties, groups that rise, prosper and die like so many mayflies. It's like following professional baseball, plus all the farm teams.

You Can't Say That

If censors had a motto it might be "What you can't see won't hurt you." Countries such as Iran and China might have censors--in practice if not in name--but surely enlightened democracies such as Britain and the United States don't. Not so fast, says Henry Laurence, a Bowdoin College professor who lectured yesterday here in Oxford. Henry compared episodes involving public broadcasting in the U.K., Japan and the U.S. The bottom line: Uncomfortable subjects make people uncomfortable.

In 1965 a British filmmaker named Peter Watkins made a film for the BBC about the devastating effects that a nuclear attack might have on England. Called "The War Game," it featured harrowing scenes of death and destruction. We see those sorts of things everywhere now--I'm disappointed if my evening's television viewing doesn't include at least one mushroom cloud, fireball or slow pan over a post-apocalyptic landscape--but it was scary stuff back then. And since the film seemed to question the very notion of mutual assured destruction--aka, "Nuke! You're it!"--executives at the BBC started to get nervous. In the end, they were so nervous that they didn't show "The War Game." It was finally aired in 1985.

Japan's public broadcasting service, NHK, was explicitly modeled on the BBC, though critics say it is so deep in the government's pocket that it's covered with lint and fuzz. Nothing is more controversial in Japan than that country's World War II atrocities. When a conference was held in 2000 to discuss the issue of "comfort women"--Chinese, Korean and other women forced into prostitution to service the Japanese Army--it was big news. Or it would have been big news, had the Japanese media bothered to cover what was being billed as a "People's Tribunal." Still, NHK commissioned a documentary on the conference and the reparations movement. But after alleged pressure from top government officials, including future prime minister Abe Shinzo, NHK watered down the program to the point where it was as useless as a dose of homeopathic medicine.

If issues of defense and national guilt are controversial touchstones in England and Japan, what excites Americans? Sex! Gay sex! Girl on girl action! Animated rabbits! PBS's Buster the rabbit really stepped in it in 2005 when he took his camcorder to Vermont and showed families involved in producing maple sugar and cheese. The problem: The two families happened to be headed by lesbian couples. This worried the Bush education department, which had provided some funds for the children's show, and it pressured PBS not to distribute that episode of "Postcards From Buster," though stations could request it from WGBH, its maker. PBS honcho Wayne Godwin said: "In fairness I would have to say a gay character is not one we would not include. The fact that a character may or may not be gay is not a reason why they should or should not be part of this series." Apparently he was getting paid by the "not."

It's hard being a public broadcaster, taking the public's--or the government's--money but striving to remain independent. I wonder if things would have been any different if those three networks had been private. Maybe not. I remember the foofaraw over "The Day After," a 1983 ABC docudrama that, like "The War Game," showed the effects of nuclear war, in this case by incinerating Lawrence, Kansas. (Well, pretending to incinerate Lawrence, Kansas.) The Reagan White House was nervous about the film's anti-nuclear message. ABC went ahead with it. (And in Langley Park, Maryland, a college student and his roommate were inspired by the program to write a pop song called "Tomorrow Might Be the Day After." It was sort of an updating of Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," in which the singer urges a girl to sleep with him tonight, since tomorrow the Soviets might drop the big one. Yeah, it didn't really work as a song or a pickup line.)

Then there's the decision in 2004 by the Sinclair broadcasting group not to show an episode of "Nightline" in which the names and photographs of 500 U.S. servicepeople killed in Iraq were to be aired. "We find it to be contrary to public interest," said Barry Faber, general counsel to Sinclair, which owned eight ABC affiliates and dozens of other stations.

"Contrary to public interest." Hey, here's an idea: Let the public decide.

The Great Escape, Plus: Mind the Gap

Oxford is an ancient university and so certain workarounds are required to bring it into compliance with the 21st century. For example, in the good old days, if you were in the basement of a building and a fire broke out, you were content just to die of burns or smoke inhalation while silently chanting in Latin. Or, if you were lucky, you scrambled up a fire escape only to find your exit blocked by a chair against the door. Not any more. Now, courtesy of signs like that one above in Nuffield College, your escape route is clear: You simply climb to safety, emerging from the wainscoting like a rat.

I spent much of the lecture I attended in that room yesterday distractedly wondering if the panel would pop open and a ragtag line of dirty-faced survivors would crawl out. Finally, when I could take it no longer, I got up and moved a heavy table against the wall, ensuring that the proceedings wouldn't be interrupted. Now let me see, did I push the table away when the lecture was over?

Just kidding! Of course I didn't do that. I concentrated on the lecture, a talk by Paul Kellstedt, a political science professor from Texas A&M University, on sabbatical with his family here at Oxford. The lecture was entitled "The Macro Politics of a Gender Gap" and while much of it was lost on me (I start to sweat when I hear words like "variable" and "coefficient"), it was interesting.

Kelltstedt's central finding is that there is a gender gap between American men and women when it comes to political policy. Women are, on average, 2 to 5 points more "liberal" than men. What's interesting is that this relatively small number pales in comparison to other gender gaps: There are much bigger gender differences when it comes to party identification, political participation, presidential approval and presidential candidate selection. These gender gaps are growing while the macropolitical gender gap is staying the same. In other words, what you would expect to be the bedrock foundation for decisions about politics--a person's stance towards various policies (on the environment, welfare, etc.)--does not correlate directly to which candidates people support or how they vote.

I'm sure I'm mangling this completely.

Paul didn't mention it yesterday, but here's another bit of research that resulted in counterintuitive findings: The more you know about global warming, the less motivated you are to do something about it. Kellstedt and colleagues surveyed 1,093 American and asked them about global warming. "More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming," they wrote in the journal Risk Analysis.

Said Kellstedt: "The findings that the more informed respondents were less concerned about global warming, and that they felt less personally responsible for it, did surprise us. We expected just the opposite."

Too bad there's no fire escape to help the planet escape from global warming.

Ted Nelson: Crackpot or Genius?

And so yesterday to a lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute by a man named Ted Nelson, the guy who either "invented" the World Wide Web years before Tim Berners-Lee could tie his own shoelaces or who is a tragic joke, destined to forever claim that the paradigm-shattering software he's been working on for four decades is just around the corner.

Nelson went to Swarthmore and Harvard, where he trained as a sociologist. The story goes that his severe attention deficit disorder raised in him a wish that he could organize all his thoughts and the countless pieces of paper on which he scribbled notes. Early on Nelson saw the potential of computers and he envisioned a system that would not only link documents but maintain their connections. When a writer moved paragraphs around in a document, there would be still be a version of the original document. When a writer quoted from another writer there would be a pathway to that other work. When another work was cited, a royalty micropayment would somehow wing its way to the copyright holder.

Nelson coined the word "hypertext" to describe these interconnections and he called the project Xanadu, after the pleasure palace in Coleridge's poem. (It's an actual place, too, the summer capital of Mongol emperors. Nelson showeds a Google Earth image.) He wrote several influential books that, among other things, outlined his vision.

But Nelson seemed better at describing things that had yet to be made rather than actually making them. He was not a computer programmer himself and he enlisted the help of a rotating cast of characters who have been working on Xanadu since the 1960s. (Nelson hates this Wired story from 1995 describing the so-far ill-fated project.) Despite the fact that he was a visiting fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, I was prepared to write him off as a crackpot. I mean, the guy showed up to his lecture dressed in a tuxedo, claimed to have written the world's first rock musical, sang three songs and recited a poem.

But perhaps he does have something to teach, after all, more as an inspiration than as a creator. He said he wanted to invent Xanadu because if he didn't, "the techies would screw it up. And that's exactly what happened." Word processing programs replicate the worst aspects of paper while ignoring some of the best. He despises "cut and paste" because it doesn't actually do that. "Hide and plug" is what he calls it, since the action makes your text disappear before showing up when you press ctrl V. The web, he said, is limiting, not liberating. He bristles when people talk about things like "Windows technology." There's precious little technology involved, he argues. Software is just a collection of conventions, most of which we've got wrong.

He showed a demo of Xanadu: Eleven long, thin documents were arranged behind two working documents. Everything floated in three dimensions, with lines and triangles of different colors showing various connections. It was a confusing hodge-podge but it hinted at a certain power. Perhaps it was a graphical representation of Nelson's mind.

"It always seemed to me that things would be so much better if they were different," Nelson said. I'm not sure he's right about everything, but he's probably right about a few things. Too often we allow ourselves to fall into ruts, doing things the way we've always been done them just because that's the way they've always been done. We don't push ourselves to not only think outside the box, but think outside the store that sold us the box. Visionaries should be allowed to be crackpots, if a few of their visions turn out to be right.

Don't Spare Me the Lecture

When I saw the name of the event published in the University Gazette I knew I had to attend: "The Bapsybanoo Marchioness of Winchester Lecture." The lecture could have been on cuticle growth in South American ungulates or the economic ramifications of medieval shipbuilding techniques and I would have been there. After all, how often do you get to hear someone say the word "Bapsybanoo"?

Held last week in the Examination Schools, the Bapsybanoo Marchioness of Winchester Lecture is one of those annual endowed lectures that universities such as Oxford are rife with. Someone dies and leaves a pot of money to serve two purposes: 1. to further knowledge on a particular subject and 2. to keep alive the donor's name.

And what a name! Born in India in 1902, Bapsybanoo Pavry was the daughter of a Zoroastrian high priest. She moved to Britain as a young woman and, according to bits and pieces I gleaned from the web, was quite the society beauty. Among her acquaintances was the 16th Marquis of Winchester, four decades her senior. It was not until 1952, when she was 51, that she married the 90-year-old Marquis and earned her title. (As you are no doubt aware, a marchioness falls between a countess and a duchess in the leader board of British aristocracy.)

The union was not to last, however, for just a few weeks after the nuptials, and before the marriage had been consummated (at least according to the subsequent divorce case), the Marquis left the Marchioness for another woman. That the other woman happened to be Eve Fleming, the mother of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, adds a nice touch to the story.

Before she died in 1995, Bapsybanoo endowed at least three things: the Oxford lecture, an annual academic prize and a community center in Winchester. The community center, it is speculated, was prompted by her disappointment at not being greeted by children waving flags and banners when she alighted at some public event. A 500,000-pound bequest was made but the building still hasn't been put up, since Bapsybanoo's stipulations were very specific. The truth is, the city says it doesn't really need a community center, at least not where Bapsybanoo wanted it. So the money just sits in the bank, earning interest.

But the lecture, launched in 1996 and meant to address international relations, lives on. The title of this year's was "Islamic persuasions: pathways to change in Islamic norms," delivered by Washington University's John R. Bowen.

As 5 o'clock rolled around there were 10 people in a room that the fire marshal said could accommodate 100. "We'll give them a few more minutes," I heard the convenor say to Dr. Bowen. "They've got to find their way upstairs."

"It's the worst possible time to have a lecture," the convenor added in explanation. "Thursday of Seventh Week. Lord Rees is speaking. Edward Mortimer is talking about the U.N. There's someone lecturing on Virginia Woolf.... Mind you, you're probably not competing with all of those."

"Well, Virginia Woolf I'm not," Dr. Bowen noted dryly.

Three or four more people drifted in and Dr. Bowen began. "I'm happy to have such a distinguished audience," he said good-naturedly. "Which is what you say when it isn't a large one."

The lecture--on how different Muslim communities adapt, or try to adapt, sharia law to their particular places--was rather interesting. I'm sure Bapsybanoo the Marchioness of Winchester would have approved.

That Petrol Emotion: Saying 'Bye' to Oil

And so last night to a lecture by David Sandalow, a Brookings Institution scholar and author of the book "Freedom From Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States' Oil Addiction." If the lecture had been in the United States I'm sure we all would have fought our way through traffic and jockeyed for a parking space. Since it was in Oxford, the bike racks were full. As it turned out, bicycles aren't among the changes Sandalow thinks we need to reduce our reliance on oil.

That greasy addiction has both environmental and national security ramifications. The oil we burn pollutes the atmosphere and the fact that it bubbles under the ground in not very nice places--Saudi Arabia, Iraq--means that our foreign policy is unhealthily obsessed with those locations.

So, what to do? Here's what Sandalow, a former advisor to President Clinton, said:
1. Broaden our vehicle fleet. The U.S. transportation infrastructure is based overwhelmingly on one thing: the internal combustion engine. Our infrastructure--refineries, gas stations--is set up to support that. But what else can we do? This:
2. Make cars that connect to the electric grid. Electric vehicles don't produce the greenhouse gases that belch from the tailpipes of gas and diesel cars. Hybrid engines are okay, but totally electric is better. (At home in Washington Sandalow drives a Prius retrofitted with lithium batteries.) But doesn't that just move pollution from the vehicle to the power plant? No, he said, because most of our pollution comes from vehicles while electric engines are so efficient that particulates would inevitably be reduced. The big benefit, he said, is plugging electric vehicles in to charge at night, when there is excess capacity in the power grid.
3. Explore biofuels. Sandalow admitted he isn't as keen on this as he once was. Creating ethanol can mean growing corn, which means using fertilizer, which means nitrate run-off, which means dead crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. But biofuel can also be made from switchgrass and other forms of cellulose that don't have as detrimental an environmental impact. At best, biofuels are a "transitional answer," he said.
4. Improve vehicle fuel-efficiency. U.S. automakers should build lighter-weight cars. They should embrace cleaner diesel engines already common in Europe. And, please, do something about 18-wheelers, which go through the air with all the aerodynamicism of a cinder block in a tub of Jell-O.
5. Invest in mass transit and reward telecommuting. Sandalow lamented that it's easier for a community in the U.S. to get government money to widen a road than to build a subway. But as anyone who's ever spent anytime in the Washington area knows, widening roads reduces congestion for about a week, after which everyone flocks to it and it's clogged again. (Widening a road to reduce congestion, Sandalow said, is like widening a belt to lose weight.) He said that working from home has benefits beyond saving oil: Telecommuting workers are happier, more productive workers.

That's a very brief synopsis of an hour-long speech based on a 272-page book. Some in the audience quibbled with some of Sandalow's points--can a U.S. president really promulgate policy that would end Americans' century-long love affair with the internal combustion engine? wouldn't the ExxonMobils of the world resist a turn away from the commodity that has made them rich?--but most seemed to buy his arguments.

China will have to play a role in the global climate change picture--600 new cars registered in Beijing every day, Sandalow said, with very few old ones being scrapped--but America is the key. After years of inaction under President Bush, Sandalow predicted the next president, whomever s/he is, will be committed to addressing global warming and, therefore, the unhealthy fixation the U.S. has on oil.

In my particularly American way I was disappointed that Sandalow didn't promise a technological, magic-bullet solution to all our problems--dialithium crystals for everyone!--but rather was saying that a lot of little things, as well as changes in behavior, would have to be combined to wean us from oil. But, hey, if I can get my hands on a Tesla Roadster, I'm all in favor of electric cars.

After the lecture the crowd was invited, as is Oxford tradition, to a reception. The lecture, sponsored by the James Martin 21st Century School at the university, was at the Museum of Natural History. As I sipped champagne and nibbled duck pancakes, I couldn't help but reflect on the aptness of the setting: On display all around us were the skeletons of dinosaurs, animals whose very skin and bones had turned to oil millennia ago. Dinosaurs, you will recall, are extinct.

Long Live Literacy: Lilley's Last Lecture

Those of us who attended all four of Anthony Lilley's lectures felt a certain camaraderie as last night's seminar drew to a close. For four weeks we few, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters) had been together as one as Lilley explained why he shouldn't be called the News International visiting professor of broadcast media but the News International visiting professor of networked media.

Okay, he didn't say that in so many words, but if the Oxford mediaocracy takes anything from his sojourn here, it should be that broadcast is dead. (I described his earlier lectures here, here and here.)

Lilley billed this as a user-generated lecture, taking inspiration from comments on his university blog, but, frankly, visitors to his blog didn't really pick up the gauntlet he had thrown down. I include myself in that, even if Lilley did reference a quote I posted on his blog. It's from a fellow named Benedict Anderson. When reading a daily newspaper, Anderson wrote, "each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throught the calendar. ... At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in every day."

I confess I get a bittersweet and melancholy feeling when I read that, for it describes a world that's on its way out, if it isn't gone already. But there's no use crying. As Lilley said, he didn't approach his subject--the future of media--from the standpoint of "how do we preserve newspapers?"

The market still offers simultaneous experiences--witness the 107 million people who watched the Super Bowl "together"--and some media experiences will go forth and multiply, living beyond the moment of their creation: The Beatles' White Album, for example, which people can enjoy without any temporal association to the Fab Four. Sticky ideas will spread virally, borne along by communities that can coalesce with ease.

Lilley touched on the proposed takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft. It's plain to him that it shows a strong desire to capture more of the lucrative online advertising market and could presage a shift of ads from TV to the Web. He cautioned that anything that threatens to restrict choice should be weighed closely.

In a previous lecture Lilley outlined what a public service broadcaster should accomplish: inform, stimulate, etc. Wasn't that also what an educational institution should do? Should we replace schools with online interactive learning centers? Lilley wouldn't go that far, but he criticized Oxford for refusing to join the 21st century. Why not put lectures online, he asked, a low-cost way of using the power of the network to energize the university's core values?

The digital revolution brings with it an explosion of choice and an erosion of control. With that, said Lilley, comes the Moral Panic, as parents turn to government to protect their children from inappropriate content and internet predators. The answer, Lilley suggested, isn't more regulation (we already have laws to protect children) but education: Parents and children need to be more media literate.

And that was his final message: Whether we like it or not, it's a big, messy, open-source world out there. We all need to learn how to navigate it.

Cynical World
There was an interesting question from a student about whether media literacy required a certain amount of cynicism. I was wondering the same thing myself: Do we tell our children not to believe anything they see on the Web? Or would that deny them the good things they can find there? Perhaps it's good for them to learn as early as possible that the world is full of all sorts of people peddling all sorts of information--and disinformation.

Come on Get Happy....Except for Some of You

I was not happy that I missed the first three lectures in a four-part series called "Prospects of Happiness" at Green College. But it's no use beating myself up about it, so off I went to last night's final lecture. It was an unhappy climax.

Not because it was a bad lecture. It was gripping, actually. But it was gripping in the same way a train wreck or a horror movie is gripping. The speaker was Richard Wilkinson, a professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham. Wilkinson has spent 30 years studying one thing: What affect does living in an unequal society have upon its citizens? What that means is, what happens if there are vast differences in income in a society--with the top 20 percent earning eight times more than the lower 20 percent, say?

To find out, Wilkinson looked at data from about two dozen wealthy countries. The bottom axis of his graph was income inequality. The further along to the right a country was the bigger the gap between the richest and the poorest. Then he graphed various social problems along the vertical axis. The higher a country was, the worse off it was.

In slide after slide--infant mortality, teen births, poor life expectancy, high rate of violence, etc.--the United States was way up and to the right. It often looked as if it was shooting off the page, headed for the stratosphere. Down and to the left on the charts were the nordic countries and Japan. "I'm sorry they're all the same story, but that's why I'm here telling you this," said Wilkinson.

Wilkinson's thesis is that income inequality has detrimental social effects. He says he's corrected for things like poverty and access to health care. It isn't just a case that the USA has more people and thus more poor people (and more "poor people's problems"). He's eliminated everything as a factor but the distance between the richest and the poorest. And that very distance brings everyone down--not just those at the short end of the stick.

So why would this be the case? Wilkinson thinks it has something to do with social status. A grossly unequal country threatens the self-esteem of every citizen, as you worry about your place in the pecking order. It is a "less friendly" country. While friendship is based on sharing, reciprocity and notions of social obligation, social status is based on power: who has it and who doesn't. Wilkinson said that when researchers give people tasks to test their body's level of cortisol--a hormone that rises with stress--those tasks that invoke threats to self-esteem or social status, tasks which others can judge negatively without the subject having much control, raise levels the most.

It was depressing stuff. The United States did not come out well and it was a reminder that as wealthy and free as we are, we're nowhere close to the dream we ought to have for our country. Even typing that makes me feel like a goddamn communist and of course I'm not. I believe in the free market and I think people have a responsibility to themselves and their families to do the best they can to prosper. But great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few is bad for the nation as a whole, not just for those on the welfare rolls.

Wilkinson said he just studies this stuff. He doesn't offer recommendations. But he did wonder if employee ownership of companies might help address the inequality. I didn't quite understand that, actually, but I do question the massive compensation packages some CEOs receive, even when their companies are doing poorly. And, yes, why not tax the rich more? It seems to me they can afford it.

By the way, here's one of Wilkinson's papers, on inequality and child well-being. The graph is a bit different from the ones I described, and so it goes in the other direction. But it doesn't paint a very happy picture.

Radio, Radio

The payment extracted for sipping wine in a handsome function room in an ancient Oxford college is typically attendance at a lecture. Usually it's a small price to pay. Sometimes the cost is steep, indeed. But occasionally it's a pleasure, as it was last night, when I attended something called the Philip Geddes Memorial Lecture.

The topic was "Radio: Medium of the Moment" and the presenter was a journalist named Martha Kearney. She started out in radio news in London, moved to television and, since April, has been back in radio, as host of BBC Radio 4's daily current affairs program "The World at One."

Many colleagues, Kearney said, were baffled that she left television for radio. In the hierarchy that all journalists mentally calculate, radio is inferior to TV. But, she argued, radio can touch listeners in ways no other medium can and is, in these challenging digital-broadband-podcast-user-generated-content times, showing amazing stamina. (Of course, you couldn't really expect her to say otherwise. I can't imagine her delivering a lecture entitled "Radio: It Was Nice While It Lasted" or "Radio: Can I Have My Old TV Job Back, Please?")

While television news audiences have fallen, radio listenership, especially among the young, has risen--this 40 years after the birth of "modern" radio in Britain. The explosion of delivery mechanisms almost demands a change in terminology. "Radio" is a multipurpose word that means both the machine that one switches on and the program that comes out of the speaker. Those programs--that "content"--will be delivered in increasingly diverse ways, from downloadable .mp3 files to programs sent to mobile phones.

Regardless of how it tickles your cochlea, Kearney said radio will possess the same vital qualities, that of being "personal, portable and universal." Radio, she said, "is the most personal medium of all, a voice in your ear that follows you around."

Socialized Media
After Kearney's lecture, Tim Gardam, himself a former television executive, asked a question: How fertile was the ground for commercial radio stations? Could they flourish in an environment where so many resources were lavished on the BBC? Kearney acknowledged the dilemma but hoped commercial radio could survive, possibly by taking advantage of the cost savings that come from harnessing new digital technology.

The exchange made me ponder the irony of the BBC: It wants to be--it has to be--successful, but it can't be too successful. It needs a viable commercial media the same way a company like Microsoft needs to be able to point at Apple and say: "See, we don't really have a monopoly."

As an Anglophile raised on PBS and "Masterpiece Theatre" I've always thought of the BBC as a Good Thing. And I'm sure it is. But I can see how--regardless of one's thoughts on its political bent--the BBC could be seen as a force that disrupts the intricate workings of The Market. Not that I understand those workings or even believe that they are intricate.

Wookey Nookie
As I mentioned Monday, we spent the latter part of last week driving around the West Country. Because driving around certain villages--their roads a warren of one-way streets and diabolical roundabouts--can be maddening, we often saw the same signs again and again. That was the case in the Somerset town of Wells, where between trying to find an ATM and looking for Wells Cathedral, we drove down the same stretch of asphalt a dozen times. We kept passing the sign for a village called Wookey Hole and laughing at the name.

Then in today's Guardian I read that a hotelier in Wookey Hole is planning to host Britain's first ever Erotic Film Festival there next summer. I don't think I will ever be able to think of Wookey Hole the same way again.