Christopher Schroeder

Category: reviews

  • Revolutionary Thinking

    I had been encouraged after a conference session to read Heather Ford’s (2022) Writing the Revolution, and can understand after having done so why this book was recommended.

    Ford in it offers her decade-long digital ethnography of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Wikipedia entry from its emergence and through its evolution and uses it to challenge conventional ideas about facts in the digital world. To do so, she outlines a framework for facts that includes allies, or those who author or edit Wikipedia content, and companions, or sources that validate and verify these assertions.

    Ford uses these results to challenge conventional Wikipedia principles, such as neutral point of view, verifiability of facts, and prohibitions against primary research. Instead, she argues that facts are contested and change, and as such illustrate the reality that knowledge is not objective but rather situated, especially in a digital world.

    This account systematically examines her observations and consistently supports her claims. Moreover, it establishes context through interviews with central participants, including those who led early efforts to establish this page, and in so doing shaped the narrative around this event, such as whether, and when, to call it a revolution.

    I wanted more synthesis, implications, and even application, especially beyond the Wikipedia world, but I admit that at least the latter wasn’t the ostensible purpose of this book, which is a successful account of academic research. As such, it illustrates a way of bridging the academic and the public, and offers a way of thinking about more relevant research.

    And I found it to be useful in ways I didn’t expect. For me, its engaging style consistently demonstrated a grad school tenet — knowledge as situated — that seemed intuitively true, and yet to have wide-ranging implications, especially for institutionalized practices, which I could never confront.

    I think Ford’s account clearly illustrates an interim step in an effort to transform a grad school stipulation into a useful foundational principle.

  • Nothing Smashing

    Many credible critics liked The Smashing Machine, which I liked more than I expected yet couldn’t recommend.

    This sports biography focuses on several years (1997-2000) in the life of mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr as he confronts professional and personal challenges. These moments were also featured in a 2002 documentary, which seems to have been widely admired.

    I’m a fan of neither sports biographies nor Dwayne Johnson, who nonetheless attempts to go places in his Kerr performance that I’ve not seem him acknowledge in other roles. Johnson claims that this movie, which also changed his life, isn’t a “fight” film but a “life” movie perhaps in part because its subject is still alive, and even makes a cameo appearance in a grocery store at its end.

    Neither Johnson nor his co-start Emily Blunt, who plays Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn Staples, succeeds for similar and different reasons. For Blunt, the issue is less her ability — she makes the most of her role, and attempts to add dimensions but runs out of room in this script. Regardless, the effect limits the appeal of this movie.

    The bigger problem is the lack of a clear purpose. For example, I was curious why Kerr, whom I’d watched struggle with losing, could laugh after having done so in the shower while his friend, and manager / trainer Mark Coleman went on to win the “life-changing amount” of money. Both had mused about the possibility of fighting each other one day, which until this loss seemed inevitable in this tournament.

    The explanation suggested by this movie has something to do with Kerr’s newfound sobriety, including its effects upon his romantic relationship. His addiction had previously forced him to withdraw from a tournament, for which he had apologized, so his sobriety could be both why he can fight again and why he cannot maintain the ferocious professional reputation. Perhaps that also accounts for why he was showering while Coleman was fighting.

    Or maybe the purpose is more recognition for Kerr, who was a MMA pioneer but remained relatively unknown even after the 2002 documentary. The scrolling epilogue informs audiences that Kerr and Staples marry soon thereafter and later have a son — becoming parents is a conflict between them earlier in the movie — and that they were together for fifteen years, which seems life-changing enough.

    I’d guess if pressed that the writer and director Benny Safdie wanted to highlight a forgotten figure whom others could admire. Such a possibility, and parts of the plot, are easier to understand after reading about the previous documentary on which this version is based. Regardless, I think Safide gets bogged down in doing so as a box-office success, and cannot find the proper perspective to do both.

    Perhaps both are ultimately impossible, or at least seem so in this version of a biography of someone who might be admirable nonetheless. By its end, I had no greater interest in this sport, and didn’t learn anything about being human, even as I had been more entertained for a couple of hours than I expected, which at that point seemed enough.

  • More From Our Monsters?

    I was more intrigued by Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer (2023) at its beginning than I was by its end.

    This book is presented as an audience memoir by its author. In it, Dederer considers the question of art created by artists who have behaved badly. She considers a range of different artists, including herself, and she concludes that audiences emotionally respond to whatever moves them, which for her seems sufficient.

    publisher cover of MONSTERS: A FAN'S DILEMMA by Claire Dederer

    Others readers’ reactions included a debate about the ethics of Dederer’s conclusion and this question. One for example advocated for a distinction between artists who would remuneratively benefit from the consumption of their art, which audiences should avoid, and those who would not, which was acceptable to consume. Another argued for the standards or criteria she had obtained from The Feminist Mystique, which determine her decisions about what, or whose, art to consume even as she was willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of others’ limits.

    Both of these reactions ignore the effects of distribution networks for example and larger social and economic forces that affect whose art is available for consumption or what art certain audiences are expected to consume. Some even so far to argue for the impossibility of ethical consumption in capitalist economies, which could make the more conventional conclusion — art should be separated from artists — that Dederer criticizes the only attractive answer.

    Some reviewers describe this noteworthy and award-winning book, which expands on Dederer’s Paris Review essay, as part memoir and part debate, in which she resists the option of extending her original thesis across hundreds of pages and insists upon repeatedly rethinking her answers to this question. Others suggest it’s more a meditation on the moral ambiguity of this issue that connects the history of artists with the histories of audiences.

    One problem I had was that I expected a wider range of answers, which wouldn’t have precluded Dederer’s conclusion. This expectation is less a criticism of her personalization of this subject, which in retrospect is understandable, as it is a suggestion about its oversimplification, or reduction.

    I also object to her conclusion, which is another problem with this book I have. Such a conclusion allows art consumers to do little more than accept others’ experiences. At most, we can only inquire into others’ interpretive (consumptive?) experiences, or ask how they came to their conclusions about the art they’ve consumed. Such questions are intriguing yet ultimately limited and for me unsatisfying.

    I did appreciate the way this undeniably entertaining book engages its question and its readers, which is an accomplishment. I just wanted more of both.