I recently finished Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph Ellis, a Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College. The book, which tells six stories profiling the leading American statesmen of the time and chronicling the early years of the nation, deservedly received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2001. The stories it tells include the Burr–Hamilton duel, the Compromise of 1790, the Congressional debate surrounding slavery, Washington's Farewell Address, the relationship between John and Abigail Adams, and the alternating feelings of amity and enmity in the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. I enjoyed the book so thoroughly that I decided to send Ellis an email, reproduced below.

Professor Ellis,

I would like to preface this note by saying that never before have I written to an author, but I felt compelled to do so after I finished reading Founding Brothers.

My name is Prameet Kumar and I'll be a junior at the University of Pennsylvania this fall. I usually don't read history books, but decided to give yours a try. I was immediately mesmerized. The way you handled your subject matter was magnificent. I had known the basic facts of some of the narratives you wrote about in your book, but the intricacies and nuances that you explored truly made history come alive for me. I nearly shed a tear when your book came to an end with the powerful story of Jefferson and Adams both dying on the fiftieth anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence.

Founding Brothers has ignited in me a deep desire to learn more about the birth of the American republic. I look forward to reading all the other books you have published and the books you will write in the future.

Thank you for the work you do.

Prameet Kumar
prameetkumar@gmail.com

The night Barack Obama won the presidential election, his supporters stormed the streets. In Philadelphia, I saw them parade down the sidewalks and the roads, drumming on trash cans and stopping cars in traffic. The crowd cheered and chanted in unison, “Yes we can!” Those who had voted Democrat felt like they were a part of the victory. Meanwhile, Republicans sulked quietly and dejectedly. They had already been distancing themselves from John McCain for quite some time now, and blamed his loss on the shortcomings of the candidate himself, not the Republican party. The behaviors of both Democrats and Republicans can be explained by concepts of the theory of social identity—the former group was basking in reflected glory and the latter was cutting off reflected failure.

The theory of social identity is a well-substantiated explanation for the psychological basis of intergroup discrimination. It states that individuals, in an effort to increase their self-esteem, tend to obtain part of their sense of identity from the groups to which they belong. A corollary of the theory of social identity is the concept of basking in reflected glory (BIRGing), by which individuals associate themselves with successful others to the point that the achievements of the others is regarded as those of the individuals. Its inverse is cutting off reflected failure (CORFing), by which individuals distance themselves and minimize their connection to the failings of their group.

The phenomenon of BIRGing was explored in an influential 1976 paper by Robert Cialdini and his colleagues titled “Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies.” In their first experiment, the researchers found that undergraduate students wore school-related apparel in greater numbers after their university’s football team had won a match. In two other experiments, they showed that students used the pronoun “we” more often if the university’s team had won than if it had lost.

The principles of BIRGing and CORFing were shown in American politics in Chris Miller’s 2009 paper titled “Yes We Did! Basking in Reflected Glory and Cutting Off Reflected Failure in the 2008 Presidential Election,” which included two studies of Obama and McCain supporters. The first study found that individuals would display political posters and lawn signs supporting Obama for a greater length of time than posters that supported McCain, showing people’s desire to associate with winning parties and dissociate with losing parties. In the second study, Miller had individuals evaluate (both before and after the election) their feelings toward the candidate they supported in how “warm and friendly” they felt toward him. Again, as predicted, the average scores McCain supporters gave decreased and the average scores Obama supporters gave increased after the election.

The 2008 presidential election was unique in many ways, one of which was the extent to which voters were enamored with Obama. Perhaps one reason for this idolization was the desire to BIRG. As Miller suggested in his paper, it would be interesting to analyze how this BIRGing translates from Obama’s campaign to his administration. With his job approval rating currently at 52% (down from a high of almost 70%), will his adherents continue to bask in his reflected glory or will they decide to cut off his reflected failure, and distance themselves from the candidate they once supported, in order to preserve their own self-esteem?

Excerpted from my psychology paper, “Social Identity Theory in Politics: Studies of Basking in Reflected Glory and Cutting Off Reflected Failure”

With the advent of capitalism and the bourgeois fascination with financial speculation in the nineteenth century, dealers became an indispensable part of the art industry. Paul Durand-Ruel, a dealer closely associated with the Impressionists, was one of the most successful speculators of his time. That he readily assumed the enormous risk and financial insecurity of dealing Impressionist paintings when the reputations of their painters had not yet been established showed his aptitude as an entrepreneur.

However, although dealers practiced much speculation, they were unwilling to take unnecessary risks to promote avant garde art. A means of making speculative investments in art more secure was the capitalist concept of mass production, also known as serial production. Serial production grew in popularity in the nineteenth century with the help of the development of lithography, a method of planographic printing cheap enough for reproduction in mass-circulated newspapers. The mass production model had some of its roots in the cotton industry, in which a fixed amount of capital was used to develop a homogenous product that returned significant profits; the method decreased the financial risk associated with speculation to a certain extent. Other industries adopted this approach, including the silk industry of Lyons, whose guiding principles were specialization and efficiency.

Dealers and artists, too, used mass production to decrease speculative risk; Claude Monet’s Haystacks series is a prime example. By 1890, Monet’s artwork had become reliable investments, and his paintings were selling quickly for very high prices. Financially secure and confident in his ability to sell his work, Monet took a page from the serial production of industrial goods to efficiently create homogenous paintings; he could specialize in haystacks or water lilies or cathedrals or poplars, churning them out in mass quantities.

Monet's Haystacks series consists of paintings that are almost exactly alike, using the theme of repetition to show disparities in the impression of light at different times of day, kinds of weather, and seasons. He captures the ephemeral changes of nature on the same scene. The sky is tinted blue in one and burning bright orange in another; the shadow of the haystack falls to the left in one and to the right in another; the ground is covered with grass in one and with snow in another.

But these slight variations on the theme are but small changes to a repetitive image. Serial painting dispenses with many artistic choices in favor of efficiency. No longer did Monet choose his subject and style for every painting he did; the decisions had already been made. For most paintings in the series, there would be two haystacks depicted—the one in the foreground slightly bigger than the one in the background, each casting a shadow on the ground; there would be hills behind the haystacks and, above them, a strip of sky.

The repetitive Haystacks series, as expected, sold very well. Fifteen of the twenty-five paintings in the series were exhibited by Durand-Ruel in May 1891 and sold almost immediately, fetching an average price of about 1,000 francs. Monet was very well aware of the commercial nature of this serial production; he wrote that he needed “these valuable commodities, these mass productions” for his dealers. Fellow Impressionists Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro considered his series to be financially motivated and referred to it as “art de vente,” or art made specifically for sale. (This statement is a bit hypocritical of Degas, whose serial production of ballet scenes—though not as repetitive as Monet’s—still relied on the same principle of homogeneity.) Pissarro criticized Monet’s Haystacks series by saying, “I do not know how it does not bother Monet to constrain himself to this repetition—here are the terrible effects of success!”

Excerpted from my art history paper, "Impressionism, Inc.--The Effect of Capitalism on Nineteenth-Century Art"

Anyone who has ever read a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book understands the concept of hypertext fiction, storytelling that is non-linear in its organizational structure. Modern readers can understand the concept of hypertext because they are familiar with hyperlinks, connections from one hypertext file to another (for example, clicking on the hyperlink "View my complete profile" on the right will direct you to the hypertext file that is my Blogger profile).

Hypertext fiction is a remarkable creation for two reasons. First, it unfetters literature from the shackles of linearity and temporality. No longer do books need to be read sequentially from start to finish; authors are able to guide their readers to skip around in space and time. Second (and more significant), writers penned hypertext fiction before engineers invented hypertext.

In July 1945, Vanevar Bush -- the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (a federal agency during the Second World War) -- published the article "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly. In it, he proposed a proto-hypertext computer system that he called "memex"  (a portmanteau of memory and index), which would create links between two pieces of information. "The process of tying two items together is the important thing," Bush wrote, predicting hyperlinks. "This is the essential feature of the memex." But it wasn't until 1967 that this concept was given life and the Hypertext Editing System (HES) research project was conducted at Brown University.

Twenty-six years before the HES and four years before Bush's article, Argentine poet, critic and writer Jorge Luis Borges published "The Garden of Forking Paths," arguably the first work of hypertext fiction ever published. In this short story, Borges explored the theme of alternate realities and the forking of a narrative in space and time -- "an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times," or hypertexts. Borges wanted his work to replicate a labyrinth; readers should be dropped into it at any instance in the story and forced to fumble their way around from point to point within it. (This fumbling around is a similar idea to starting off, for example, on Bob Dylan's Wikipedia page and ending up on that of Oslo, Norway by clicking on various hyperlinks.)

Published in the same year as "Garden," Borges's "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" predicted "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels thirty-eight years before their inception. He thought of a book that trifurcated twice backward in time to create nine different stories, providing the following diagram to illustrate his point. The reader had a choice of any of nine different beginnings (x 1-9), any of three events that followed (y 1-3) and ended up at the same conclusion (z).

The internet has made hypertext and hyperlinking such a commonplace idea that it becomes difficult to appreciate Borges's innovations. If he were alive today, perhaps he would abandon print as his medium of choice and migrate to the World Wide Web, where his vision of forking paths can be realized more easily. In fact, here is University College London student Vaios Papanagnou's project to create a hypertext version of Borges's "Garden." You can also check out University of California San Diego student Shannon Chamberlain's hypertext version of Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1961), a literary masterpiece and perhaps the first novel-length work of hypertext fiction ever published.

Earlier today, I went to an event sponsored by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter in which he answered twenty questions asked of him by audience members. The popular press prefers to call such a gathering a "town hall meeting," a name I find myself questioning. The City of Philadelphia is not a town by any measure and our University's student union building is no town hall.

The term is, of course, meant to evoke the establishments of local governance whose history in our country can be traced back to the legislative bodies of New England colonies (a tradition that continues in some places across the nation). But it wasn't until the bicentennial of America's independence that the modern political concept of the town hall meeting emerged.

While campaigning in the 1976 presidential election, Jimmy Carter discovered that the town hall meeting was an efficient way to increase his emergent popularity. After the idea developed for a couple of decades, Bill Clinton furthered its prominence by televising his town hall meetings. George W. Bush considered the events to be so crucial that he often made sure his audience contained no dissenters. Why did these presidents consider this relatively recent political phenomenon to be so important?

 Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist and former Clinton aide, credited the rise of the town hall meeting to the "disintermediation" of politics -- that is, the elimination of the intermediary that is the media. Politicians benefit from this disintermediation by growing popular support for their policies and initiatives without having to field (what are usually) tougher questions from trained journalists and without having to address follow-up questions, all the while making themselves appear to be populists who are in touch with common people -- all in a setting that is more of a public relations opportunity than a press conference. The public (supposedly) benefits from having greater direct access to the politician.

These days, all politicians -- from the President to the most minor public official -- seem to be holding their own town hall meetings. But these superficial attempts at conversation add nothing to, and perhaps even detract from, the public discourse. The vitriol that came out of the completely ineffectual town hall meetings on health care this summer prove that point.

If politicians truly want to connect with the public and improve this flawed model of town hall meetings, they need to find a way to revert to the historical beginnings of these gatherings in colonial New England. The reason its town halls proved so successful was because of the diverse participation they promoted and the informed dialogue they supported. Today's town hall meetings would do well to learn from their ideal of truly deliberative democracy.

A few weeks ago, I bought four posters for my dorm room: Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhone, Wassily Kandinsky's Farbstudie Quadrate, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and (because I couldn't have walls covered with only serious pieces of art) Homer Simpson's Edvard Munch Scream.

These posters are, of course, only reproductions of classics. So although I wouldn't technically be lying if I were to say that I have a Van Gogh hanging above my bed, no one would let me get away with claiming that I do. What is it, then, that separates "Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888. Paris, Musée d'Orsay" and "Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone, 2009. Philadelphia, Wilson Room 303"? Aren't they identical images with the same color, composition and value?

In my Cinema Studies class last year, we read a text by German essayist and critic Walter Benjamin titled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)." Benjamin argued that the reproducibility of art allowed by the innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution degrades the work and results in the loss of its "aura," the awe-inspiring experience of witnessing the piece up close. The cheap "exhibition value" of reproductions displaces the inherent "cult value" of the authentic artwork.

Indeed, it's one thing to look at a photocopied Starry Night stuck to my wall with tape. It's quite another (I assume) to observe the original -- to bask in the magnificence of its Post-Impressionist aura in the Musée d'Orsay.

A century after the end of the Industrial Revolution, we find ourselves in the heyday of the Digital Revolution. Seventy-three years after Benjamin published his essay on reproducibility, I am publishing the first post of my first blog. In these entries, I replicate my thoughts, my ideas and myself -- offer myself for exhibition. This blog is not my first digital reproduction; I've already made copies of myself on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and countless other websites.

As I start this blog, I hope that Benjamin's critique of reproduction limits itself to the twentieth century. I hope the work of art in the age of digital reproduction can find a way to use the piece's exhibition value to augment its cult value. I hope the publication and replication of my thoughts in this blog don't do too much harm to the aura of my real self. And I hope that if you ever meet the real me, your impression won't have suffered terribly from knowing my digital reproductions (just as I hope that looking at a poster print of Nighthawks every day only helps me to appreciate the real work of art that much better if I ever go see it in Chicago).