I drove five miles in the wrong direction this morning before I remembered that my polling place had been moved, and I briefly thought about not voting at all. What's on my ballot anyway? Exactly two contested races--township trustee and school board. My vote is unlikely to make a difference, but nevertheless I turned around and drove to the polling place to cast my vote, which was more difficult than usual because the machines were acting wonky so anyone who had a job to get to was urged to use paper ballots instead. Then of course I was way behind my usual commuting schedule so I drove through two 20-mph school zones and got stuck--twice!--behind school buses loading passengers. But hey--at least I had some extra time to charge up my phone.
Oh, what a fragmented morning! Papers to grade and classes to prep, but my brain is going in a million different directions:
How would you like to be interviewed by a bot? Inside Higher Ed ran a story about companies using Artificial Intelligence to conduct initial interviews with job applicants, which is supposed to counteract bias based on appearance because the AI relies on an algorithm instead of a human being's gut reaction. However, human beings write the algorithms, which remain relatively opaque to the uninitiated, so there's no telling what kinds of preferences may be programmed in to the AI: smiling too much or not enough, gesturing or not gesturing, code words that can either improve or sink a candidate's chances. My feeling is that AI interviews will select for candidates who are good at communicating with AI bots, and if that's the kind of workforce we need, then we're all set.
Every interview is an opportunity to hone and share the story of ourselves, just as every court case requires a transformation of fact into narrative. Before I left the house this morning I was reading a fascinating article in PMLA by Peter Brooks called "The Facts on the Ground," in which he examines the importance of how facts are framed in court cases. "The facts on the ground may not themselves be malleable," he writes, "but once they are narrativized--as they must be if they are to be intelligible--their shape may prove protean." How we tell the story is sometimes a matter of life and death, which is why the human ability to create stories will never go out of style.
And sometimes storytelling can give us a whole new window into history. I'm a little behind on my podcast listening by the other day I heard the Code Switch episode called "A Strange and Bitter Crop," a fabulous feat of storytelling dealing with the lynching of Claude Neal in Marianna, Florida, 85 years ago. Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, which I'll be teaching next semester, is based on events in a fictionalized Marianna, so the podcast deepened my understanding of the area's troubled history, but it's also sobering to recall that lynching is not ancient history and to consider the different ways Claude Neal's story has been framed in the past 85 years. How we tell the story makes a huge difference, but sometimes so does who gets to tell the story, especially when the facts have been intentionally obscured.
Looking at the past can make me wonder whether we're as advanced as we think we are, while looking at the future makes me wonder what sort of world we're creating for our children. Maybe I'm not the only one driving the wrong way! My unintentional detour this morning may not have given me much of a story to tell, but sitting behind a school bus gave me time to think and muse and simply be, a commodity in dreadfully short supply.
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