Changing the World, - Horace Mann School

changing the world
The idea became a necessity Dr. Zaloom explained further.
“Industries that supplied the War effort needed retooling. They
were transformed into industries that produced what was used in
the home. There was also a connection between home ownership
and industries that had grown up around the car, like the building
of highways, and the development of suburbs. Owning property
became a key part of the economy because property ownership
tied people to their jobs.”
Pointing cultural history toward solutions
Caitlin Zaloom stretches this thread to our day. “The unintended
effect can be seen clearly in the housing crisis because, in
fact, not everyone can afford to own their own home.
One big, big lesson is that we need to rethink
housing, and make renting acceptable. We need
to make sustainable rental housing an honorable
way of living. From the post-War era until
today the federal government divested itself
of our urban infrastructure. One thing the
federal government can do now is look at the
housing that has become dilapidated in this
country and restore it. There are many reasons
why this is important. Just replacing windows
with lead paint could result in a five-to-ten-point
increase in the IQs of children living in low-income
housing, and help make this housing viable. Even with
the stimulus package, this is an area that has not gotten much
attention,” advised Dr. Zaloom. “I have been working on this idea
with pediatricians at NYU medical school, particularly Dr. Michael
Weitzman, a prominent children’s health advocate.
“The connection I wanted to make from the mortgage crisis to
the evangelical Christian approach is that culturally-speaking there
is good debt and bad debt. The federal government has convinced
Americans that some debt is good. This worked even on people
who grew up in the Christian tradition of scripture that discouraged
debt,” said Dr. Zaloom. “Today the evangelical movement is
addressing moral debt. A very interesting twist to the way of thinking
about money that the churches are promoting is that external
trappings of wealth become markers of inattention to spiritual
matters. Adherents of this movement are not ascetic at all, but they
are learning to see consumption as a means and not an end. The
family, for example, has symbolic significance. The home can be
redefined as wherever family is.”
Dr. Zaloom sees such thinking as important for all to grasp, not
only faith-based communities. She also sees ours as an era of opportunity.
“This goes back such issues as getting people back into
urban areas. One positive thing that can come out of today’s crisis
is that we start thinking again of cities as places where people live.
The American middle class has moved out of cities. Instead, we
should value cities as places not just for the rich or the poor. A lot
of different kinds of people living together make cities vibrant. This
contributes to a wider range of businesses, and a combining of creativity.
This idea of creative economics includes artists who revitalized
urban areas in the ’70s, or those who fueled the development
of the Internet in the ’90s. Returning cities to economic value is an
ethical responsibility for this country. We need to attend to how to
make that possible. We need to see people living their lives.”
Studying financial trading, emerging scientific fields, and consumer
debt practices, Dr. Zaloom brings together an ethnographer’s
commitment to fieldwork with techniques from other fields: space
and place analysis from geography, attention to technical objects
from science and technology studies, and the examination of
social interaction from sociology.
An analyst of the way people have “lived their lives” over history,
an observer of how we live today, Caitlin Zaloom is helping point
our steps toward a more promising future.
James Grimmelmann ’95,
a “Watchman” for
the Internet Age
In 2007 Interview magazine named James
Grimmelmann ’95 to its “New Pop A-List: 50 To
Watch (Age 30 or Under).” Grimmelmann is a
bit over 30 by now, but Horace Mann School is
still watching.
Grimmelmann, now a professor at New York
Law school, returned to Horace Mann in January
2008 to deliver the Computer Science Department’s
annual Senior Technology Seminar lecture. He introduced it
as a “very Horace Mann kind of talk,” mixing English, history, math,
science, language, and art like an Upper Division student’s schedule.
Starting with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s vision of
an infinite library and moving through images of a football field full
of pennies and a giant abacus, Grimmelmann examined the way
search engines work and the immense power they have over how
people experience the Internet.
It was a typical performance for the young scholar, an intellectual
juggling act combining serious science with legal policy and a generous
dash of playful wit. In a recent post on his weblog, the Laboratorium
(http://laboratorium.net/), he referred to Google’s plan to scan
and put online all books ever published as creating a “zombie army
of orphans.” Perhaps it’s Grimmelmann’s goofy panache that led Interview
to put him on its A-List with the likes of Saturday Night Live star
Andy Samberg. But Grimmelmann said he takes very seriously the
mission of making sure that future Steve Chens and Chad Hurleys—
the founders of YouTube—will still have a free and open Internet to
rely on. (And, oh yes, Steve and Chad were on the A-List, too. So were
Rihanna, Akon, and Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka.)
His work jumps from one urgent technological issue to another:
Does copyright law encourage people to be ethical? How can we
protect privacy in the age of Facebook? Are online communities
really feudal societies in digital disguise? Who controls search
engines, and who ought to? Connecting these themes are Grimmelmann’s
playful intellect, his concern for making a better world, and
his unabashed love of the Internet. Where does a do-gooder young
scholar get his inspiration? We sat down with Grimmelmann to find
out what influence Horace Mann had on his sense of purpose.
18 Horace Mann Magazine Spring 2009