In a Circle of Men...

Neal Contrasts 60s' Leaders to Today

by Gary James '10

How do Malcolm X, Facebook, and Muhammad Ali relate to each other?

Before the 21st century, the question would have been difficult to answer. But with the rise of social networking, Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University, has been able to revisit the history of black social and political figures like Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown within the context of modern-day possibilities for communication.

Neal has been on campus since Wednesday as the College’s Owen Duston Visiting Minority Scholar. He has visited nearly half a dozen classes, and faculty, staff, and students have been holding weekly round table discussions of Neal’s book New Black Man in preparation for his visit. He delivered the annual Malcolm X Institute Lecture Thursday on the friendships among different civil rights leaders in the mid-20th century and how those friendships could form and mean today.

Neal told the story of how four men were brought together by their mutual relationships with Muhammad Ali and divided by the vicissitudes of life and politics in the 1960s.

Malcolm X was a social theorist political activist representing a fringe element of the civil rights movement.

Sam Cooke was an R&B singer and entrepreneur.

Jim Brown was a professional football player and actor, perhaps best known for the records he set as running back for the Cleveland Browns back in the 1950s and 1960s.

And Cassius Clay, who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali, was a famous – or imfamous – boxer known for saying whatever came to his mind.

Neal panned the unique bond of this “quartet,” how it developed and what possibilities could have arisen out of their continued friendship.

“One reason we’ll never know how this friendship developed is because three weeks [after they all spent time together in Miami] Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam,” Neal said. “A day [later] Muhammad Ali announces to the world that he’s no longer Cassius Clay…and is instructed to sever all ties with Malcolm X. I often wonder what might have happened to that relationship if, in the face of all this public stuff, Ali and Malcolm X could have texted each other, if they had had Twitter or Myspace or Facebook or a way to communicate outside of the public.”

Read the Full Article @ Wabash College

The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future

from Beacon Press

A media expert explains how and why the digital migration is transforming youth culture, identity, and everyday life

In 2006, S. Craig Watkins participated in the MacArthur Foundation’s well-funded digital media initiative alongside a select team of scholars and tech experts. The goal was simple: to understand young people’s emphatic embrace of social and mobile media. Watkins went on to build a small research team that skillfully collected over 500 surveys and conducted 350 in-depth interviews with young adults, parents, and educators while visiting the online spaces where young people gather. It was a full-scale immersion into what Watkins calls the “digital trenches,” and when he emerged, his understanding of the ways young people learn, play, bond, and communicate had become more detailed and dynamic.

It may come as no surprise that more teens are online than ever before—in fact 87 percent are. Consequentially, television is no longer the dominant medium it once was because young people are now spending an average of six to eight hours a day online. Watkins contends that most teens and twenty-somethings migrate online to share their lives with friends, something television simply cannot offer. As Melinda, a twenty-one-year-old student, proclaimed, “What do people do without Facebook?” In other words, for young people today, if you’re not online, then you’re not really living—and the ubiquitous presence of their mobile phones, laptops, and iPods positions them at the center of our evolving digital landscape.

Timely and deeply relevant, The Young and the Digital covers a host of provocative issues—the influence of social sites like MySpace and Facebook; the growing appetite for “anytime, anywhere” media and “fast entertainment”; how online “digital gates” reinforce race and class divisions; how technology is transforming America’s classrooms—and takes a fresh look at the pivotal role technology played in the historic 2008 election. Watkins also debunks popular myths surrounding cyberpredators, Internet addiction, and social isolation. The result is a fascinating portrait, both optimistic and cautious, about the coming of age of the first fully wired generation.