Being Cool
Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 3:55 am
Is being cool a bad thing or just another case of all things in moderation?
I'm going to pull a Coberhst and post some stuff.
It's an essay on teaching actually but the author points to the climate of cool as a reason for lack of engagement in learning.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagogy/v ... regory.pdf
David Foster Wallace (1997:
63–64) describes this demeanor with vivid clarity:
To the extent that [television] can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending
put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and
the ultimate art-form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance:
the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving
oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or
vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naiveté. . . .
In fact, the numb blank bored demeanor . . . that has become my generation’s version
of cool is all about TV. . . . Indifference is actually just the “90s” version of frugality
for U.S. young people: wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing but our
attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we
are loath to fritter it. In the same regard, we see that in 1990, flatness, numbness, and
cynicism in one’s demeanor are clear ways to transmit the televisual attitude of standout
transcendence—flatness and numbness transcend sentimentality, and cynicism
announces that one knows the score, was last naive about something at maybe like age
four. (my emphasis)
and
"In the contemporary context of cool detachment, cynical put-downs,
and never letting on that one is naive about anything, friendship is being pressured
to reconfigure itself as something that we might well call “the convocation
of the cool.” Sometimes teachers attempt to join the convocation of the
cool themselves, a tendency especially noticeable in older teachers who persist
in holding on to their own but increasingly distant cool from graduate
school days.When this tendency takes over, however, responsible pedagogy
suffers."
I'm going to pull a Coberhst and post some stuff.
It's an essay on teaching actually but the author points to the climate of cool as a reason for lack of engagement in learning.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagogy/v ... regory.pdf
David Foster Wallace (1997:
63–64) describes this demeanor with vivid clarity:
To the extent that [television] can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending
put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and
the ultimate art-form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance:
the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving
oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or
vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naiveté. . . .
In fact, the numb blank bored demeanor . . . that has become my generation’s version
of cool is all about TV. . . . Indifference is actually just the “90s” version of frugality
for U.S. young people: wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing but our
attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we
are loath to fritter it. In the same regard, we see that in 1990, flatness, numbness, and
cynicism in one’s demeanor are clear ways to transmit the televisual attitude of standout
transcendence—flatness and numbness transcend sentimentality, and cynicism
announces that one knows the score, was last naive about something at maybe like age
four. (my emphasis)
and
"In the contemporary context of cool detachment, cynical put-downs,
and never letting on that one is naive about anything, friendship is being pressured
to reconfigure itself as something that we might well call “the convocation
of the cool.” Sometimes teachers attempt to join the convocation of the
cool themselves, a tendency especially noticeable in older teachers who persist
in holding on to their own but increasingly distant cool from graduate
school days.When this tendency takes over, however, responsible pedagogy
suffers."
