Why this is important

I found Username a source using Google Scholar and the Rowan library.

“I can’t find any sources!”

Username and I were talking yesterday about his topic, the hateful anti-gay rhetoric spewed by the Westboro Baptist Church, that passionate, let’s just say obnoxious and vicious group responsible for the God Hates Fags signs they display at funerals for American soldiers, gay or otherwise.

His thesis is that the Church inadvertently creates support for the gay community, maybe even for the gay marriage efforts of local jurisdictions, by making it harder to share a point of view with a group so tasteless. We don’t want to be associated with the “God Hates Fags” group, so we find it impossible to publicly support their cause.

So far, Username has been frustrated looking for sources to support his thesis. No amount of searching for “Westboro Baptist Church” has yielded the sort of evidence he’s looking for. Which is a good thing, but he doesn’t know it yet.

“I’ve been looking in the wrong place!”

I suggested to him that the trouble was his search technique. He was looking for direct testimony from somebody that the WBC were creating enemies for their cause. I asked him why. He said he wanted evidence that we all want to associate our opinions with people we admire, and that we avoid being associated with people we despise. I asked him if he could give me an example. He suggested that sometimes the sudden appearance of unexpected people in media presentations have polarizing effects on viewers’ feelings. When Oprah Winfrey endorses a cause, for example, some people automatically embrace the cause to show their solidarity with Oprah, while others resist the cause from a similar impulse. I asked him how this related to the WBC. He said the appearance of the celebrity reflects on the value and credibility of the message. It was clear from our conversation that the personalities involved in expressing an opinion affect our opinions.

“All I had to do was talk about it with someone”

Which made me mention celebrity product endorsements. A few years back, not just golf fans, but people in general, wanted to associate with Tiger Woods any way they could, which made him a massively popular product endorser. Now marketers won’t touch him with a 9-iron.

The process Username had been using:

1. I want to my thesis that the Westboro Baptist Church creates support for gay rights.
2. I search endlessly for “Westboro Baptist Church.”
3. Nobody has written about the effect of the WBC on public opinion.
4. Nobody has written about the accidental support the WBC provides for gay marriage.
5. I despair that there are no sources to prove my thesis, that the WBC creates support for gay rights.

The best (worst) outcome for this process:

• Somebody would agree with me, which would prove my thesis. FAIL.
• Somebody would have written about the idea before I did and I would simply echo them to support myself. FAIL.
• I would “succeed” by parroting someone else’s thesis. FAIL.

What should I do instead?

1. Think about (better yet, TALK about) my thesis until I start to raise questions that can be researched by searching something other than Westboro Baptist Church.
2. Follow up that lead I generated for myself by raising the question of celebrity endorsement.

“This stuff actually works!”

Shortly after that conversation, I typed “celebrity endorsement” into Google Scholar and generated this lead on the second page:

The effects of negative information transference in the celebrity endorsement relationship

The source is a journal of retail management. It has nothing to do with the Westboro Baptist Church, but it has everything to do with how far people will go to distance themselves from a product (or perhaps a political or social position) on the basis of negative information about a celebrity who endorses it.

“But I can’t actually get the article I want!”

The actual journal article was not available for free on Google Scholar. The cost to print the article was $32. And I didn’t even know if it would help me. I like Username a lot, but that was a little steep for a source of unknown value. So:

“Oh. That was easy.”

I entered the title above into the search engine for Rowan’s Campbell Library. (I didn’t even have to choose between ProfSearch and ProQuest; the generic search engine did all the work for me, since I knew the title.) The immediate result was this:

The effects of negative information transference in the celebrity endorsement relationship

Free access to the full article from ProfSearch. Free because I’m affiliated, as you are, with the Rowan library database and the thousands of journals it subscribes to.

So, to update that process:

1. Think about your topic.
2. Talk about your topic.
3. Listen carefully for researchable topics not immediately named in your thesis.
4. Use whatever search engine works best for you
   • Library Database directly
   • Google Scholar
   • Wikipedia articles that yield rich lists of sources you can then retrieve by title
5. If you run into a pay wall, enter the titles in the Campbell Library database.
6. Read about the value (both positive and negative) of celebrity endorsement.
7. Learn about our tendency to dissociate ourselves from unsavory characters (AND their products, AND their social views).
8. Apply that evidence—from outside your primary topic—to your very specific thesis.

Feedback Required

Please reply below if this advice has been useful to you. Reply also if it hasn’t been useful. Don’t reply at all if you want me to believe you didn’t read it despite my efforts to help you. 🙂

Finding Sources vs. Using Sources

Imagine a psychologist who believes that children raised by single parents are more aggressive and likely to abuse their own children later in life. She has noticed a trend in her patients that leads her to this belief, but she doesn’t have the evidence to draw a compelling conclusion.

Listening to the Evidence

Once she has formulated her thesis, she starts to listen to her patients differently. She’s working on a paper for a psychology journal, so therapy sessions become partly about gathering evidence for her theory.

She pays particular attention to patients of single parents and guides their sessions into conversations about their violent feelings, their attitudes toward their own children. When they speak of frustration, she hears that they’re angry. When they speak of venting those frustrations, she envisions them punching through walls. When they say they leave the house in such situations, she imagines it’s to avoid hurting the children.

Hunting for Proof, We Find “Proof”

She’s on a hunt for evidence that proves her thesis. What her patients with two parents say about their violent personalities she dismisses as irrelevant. What they tell her about hurting their children she attributes to factors other than their parentage.

She wants her evidence neat; she wants it free of conflict; she’s looking for a slam-dunk. Consequently, what she hears sounds like proof, and evidence to the contrary she considers noise.

Why Publish Someone Else’s Truth?

We read and study to discover the truth, not to prove that our preconceptions were valid all along. When we forget this essential point, we start reading defensively, hoping to avoid unpleasant counterarguments that upset our worldview. Reading openly and honestly, remaining receptive to the best ideas and evidence we can find, we gain knowledge and perspective.

Finding the “perfect source that proves our argument!” is a catastrophe. It means we’ve arrived too late at someone else’s truth and have nothing left to say except: “Look! Right there! That’s what I’ve been thinking!”

Just as bad as finding the perfect source is starting with the perfect source that proves our point and provides all the necessary evidence before we even begin my work. What is left for us to do when the definitive article has already been written? Nothing but to share it.

Look for Evidence, Not Conclusions

We write to learn, not to prove. The research part of the writing process is our chance to find better, not to locate good enough. If our first five sources say the same thing five ways—or worse, say it the same way!—we have to start asking ourselves: where are we in this process?, what’s our contribution to the conversation?, why does this chorus need one more voice echoing the others?

Failing to find the source that “proves” our thesis is the real blessing. Without an expert to follow, we are free to become the expert. Instead of giving the credit for our ideas to acknowledged authorities, we get to draw our own conclusions, based on the best evidence we’ve found, and make a unique contribution to the debate. Wrong is as good as right; both are better than safe.

Username, whose questions are better than most people’s answers, told me she had found plenty of sources to demonstrate that white patients get brand-name Prozac disproportionately more often than patients of color, who more often get generic drugs, but that she hadn’t yet tracked down a source to explain WHY the disparity occurs (or HOW the mechanics of health-care delivery produce such a result). I say that makes her very lucky. She is free to draw her own conclusions and challenge her readers to dispute them with their own evidence. The most successful papers take a good look at a perplexing problem and offer a solution that requires further study. They’re part of a conversation, not an echo of the last word.

Beginning with the Op-Ed, your essays will have to include a Works Cited. Please understand this is different from a Bibliography, which identifies every source you consulted in your research. The Works Cited identifies only (this will sound so obvious!) works cited in this particular essay.

If you get your sources through the library databases, you can use Prof Search or RefWorks to produce automated Works Cited citations. A little experience with RefWorks will also accustom you to the mechanics of common citation types. But if you get stuck for a particular style, the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue offers a free online guide to citation.

A link to the OWL material is always available in the Resources section of the sidebar.

Easy Bib Link
Son of Citation Machine Link

Works Cited:

“Are you Eating Too Much Meat?” Forbes. 24 March 2009. Web. 9 March 2011.

“Teeth Show Fruit Was The Staple; No Exceptions Found.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 15 May 1979. 8-9 March 2011.

“Meat.” WikiInvest. Web. 9 March 2011.

“Study: vegan diets healthier for planet, people than meat diets.” The University of Chicago News Office. The University of Chicago, 13 April 2006. 8 March 2011.

“Humans are Naturally Plant-Eaters (According to the Best Evidence: Our Bodies).” Vegetarian Guide. Michael Bluejay, September 2010. 8 March 2011.

“How Meat Contributes to Global Warming.” Scientific American. Scientific American, 4 February 2009. 9 March 2011.

We’ll have just one item on the Agenda today as I try something new. More than half of you have asked, some of you emphatically, for feedback on your first drafts of the A05 assignment. Today, I’ll do live feedback on as many drafts as I can.

Without identifying who belongs to which username, I can feed back on live blog posts projected on the screen at the front of the room. Call this “live critique.”

If even that level of anonymity unnerves you, but you’d like to have your work considered in class, ask for “blind critique,” and I’ll cut and paste your work into a new post divorced from your username.

• Live (blind or visible) Feedback in class

Go to your post now and leave one of three comments, please:

1. If seeing your post on the screen attached to your username is OK, leave the comment “live critique please.”
2. If you’d prefer that I cut and paste your work into an anonymous post, leave the comment “blind critique please.”
3. If you don’t want live feedback on your post, leave the comment “no critique please.”

We’ll have just one item on the Agenda today as I try something new. More than half of you have asked, some of you emphatically, for feedback on your first drafts of the A05 assignment. Today, I’ll do live feedback on as many drafts as I can.

Without identifying who belongs to which username, I can feed back on live blog posts projected on the screen at the front of the room. Call this “live critique.”

If even that level of anonymity unnerves you, but you’d like to have your work considered in class, ask for “blind critique,” and I’ll cut and paste your work into a new post divorced from your username.

• Live (blind or visible) Feedback in class

Go to your post now and leave one of three comments, please:

1. If seeing your post on the screen attached to your username is OK, leave the comment “live critique please.”
2. If you’d prefer that I cut and paste your work into an anonymous post, leave the comment “blind critique please.”
3. If you don’t want live feedback on your post, leave the comment “no critique please.”

• In-Class Exercise (ICE) Unfair Summary TR
• Introduction to the Op-Ed
• A05: Op-Ed Assignment

Amazon Plays Rough. So What?

by Joe Nocera, the New York Times, OCT. 13, 2014

Is Amazon a monopoly?

That certainly is what Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic, thinks. In the magazine’s current issue, he has written a lengthy polemic denouncing the company for all manner of sins. The headline reads: “Amazon Must Be Stopped.”

“Shopping on Amazon,” he writes, “has so ingrained itself in modern American life that it has become something close to our unthinking habit, and the company has achieved a level of dominance that merits the application of a very old label: monopoly.”

Foer’s brief is that Amazon undercuts competitors so ruthlessly and squeezes suppliers so brutally — “in its pursuit of bigness” — that it has become “highly worrisome.” Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, “borrowed his personal style from the parsimonious Sam Walton,” the founder of (shudder) Walmart, and Foer notes that pushing suppliers has always been the key to Walmart’s low prices, just as it is for Amazon’s.

But, he says, when Amazon does it, the effect is somehow “darker.” Why? Because “without the constraints of brick and mortar, it considers nothing too remote from its core business, so it has grown to sell server space to the C.I.A., produce original television shows about bumbling congressmen, and engineer its own line of mobile phones.” What, precisely, is darker about making TV shows about bumbling congressmen is left unsaid.

And then, of course, there is the book business, which Amazon most certainly dominates, with 67 percent of the e-book market and 41 percent of the overall book market, by some estimates. Foer devotes a big chunk of his essay to Amazon’s ongoing efforts to “disintermediate” the book business, most vividly on display in its current battle over e-book pricing with Hachette, in which it is punishing Hachette by putting its books at a disadvantage on its website compared with other publishers’ books. Foer worries about what Amazon’s tactics will ultimately mean for book advances. And he fears that books will become commoditized — “deflating Salman Rushdie and Jennifer Egan novels to the price of a Diet Coke.”

What he doesn’t say — because he can’t — is that Amazon is in clear violation of the country’s antitrust laws. As Annie Lowrey and Matthew Yglesias both pointed out in blog posts (at New York magazine and Vox respectively), there is no possible way Amazon can legitimately be called a monopoly. Lowrey notes that Amazon’s sales amount to only “about 15 percent of total e-commerce sales.” Walmart’s e-commerce sales are growing at least as fast as Amazon’s. Meanwhile, as Yglesias points out, Amazon has to compete with far larger rivals, including not just Walmart, but Target and Home Depot in the brick-and-mortar world, and Google and Apple in the digital universe.

The truth is that American antitrust law is simply not very concerned with the fate of competitors. What it cares about is whether harm is being done to consumers. Walmart has squashed many more small competitors than Amazon ever will, with nary a peep from the antitrust police. Even in the one business Amazon does dominate — books — it earned its market share fair and square, by, among other things, inventing the first truly commercially successful e-reader. Even now, most people turn to Amazon for e-books not because there are no alternatives but because its service is superior.

“In confronting what to do about Amazon,” Foer writes as his essay nears its conclusion, “first we have to realize our own complicity. We’ve all been seduced by the deep discounts, the monthly automatic diaper delivery, the free Prime movies, the gift wrapping, the free two-day shipping, the ability to buy shoes or books or pinto beans or a toilet all from the same place.”

Our complicity? In fact, in its two decades of life, Amazon has redefined customer service in a way that has delighted people and caused them to return to the site again and again. Does Amazon have a dark side? Yes, it does — primarily in the way it has historically treated its warehouse workers. But to say that Amazon has to be stopped because it is giving people what they want is to misunderstand the nature of capitalism.

Let’s be honest here: The intelligentsia is focused on Amazon not because it sells pinto beans or toilets, but because it sells books. That’s their business. Amazon is changing the book industry in ways that threaten to diminish the role of publishers and traditional ways of publishing. Its battle with Hachette is a battle over control. It’s not terribly different from the forces that ultimately disintermediated the music business.

As an author, I’m rooting for Hachette. The old system — in which the writer gets an advance, and the publisher markets the final product — works for me, as it does for most writers of serious nonfiction.

But, am I going to stop using Amazon? No way. I’m betting you won’t either.

SUMMARY 1
Joe Nocera is losing his mind. As an author himself, he should know better than to defend a mammoth company that routinely suppresses the books of familiar—dare I say important?—authors, as part of its business model of diving to the very bottom of the bottom line. Nocera defends Amazon’s practice of punishing rival publisher Hachette by, in Franklin Foer’s words “putting its books at a disadvantage on its website compared with other publishers’ books.” This blatant censorship of a rival company’s 1st-Amendment-protected products is a clear violation of the freedom of speech of authors who had the audacity to be published by someone other than Amazon. But to Nocera, that constitutional violation doesn’t matter. He defends Amazon on the flimsy pretext that they aren’t, at least technically, well not entirely, “in clear violation of the country’s antitrust laws.” And just because Amazon doesn’t entirely dominate e-commerce sales, he comes to the additional, equally ridiculous conclusion, that the company that commands nearly half of America’s book sales, cannot in any “legitimate” way, “be called a monopoly.” All I can say is, Joe Nocera must be completely addicted to cheap e-book prices to defend Amazon’s predatory tactics. I hope he never gets another book advance.

SUMMARY 2
Joe Nocera must be working on a book deal with Amazon. How else can we explain his defense of the company that doesn’t just sell books but also provides a self-publishing platform for authors whose books aren’t good enough to attract a real publisher? And then, as if publishing their 3rd-rate work weren’t enough of an insult to book readers, cynically promotes those books at the expense of legitimately-published authors who happen to be working with another publishing house? Nocera clearly perceives the quality difference between Amazon’s e-books and those of other publishers. He says himself, “most people turn to Amazon for e-books not because there are no alternatives but because its service is superior.” Apparently that superior service includes telling readers which e-books (and for that matter, which physical paper books) to buy—Amazon’s! Is that what he means when he says “Amazon has redefined customer service”? The comparison to Walmart is obvious. No American company is better at forcing suppliers to lower their prices in return for a chance to be on the selling floor than Sam Walton’s retail behemoth. And Nocera is clearly rooting for Jeff Bezos as the digital competitor to Walton, who in encroaching on Amazon’s core business. “Walmart’s e-commerce sales are growing at least as fast as Amazon’s,” claims Nocera, who uses this observation to excuse Amazon for its heavy-handed tactics against rival publishers. If “Walmart has squashed many more small competitors than Amazon ever will,” maybe Amazon can be excused for squashing Hachette, with “nary a peep from the antitrust police.” After all, even though “Amazon is in clear violation of the country’s antitrust laws,” it’s just good book business, right Joe?

SUMMARY 3
Finally, someone is sticking up for Amazon and Walmart. I didn’t think I’d find it at the New York Times, but I’m grateful to Joe Nocera for his passionate defense of the tactics of America’s two greatest retail giants, one brick-and-mortar, the other entirely digital. Both are masters at driving down costs for the benefit of their customers, which angers suppliers. But the latest cries of unfairness from rival publisher Hachette are truly low blows, accusing Amazon of censorship and constitutional free speech violations just because their books are not heavily promoted at Amazon’s “store.” Nocera admits Amazon is “punishing Hachette by putting its books at a disadvantage on its website” in its ongoing effort to “‘disintermediate’ the book business,” but rightly asks, “How is this ‘darker'” than Walmart’s key tactic of “pushing suppliers” for deeper and deeper discounts in return for floor space? As Nocera—clearly a champion of lower prices for consumers no matter who gets crushed in the process—puts the case: “Does Amazon have a dark side? Yes, it does . . . it is giving people what they want . . . the nature of capitalism.” This is only bad news for smaller publishers or manufacturers too weak to compete. Enemies of capitalism can cry all they want to about being “crushed” by Walmart or Amazon, but the truth is, those companies got big by delivering what consumers want. If to do that Amazon “undercuts competitors . . . ruthlessly and squeezes suppliers . . . brutally,” says Nocera, then we must all be ruthless and brutal because we’re not going to boycott Amazon any time soon.
”

How to Conduct the Exercise

In a Reply below this post, identify the three summaries as

• Fair and Accurate
• Inaccurate
• Unfair

Offer comments to support your claims of Inaccuracy and Unfairness. For example:

SUMMARY 1–UNFAIR
The author of the paragraph deliberately attributes to Mukherjee statements he did not make. His assertion that Mukherjee would support a total ban on travel from epidemic countries is clearly not supported by the original article.

SUMMARY 2—FAIR AND ACCURATE
No comments required.

SUMMARY 3—INACCURATE
The author of the paragraph wrongly reports the meaning of the word “quarantine,” which completely taints the analysis of everything else in his reaction to Mukherjee’s article. He also makes errors of fact regarding the technique of screening for Ebola.

Time Limit: 30 minutes.