Reggae musician and Hasidic Jew Matisyahu spoke in Graham Chapel this Thursday, March 18th. He interspersed an unscripted question and answer session with acoustic performances of a number of songs, accompanied on guitar by Wash. U. alumnus Adam Weinberg.

As part of EnWeek this week, the Engineering Student Council revived EnPageant, a talent and beauty contest between male student representatives of each of the Engineering School’s departments. This year, CJ Carey won a victory for computer science. See the full article here.

Then watch the Student Life video of student reactions to the tomato ban. You’ll hear, “It’s no big deal” and “I can do without tomatoes.” You’ll see, “I would like to have them, but I don’t mind not having them.”

Now, there are slightly more-heated opinions than that in the video, and there are much-more-measured comments under the online article. But I think there is a basic difference between the anonymity of online forums, and the medium of print in general, and the accountability that people find foisted upon them by the transparency of audiovisual recording: the tendency toward radical warmongering among written accounts, and the sensible, moderate consideration of issues among oral accounts.

There are two reasons, I think, for this disparity. The first is response bias. The kind of people who read an article and are moved to respond in an online comment probably feel more strongly about the issue addressed in the article than those who read it and move on, or than those who don’t read it at all. Video interviews have a higher chance of capturing the latter two types.

The second reason, to which I have already alluded, is the anonymity factor. I think anonymity is what allows those moved by certain articles to make the most shocking statements, things like “I think everyone involved needs to develop a thicker skin and just let it go” on the article about the Mothers bar incident. I imagine that it would be hard for that commenter to express him/herself directly in that way to the six students excluded from the bar.

This idea is not terribly new—that it’s the cowardly who shout most loudly from their keyboard, that those less opinionated are less likely to make themselves heard. But the disparity I am noting points to a trait that is prominent among, at least, Washington University students, but which is seldom conceptualized: We find it difficult to give valuable and constructive criticism in general, and we find it difficult to criticize at all people who are in the same room with us.

Have you been in a fiction writing class or another class where students workshop one another’s work? Such classes, teachers say, tend to be positively oriented, tend to shy away from what is wrong with each student’s story. “I really liked how x, y and z,” one might say, “but I was a little confused about the relationship between a and b.” When someone is just beginning their fiction writing career, the more valuable feedback might be, “I understand what this story is trying to do, which is x, but it does not do it, I think, because y and z.”

Now, face-to-face feedback is so valuable because it elicits this tendency to sugarcoat things; because you must take into account the intentions and thoughts of the human being whose work you are to critique, you moderate your own feedback in order to make it comprehensible to the person who has created the work. That value—the unavoidable, tangible, human presence of the object of critique—is exactly why we should learn to be better at delivering our evaluations, both positive and negative, of other people’s ideas and work. Because the person giving the critique must approach people critiqued on their own terms, discussion is likely to be quite a bit more productive, but only once we learn to formulate such critiques in the right way.

To take this a little further, I want to suggest that argument in the public sphere (in Student Life, The New York Times), which can be understood as a series of people critiquing each other’s ideas, would benefit immeasurably from the adoption of such a forum—but only if it were possible. If there were a way for people with different ideas to sit down in a room together and come up with a sensible understanding of the issue at hand, even if there are final disagreements in taste, we would all find ourselves more sensible people, for having such behavior as a model.

Unfortunately, I think the vapidity of argument in the public sphere is much more fundamental than the form it takes. It relies upon a collective ideological entrenchment that has itself developed into a matter of underlying values or, in other words, of taste itself.

When open minds meet, face to face, remarkable ideas can be produced. It is valuable that, at least, this can occur on a local level at Wash. U. We ought to practice such person-to-person critique more often.

Dennis is a senior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at djsweene@artsci.wustl.edu.

“Blondie,” a slightly less up-with-the-times comic strip, took on the same subject Sunday by showing Dagwood’s coworkers extolling the benefits of new technology. Says a co-carpooler on the way back from work, “Did you know they have caller ID that flashes on your TV screen? Meanwhile, I get streaming videos on my cell phone!”

The fact is that Scott/Borgman (“Zits”) and Young (“Blondie”) decided to dedicate their weekly full-color, longer-than-usual strip to a depiction of behind-the-times characters watching in desperation as technology advances on their everyday lives. One can visualize the longtime reader of “Blondie,” as he cuts out the strip for his son and puts it at his son’s place at the table. The father sees in it an artistic expression of the technological frustration that he’s been dealing with increasingly for 20-plus years now and that his son seems to have somehow mastered.

The son comes down to breakfast, and he reads the comic. He gets it, more or less: Here’s this perplexed character who’s worried about the functionality of his microwave in the midst of a variety of newfangled gadgets that do lots of things that they weren’t really originally built to do. But instead of identifying with the perplexed protagonist, the son sees him as a caricature of his own father. His goofy, frantic response to technological change becomes a surprisingly apt characterization of the bizarre response of the older generation.

There is a fundamental gap here between the father and the son. It’s a gap that’s much talked about these days, especially in terms of the workplace, in books like “Bridging the Generation Gap” and “When Generations Collide.” We’re Generation Y, the Millenials, the Net Generation. They’re the Baby Boomers.

I think the most astute of us often consider these monikers irresponsible overgeneralizations, because for the most part they are. But it seems to me that, when you really look at it, there is a real, serious gap in communication, a place where language, or concepts, or views just don’t match up. It’s the place where older adults have other people “sign them up” for Facebook. It’s the place where they “boot up” their computers. No, we might respond. You just turn them on.

A similar thing happens in a recent article in The New York Times Book Review that describes the disparity in sex scenes between a raunchy earlier generation of authors represented by Philip Roth and John Updike and contemporary, much more sexually mild writers like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. In it, Katie Roiphe describes a couple of characteristic scenes in “Infinite Jest” where males’ worried anticipation of the sexual act is more potent than the act itself. “Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation,” Roiphe concludes, “there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing.”

Right. Except it is not a fascination with such attitudes that these books display, but a possession of them. Throughout the article, Roiphe speaks as if the new more self-conscious approach to sex in literature were some kind of hip fashion, a “cool” attitude toward sex. Her account is something like Borges explaining a planet where beings experience life in terms of temporal, rather than spatial, unity—the planet’s language has no nouns. Roiphe sees, intellectually, what is going on in contemporary novels’ sex scenes. But, like Borges, she doesn’t have the language or generational assumptions to really get inside it.

Wallace, on the other hand, says of Updike’s penis-with-a-thesaurus effect, “I’m not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it.” Forget that he was born six years before Roiphe. Instead, focus on the fundamental gap in communication: Roiphe and Wallace, our avatars for the Boomers and the Millenials, really fundamentally have no way to “get” one another.

The result on campus? Only grape tomatoes for now. We asked students, “What do you think?”