Thursday, February 28, 2013

How to come off as an idiot in the Netherlands, part 12, with our weekly guest, Elke Vrijdag

This looked like fun:

Let's see how we're doing reading Dutch flyers. Some of the words, like "Live Jazz," might even mean something like the very similar English words, "Live Jazz."  How hard can it be? Start the weekend in the club, Elke Vrijdag at 5:00 pm. Correct? 

I wonder what Elke Vrijdag sounds like. Is she a jazz pianist, or a singer? Modern jazz or old standards, do you think?

My suggestion: Don't ask anyone. Really, don't. Trust me on this one.


Elke Vrijdag (despite the weekly appearances for as long as anyone can remember): None of the above

Finishing February

Centraal Station

Teaching


 I've been leading a seminar with masters degree students that focuses on self-disclosure in online relationships and virtual groups. Online relations and virtual groups are among places where disclosure “touches down”so to speak, but our approach is very broad. We started with landmark works on disclosure from the early 1970s, long before the Internet, because that's where the roots of so many of the current questions are 

that people ask about the Internet: How do we get to know each other, become familiar with each other, develop trust online, and what happens when people share information about themselves with us using computer-mediated communication? What happens to us when we disclose aspects about ourselves to others? These questions are occupying research in virtual teams, online courses, electronic dating sites, and a variety of applications, yet the answers are guided by inquiries surfaced by Jourard in 1971 or Altman and Taylor in 1973. It appears for some reason that disclosure has a stronger impact online than it does in face-to-face settings, and we are running through the possible explanations for this—and looking at the empirical support for the explanations—week by week.

I like the masters students here. They are attentive, and well-prepared for class. As is the case at home, some students are unlikely to say much. Some are always willing to venture a guess to a question I put, even if they are not sure of themselves, which I appreciate (and they are cool when I suggest they are off track). It’s a nice environment for me. I have no idea how my approach compares to other instructors they have had. When I ask them, they tell me there are a lot of different styles. (I wonder if that is politeness? Then again they tell me that the Dutch are very open about their opinions. I haven’t seen anything very blunt yet.)

Most of the students are Dutch but not all. There are German students, Croation, and Latvian. One spent time in America and sounds a little like me. Despite the differences they all have had similar experiences using the Internet especially when they were young. I am not doing enough to learn from their different perspectives. I tend to help students learn to dissect arguments and evidence so they can distill ideas clearly from what they read, and decide whether to believe them or not. I need to listen more.

A 2x2x2x2 research design!

Research





I have been having very stimulating conversations with my hosts. I am well aware that I have plunged myself into their busy lives and we have carved out regular times to meet so that we neither let the opportunity to work together go by, nor do I wear out my welcome by being in their faces too much. Our conversations range from designing research studies that may help resolve some puzzles about online self-disclosure and feedback to the discloser from others.  There is mixed evidence in the research about what happens when someone discloses to another. 
Sometimes it appears that liking someone leads to disclosure, but other studies show that disclosing to individuals causes us to like them. Both, of course, are possible, but it’s important sometimes to see if we can get at the chicken-and-the-egg conundrum this is.  It is also known that disclosing aspects of ourselves to others can lead to self-adjustment. Both of these processes should, theoretically, involve responses from other people to our disclosures. But if disclosing itself causes these effects—the chicken/egg thing-- then the hypothetical role of feedback from others becomes murky.  If that is not trouble enough, we’re asking what kinds of feedback might one receive from others? 
Concurrence, evaluation, describing similar experiences and views, affirmation, negation withdrawal – all are possible and we need a conceptual framework with which to consider them. Finally, we are considering whether and why these processes appear to be intensified in computer-mediated exchanges, and there are a number of theoretical possibilities for that. Patti Valkenburg and Jochen Peter and their colleagues have advanced some, and I have advanced some, and we’re looking at those. But we’re also looking for new ideas and refinements of our thinking. It’s causing us to ask questions about the manner in which face-to-face communication might temper the potential intensity of verbal content, or how the persistence and visibility of our online actions might increase their impact, or both.

.  



I have an office at the university’s Bushuis, or Oost-Indisch Huis, a building that was once the Dutch East Indies Company in the early 1600s. One can see what looks like some of the original timbers in the top story. The basement, where bicycles are parked now, used to be the store holds for spices brought back from the New World. There is a lot of activity in the building, and a lot of coffee. And occasionally there are musicians outside.




The Neighborhood




Nieumarkt

Five minutes from the apartment is the Nieuwmarkt, aside Den Waag, which was a weighing station in Amsterdam's great shipping era. There is a fruit and vegetable stand and a cheese shop there daily. On Saturday it comes alive with a larger market of tent stands.  I have taken to doing some weekly shopping here for smoked meat, cheese, vegetables, and who knows what. Some of the merchants are getting to know me and they humor me. 

I like being particularly friendly with people because it is pleasant and sometimes disarming.  I always wave enthusiastically to the two veteran working girls as I walk by their red-lit windows on Geldersekade, and they seem to have come to expect it, and no more, from me. So they wave back rather than crook their fingers now.  


Back at the market, one of the cheese vendors has put me to work. 

A man who sells fine woolens tells me that wearing knee socks will make me “feel like a gentleman.”  


Other landmarks 

Sint Nicolaaskerk
Behind my apartment is the Oudezijds Kolk, with the SintNicolaaskerk (St. Nicholas Church) rising above it.

I needed some medical supplies and was having no luck finding them. There are not Rite-Aids on every corner the way there are back home (which is refreshing most of the time). Many vitamin and health-related stores, but I could not find a pharmacy. I would ask, people would point in one direction or another, but I never found one. 

Finally someone told me a specific street corner to seek, and it is really just two block from where I live. I stopped in the Apotheek, and they had what I needed. I mentioned that I had walked by their store a hundred times and never knew they were there, and the saleswoman said that was funny because “We’ve been here for four hundred years.” It turns out, they say, that theirs is the oldest apothecary in Amsterdam, established in 1696. They have medicine jars going back who knows how long, although they do not dispense from those (they said). Can you imagine anywhere in America where someone in a business or a building would say we’ve been here four hundred years? That would not be on a list of monuments or something?

Excursions

Haarlem




I visited Allison Eden and her family one weekend at their home in Haarlem. Allison took her PhD in communication at Michigan State and now is an assistant professor at VU University in Amsterdam. Her family settled in Haarlem, a short (and very easy) commute from Amsterdam. It is a smaller city that seems to have many of the charms of its larger cousin only in less overabundance. That is, it appears you could find anything you wished for in Haarlem, but with fewer choices. That was refreshing. After all, how many Heineken bars or Argentine steak restaurants does one need in a four-block area? Amsterdam might have a dozen where I live (no kidding).
 In Haarlem there are some—plenty—but one doesn’t trip over them.  Allison told me of a recent comment to her, that many people in Amsterdam turn their noses up at the idea of living in the suburb of Haarlem, until, that is, they have children and a dog. Then they, too, go where you get a little more space for the money, you’re closer to an off-leash dog park, with a great Saturday market, wonderful gothic churches, and a couple of excellent museums. 

It was fun to hear Alllison’s views of living here, of how the Dutch take seriously issues of work/life balance, encourage productivity while incorporating flexibility into faculty assignments and duties. It is really nice to see one of “our people” from MSU doing well and feeling good about life. Being an assistant professor is a lot of pressure, and Allison seems to be thriving.

Haarlem had a museum containing a number of old scientific instruments. How do you measure light? What is sound and how can you examine it in other forms of representation? How do you store electricity? Cool old gizmos. Beautiful building.


Don’t forget the windmill.




Duisburg-Essen

Last week I made an excursion to Germany, to visit with Prof. Nicole Krämer and her associates. I must say I handled finding a schedule from home via computer, buying a ticket, downloading and printing it, all just fine. I am amazed. Amsterdam Centraal Station is 4 minutes from the apartment so off I went easily. Found the platform, and my reserved seat on the train. Arrived in Dusseldorf two hours later. A group of us went out to a fun restaurant (that had beers from all over Germany, not just the dark beer from Dusseldorf, a topic over which we debate.) 

Mark and I discuss MOOCs
We spent the next couple of days discussing research and course collaborations, dissertation strategies, MOOCs, and the like. I have been meeting several of these people once or twice a year for several years now, and Tina Ganster and Stephan Winter did some research at Michigan State with us, so we are growing quite familiar.
Nicole and me doing science
 It almost got lost on me how crazy great this is. In a way I have grown a little accustomed to visiting colleagues in Europe or elsewhere, and I like how it gets easier for me to do it without getting anxious about how to do it or whether I’ll know how.  But for some reason I remembered this time how special it is to be able to say to myself, I’m going here or there, to another country, where I have friends and colleagues who I know and who welcome me. I know that’s pretty run-of-the-mill for a lot of people, especially Europeans. But for me it’s something I stumbled into that I never imagined. I do tell people I am the luckiest person I know, to get to do these things in far off places. I am quite fortunate and I am glad I remember to remember that.



I did something quite different on this trip. A couple of years ago while going documents my father left us from when his family emigrated to America in 1938, I discovered that my grandparents were married in Essen in 1926. My visit was to the University of Duisburg-Essen. I asked Nicole if it was far to where the restored synagogue stands, and she generously asked if she could take me there.

It was a beautiful synagogue, and it’s now known as the Alte Synagogue Essen, where it stands as a Jewish cultural center. I showed a copy of my grandparents’ marriage record to one of the cultural center officials, and he said that yes, this had been the place.

So I stood where my grandparents must have stood 87 years ago, when they surely had no idea they would ever end up so far from this spot, or, at another point, that anyone would ever come back to places like this.  

There was a mystery, though. Although all of the weddings and Bar Mitzvahs were recorded in a book at the center, my grandparents were not listed. That is because, it seems, they were not from Essen, and the records feature only the Jews of Essen. My grandmother came from Gelsenkirchen, not far from there, whereas my grandfather came from Hechingen, much farther south, where they would go and live, where my father would spend his first 11 years.  
Why, then, did they get married in Essen? Maybe that was where the closest synagogue was to Gelsenkirchen? Nicole saw a map and, of course, could read the sign over it, that showed all the cities where Jewish synagogues had been before they were destroyed or desecrated. And there had been one in Gelsenkirchen. Maybe they didn’t daven the right way in Gelsenkerchen? Maybe they sang the wrong version of L’cha Dodi there Friday nights? Why Essen? I am not sure we if we could ever know or if it matters. It’s curious though. 
Thanks, Nicole. 
Back to the Netherlands from Duisburg. A German train that did not run on time. It is true that travel helps to break stereotypes!


Home again.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

To bike or not to bike?

 My cousin Eva asked when I am going to get a bicycle. I've been tempted to get one, but have not done so. And it's going to look really wimpy to the folks back home in East Lansing when I tell you why: the weather. Clearly I lack the skills of the locals, who have mastered controlling their bikes with one hand and their umbrellas with the other. 

But it's not the rain. It's the snow. Not like American-Midwest feet of snow, or the Eastern Seaboard's Snowmageddon. And here, no matter what the weather turns into to, it seems only to last a few minutes, anyway. 

This morning at 7:30, for instance, looked like this.


I took a video of the snow falling behind the apartment (for Californians who rarely see such wonders), too.

None of this is all that bad. But I think bridges over canals that get covered in ice and slush, like this one, could be my undoing:

I'll wait a little longer to get a bike.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Orientation, patriotism, relocation, scholarship, and registration


The last week has been a series of adventures in finance, orientation,  patriotism, relocation, scholarship, and registration.


Thursday the 31st of January started with a trip to a bank to set up an account. So many retail transactions are done with debit cards here that having one is a necessity. I visited a branch to make choices, sign papers, and learn that PINs and cards would arrive in a series of letters, for security. I also learned that banks do not do cash. You can’t bring in your coins and get bills, you can’t break a larger note into smaller ones; there are no tellers. There are ATMs for any transaction you need, and everything else that can be done, is done online. I would later learn there are no post offices any more, either. Mail gets delivered. I will have to see where you take packages.

Marcel Ooman
Linda Pietersen and I
review to-do list
The second stop last Thursday was at the Fulbright Center, for a formal orientation, and to get a US State Dept insurance card. The staff at the Fulbright Office are wonderful, smart, committed, yet down-to-earth people who clearly enjoy what they do. Marcel Oomen, the Executive Director, describes their office as the information center for Dutch families investigating college opportunities in the US, from experiential and educational perspectives to how safe it is to be on an American campus. They coordinate dozens and dozens of students and scholars from the Netherlands to America and vice versa. Linda Pietersen is the Fulbright Program Coordinator, who is both processing applications for next year’s students and scholars, but also emailing me on the steps I need to get settled, paid, etc. She also asks, “Are you going to ride a bike here? If so, remember to ride *across* the tram rails, not along them.” Ignore her advice and you find out what the US State Dept insurance card is for.

Thursday evening took me by train to The Hague, to a reception at the home of the American Ambassador (on a street with many countries’ Ambassadors’ homes – each house a different country) to meet American scholars and students, Dutch students who had been to the US, some of the embassy staff, and to hear a piano recital by Sun-A Park.  It was a lovely event. As most of you know, this kind of thing happens to me all the time. 

with Sun-A Park
It was also an interesting and quite humbling experience to realize that the US recognized me and was supporting my career. It made me reflect on the assistance I’ve received over the years, from the State of California when I started college, to the State of Arizona whose regents’ scholarship paid for my undergraduate tuition. But even in a larger sense it had me thinking of the American story I was in the middle of: How may grandparents and my father came to the US from Europe, where they could work and prosper, send their children to college, and how, a generation later, I could be honored by my country in recognition of my academic accomplishments. It is really amazing and quite stirring, and reminds me (as I am often reminded) of how extremely fortunate I have been. I spoke with John Kim, a counselor for legal affairs with the Embassy, and we reflected on our great opportunities abroad and our good luck in having found our ways into them.  I also met Tilly de Groot, the cultural affairs specialist, a vibrant person who has a knack for connecting people and expanding opportunities for Americans in the Netherlands, who invited me to call for coffee and local recommendations next time I visit the Hague.  

Friday I moved into my apartment on Geldersekade, two minutes from Centraal Station, ten  minutes to the university, with living room windows looking out onto a picturesque canal. To the rear of the building is another canal and church. The walk to the office can be down Geldersekade, although there is not much room with cars and bikes sharing the slim brick-paved road, or out the back along another canal to a Chinatown-type street, leading to Den Waag, and then to the university on Kloveniersburgwal. It is roomy and light inside the apartment and quite comfortable. I spent a good deal of the weekend shopping for some basic household supplies, things to cook, and things to cook with, at stores and at the Albert Cuyp Market, where Saturdays are generally quite hectic but where intermittent 1-minute hailstorms thinned out the crowd.
Albert Cuyp Market
noticeably crowdless

Monday was a great day at the university. Jochen Peter and I met to discuss research ideas. It is really a pleasure to discuss things with others who share concerns with theory and rigor in their studies. Jochen’s thinking intrigues me. He sees things I don’t see when we look at the same problems, and if Monday’s work together is any indication, I bring him a similar kind of complementarity. Jochen suggested a study they were considering doing about online self-presentation, which I liked, and observed that there could be reasons to hypothesize the opposite outcomes than Jochen originally expected. This kind of puzzle is fun, because it encourages us to think more carefully and to design research studies that can identify specifically under what circumstances one set of outcomes may occur and what should happen if the circumstances are otherwise. I was also able to recommend intriguing work by our friend Nicole Ellison whose recent ideas about online self-presentation include concerns about how long a time might pass between an online meeting and an offline encounter. We discussed another two studies in very tentative ways before deciding it was best to wait for Patti Valkenburg’s return and the inclusion of Maria and Dian, the PhD students who have been brainstorming with us individually on these ideas.

Monday afternoon was my first day teaching. The masters degree students have a variety of interests, and focus their studies on youth and media, political communication, and persuasive communication. They had a variety of ideas about how the study of online self-disclosure might teach them more within their respective interest areas, which I thought was fascinating. I need to remember to listen more and talk less sometimes, so I can learn from their academic, personal, and cultural backgrounds what these things we are studying mean to them in their own intellectual and personal experience. They also seemed to follow quite well, and seemed interested, when I described what my own concerns were with the topic and where I thought there were critical problems with our theories and research findings in the area. And not a one of them seemed to be doing something else with a computer while I lectured. A good first teaching day.

I met with Peter Neijens briefly on Tuesday to thank him for making so many of the arrangements that enabled me to be here (although I did complain to him about promising me I could skate the canals to work).  He is the most agreeable person I think I have met, and prolific scholar as well, and we started a discussion I look forward to continuing on how communication research is converging: Mass media and public relations researchers who formerly studied 1-to-many transmission of messages needed to know little about interactive conversations. New media is making it important to understand how communication among peers and pairs takes place (as in recommendation systems or Tweets), and how observation of those exchanges by onlookers may affect attitudes quite broadly.  I also brought Peter some weather-appropriate apparel from Spartan-land.

Finally, yesterday I became a registered resident of Amsterdam by visiting the municipal authorities at City Hall. I presented both my German and American passports; as a dual citizen of a European Union country, there are fewer permits I am required to have to reside in the Netherlands. I also had a birth certificate with an apostille, and my apartment lease, which they required. I also offered to present my letter of invitation from the university, my proof of health insurance, and other documents that, it turned out, they had no interest in. This is not the first time in my life I have over prepared for a test. 

Now I am official.