Welcome – Prof. Kovarik

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These pages are for students and anyone else who might be interested in my historical work or  links to publishing projects. By way of introduction, here’s a photo taken by Linda Burton in the science fiction gallery of the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture. 

Gort was the robot from a movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still. Despite the uncanny resemblance, I’m the handsome one on your right. The museum is  extremely cool, and if you don’t see it next time you’re in Seattle, Gort will know where to find you.

So — Why do historians  like science fiction?  It has something to do with what history is and what it ought to be.

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Farewell to John Fox

John Fox did a lot at Radford, including service as a volunteer at WVRU.

John Fox was everybody’s friend at Radford, but anyone responsible for a Mac computer lab will tell you he was a lifesaver. Saint John of Cupertino, I once called him, and he said “pssshawww, Ive never even been there.”  And smiled that famous smile of his.

His death Aug 12, 2021, was unexpected.

I met John back in  the late 90s at a time when each department was responsible for its own set of those fragile little electronic boxes,  John was hired to be the IT guy for Mac computers, and one day he showed up with a pair of pliers and a multi-headed screwdriver. He asked how things were going,  and then sat around and fixed things and told jokes and passed along some wisdom of the digital kind, and otherwise.

One of his favorite tricks before we had individual screen logins in the labs  — Im sure this doesn’t matter now — was to use the number 1 as a password.  Imagine the time we’re saving, not having to key in complicated passwords, he would laugh. We could spend a weekend fishing with all this time we saved.  I was over in IT a few weeks ago in July, 2021, and told that story, and all the old timers broke out laughing. Yeah, that was John, they said. He was remembered fondly.

Which brings me to this story:   When we did start using full logins in the Media Studies Mac lab in the basement of Porterfield, suddenly, one day in early fall of 2003, nobody could log in. The spinning wheel  would just keep on spinning on the screen, and entire classes would go by, watching the little wheel. For anyone teaching with computers it was a very serious crisis, although the local department heads and sundry administrators found an endless source of humor in it all.

Using computers to teach photography and writing is just a crutch, they would sniff. Try teaching without the computers for a while, they would suggest helpfully, trying to hold back a schadenfreudian smile.

Digital photography and web design, which is what we actually were teaching,
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How a silent movie informs the current debate over the right to be forgotten

Illustration from the Red Kimono movie poster.

In 1915, Gabrielle Darley killed a New Orleans man who had tricked her into a life of prostitution. She was tried, acquitted of murder and within a few years was living a new life under her married name, Melvin. Then a blockbuster movie, “The Red Kimono,” splashed her sensational story across America’s silver screens.

The 1925 film used Darley’s real name and details of her life taken from transcripts of the murder trial. She sued for invasion of privacy and won.

In deciding in favor of Darley, a California court said that people have a right to rehabilitation. “We should permit [people] to continue in the path of rectitude rather than throw [them] back into a life of shame or crime,” the court said. It is a sentiment that is harder to put into practice today, when information is much more readily available. Nonetheless, policymakers and media outlets are looking at the issue.

As a scholar of media history and law, I see Darley’s story as more than an interesting slice of legal and cinematic history. Her case provides an early example of how private people struggle to escape their pasts and how the idea of privacy is linked to rehabilitation.

How The Conversation is different: All our authors are experts.

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That time private US media companies stepped in to silence the falsehoods and incitements of a major public figure … in 1938

By Bill Kovarik
Published in The Conversation, Jan. 15, 2021
Creative Commons license for non-profit republication.

In speeches filled with hatred and falsehoods, a public figure attacks his enemies and calls for marches on Washington. Then, after one particularly virulent address, private media companies close down his channels of communication, prompting consternation from his supporters and calls for a code of conduct to filter out violent rhetoric.

Sound familiar? Well, this was 1938, and the individual in question was Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest with unfettered access to America’s vast radio audiences. The firms silencing him were the broadcasters of the day.

As a media historian, I find more than a little similarity between the stand those stations took back then and the way Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have silenced false claims of election fraud and incitements to violence in the aftermath of the siege on the U.S. Capitol – noticeably by silencing the claims of Donald Trump and his supporters.

A radio ministry

Coughlin’s Detroit ministry had grown up with radio, and, as his sermons grew more political, he began calling President Franklin D. Roosevelt a liar, a betrayer and a double-crosser. His fierce rhetoric fueled rallies and letter-writing campaigns for a dozen right-wing causes, from banking policy to opposing Russian communism. At the height of his popularity, an estimated 30 million Americans listened to his Sunday sermons.

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Saudi Oil: We should have known better

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World oil reserve comparison USGS vs US DOE proven reserves.

By Bill Kovarik

One of the more painful lessons of recent  history involves the way money and  politics can slant  scientific information.

Take the curiously sudden abundance of fossil fuels.  Not long ago we had looming shortages, certain oil scarcity, and the supposed need to go to war to protect the lifeblood of the world’s economy.

But now, seemingly out of the blue, we have an abundance of natural gas from fracking, heavy oil from Venezuela and unconventional oil from Canada’s tar sands. And much more conventional to come from the Dakotas, the Arctic, Latin America and the coasts of Africa.

What if the world didn’t need Saudi Arabia any more?  What if one of the world’s most brutal and bloodthirsty tyrannies were surplus to modern energy needs?

This is not about replacing oil with solar or wind, although that’s not a bad idea either. This is about replacing Saudi oil with oil from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Canada.

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We undercount hemispheric oil reserves

Letter to the editor, Roanoke Times, Nov 26, 2018

The global reaction to the Jamal Khashoggi assassination has run along two major themes: First, that it was cruel, grossly immoral, and not at all out of character for the ruling monarchs of Saudi Arabia. But secondly, on a practical level, that we will eventually have to shrug it all off because the Saudis have the world’s largest oil reserves.

So, for most of us, our moral compass is in conflict with our practical sense of the thing.

This, however, is mistaken. The pessimistic idea that the world’s energy supply must always revolve around the Middle East is a fallacy — a mistaken belief based on unsound argument.

The argument is that the Middle East has the majority of the world’s proven oil reserves, most of which sits under the sands of the Arabian desert. Consult Wikipedia or the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and you will see the figures. The Saudis have 266 billion “proven” barrels, which, along with the rest of the Middle East, represents about half of the world’s “proven” oil reserves.

The problem is that “proven” oil reserve is not estimated on a scientifically geological basis. Instead, it is politically contrived as the foundation for (among other things) oil export quotas within OPEC. The EIA and all the world oil companies have significantly under-represented the oil reserves of Latin American and Canada, which range in the low trillions (with a “T”), according to a USGS 2000 World Oil Assessment. It is a fact that there is more actual oil in the eastern third of the Venezuelan Orinoco region than in all of the technically inaccurate “proven” reserve estimates of the world oil industry.

Of course, petroleum is not the best long term source of energy, given the serious nature of the climate crisis. But the deceptively under-counted oil reserves of North and South America ought to be recognized for their potential as a practical path away from dependence on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

BILL KOVARIK

 

Mainz – The city that invented modernity


There is an endless fascination with Johannes Gutenberg, the impact of the printing press, and the town of Mainz, Germany where he grew up and began the world’s first major printing operation in the 1450s. You see it in the crowds making something of a pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum there, and you see it in the thriving city itself — the flower stalls, the cathedral, the students singing as they pedal the bicycle-powered beer wagons. Madhvi Ramani of the BBC captures this in a May 8, 2018 article, How a German City Changed How We Read, and quotes from my book Revolutions in Communication.
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Soft soap and fracking

Things can go pretty far off track when science meets the press. When we read shallow generalizations and inaccurate interpretations of studies, we wonder how it could have happened.

So here’s a case in point:  Some day soon, an oil & gas industry representative will probably tell a journalist, or a politician, or a concerned parent: “Fracking water is as safe as dish soap. Check out the 2014 University of Colorado study.”

And of course that will be very much at odds with other studies.  So then, at best, people will chalk the difference up to the old adage:  For every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD.  Or, more likely, they will just take the study at face value.

The 2014 Colorado fracking story is an example of one of many chains of errors in the science reporting system.  It started with a scientific paper about
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Free speech and international law

(Reposting a 2o12 article following events in Paris, Jan. 7, 2015).

Austrian psychology professor Konrad Lorenz used to tell a story about his dog.  On their regular walks, his dog would always run along a neighborhood wall and bark at another dog that was on the inside of the wall.

The two dogs continued this  behavior for years, barking and snarling at each other every day,  until — one day — an accident took out part of the wall.   That day, the two dogs raced along the wall as usual but then came to the broken spot. And  the two dogs faced each other for the first time. After a moment of confusion, they quickly returned to their respective sides of the wall  and started barking across the wall again.

So the lesson, Lorenz said in his 1955 book Man Meets Dog, is that this ability to moderate aggression is a survival skill that animals seem to have.  Could we learn something from their example that applies to our communication problems today?   Continue reading

In solidarity

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