CONNECT: INSTRUCTIONAL COMPUTING

Garbage in Gotham:
Enter(ing) the Trashless Classrom

by Robin Nagle

[Ed: Links to web pages and/or e-mail addresses which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]

This fall, I'll teach a new class in the GSAS Draper Program in Liberal Studies that will combine one of humanity's most mundane objects with one of its hippest new developments. It will blend a piece of material culture found all over the world with a new worldwide connection of thinkers, commentators, and electronic passers-by.

Garbage in Gotham: The Anthropology of Trash will examine the cultural assumptions and revelations found in the category of object called "garbage" -- and it will rely on the World-Wide Web to ensure that no trash is generated in the process.

Like most university classes, Garbage in Gotham requires written work. A writing assignment usually implies a work on paper, handed in to the professor, evaluated, handed back, occasionally saved for posterity -- but more often circular-filed. Some professors require students to hand in written work on used paper, but the ultimate destination is the same.

The Web solves this problem. Students submit their papers electronically. They are also required to monitor and participate in conversations on class topics between meetings by checking the class's online discussion group. The syllabus and many of the readings are posted on the NYU Web site, within the NYU home page; the syllabus and readings are linked. During the semester, the offerings of the class's home page {http://www.nyu.edu/classes/garbage/} will grow as students add links, pages, and information. For part of their final assignment, each student will create her or his own home page around a specific research topic.

A key to the success of this pedagogical choice is to make sure all students are completely comfortable with the technology. The first class session is devoted to explaining the intention of the semester, and teaching how to use e-mail, browse the Web, connect to a news group, and build a Web home page.

Technology and Trash

The Web complements the subject of the course. It is a brand-new technology that can deepen our understanding and appreciation of an age-old concern. I conceived this course because I am intrigued by the irony and stubbornness of trash. There is no category of material culture that is as intimate and at the same time as reviled. Each of us generates four pounds of garbage on average every day. There is virtually no area of contemporary life that does not create refuse. Our urban spaces reflect this; walking New York's residential neighborhoods often means maneuvering around mounds of plastic bags and rows of cans. The growl of garbage trucks is such a normal part of New York cacophony that few of us notice it, except when it's accented by the relatively new clank and smash of upended recycling containers.

At the same time, we litter bemoan the city's trash-strewn streets, practice shallow breathing on hot summer days when the sidewalk's stench is nearly choking, cluck at overflowing city garbage cans and highway meridians dotted with debris. Workers for the Department of Sanitation are never given mayoral commendations that make the evening news.

Our paradoxical relationship with trash invites many questions. How is it that, as a culture, we so dislike a category of object that we know so well? How have we come to accept the linear pattern of object creation, use, and discard? How is it that we are comfortable with an ever-growing list of things now made in plastic or paper that was once made in metal, wood, or cloth? How do we assign worth and then rescind the assignation? What would be necessary to create a system of value that does not allow for today's scale of throw-aways?

The garbage we confront in 1995 differs from that of even twenty years ago, because so many categories of object are now defined as disposable. Cutlery, plates, razors, hospital gowns, cups and glasses, cameras, diapers, milk containers -- these were once relatively permanent but are now commonly tossed once used. One could propose that the increased disposability of our material culture reflects a concomitant disposability in other areas. Are our relationships, our commitments, our bonds to social culture less solid, more expendable, than they were in our parents' time, or our grandparents'? Does our disposable culture signify a deepening sense of alienation and anomie?

The Paradox of the Web

Using the Web to draw the class together holds its own paradox. The Web is the ultimate dissolver of material bindings. Some would argue that it is the ultimate isolator. It can indeed distract from the messier, more tangible "real" world. But at the same time, on the Web and on the Internet one can create or find a kind of community with anonymous others who can become intimates, though one may never meet them face to face. In a university, the Web allows teachers and students to dissolve classroom walls, continue conversations outside the boundaries of time, invite outsiders inside the discussion, and glean knowledge from people with similar expertise or curiosity from anywhere that the world is interconnected.

Universities, at their best, provide venues for students to experience the deep and even life-altering pleasure of debating ideas, challenging colleagues, learning new perspectives and radically different points of view. We grow most profoundly through our exchanges with others. The Web provides a new way to help this happen.

A friend who teaches ethnomusicology and who created a whimsical, scholarly home page as a teaching resource offers the following thought from Seymour Papert: "The construction that takes place 'in the head' often happens especially felicitously when it is supported by construction of a more public sort 'in the world' -- a sandcastle or a cake, a Lego house or a corporation, a computer program, a poem, or a theory of the universe. Part of what I mean by 'in the world' is that the product can be shown, discussed, examined, probed, and admired. It is out there." Adds my friend: "Like a set of Web pages." [ C ]

Robin Nagle, an anthropologist and environmental journalist, is Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science.
{nagle@is.nyu.edu} Replacement URL: robin.nagle@nyu.edu

Posted 17 October 1995. Revised 20 May 2004.