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A little New Year’s Eve warning from the glory that is indexed.

The tagline above is at the heart of the University of Minnesota’s latest “Driven to Discover” public relations campaign. It’s by no means the worst such campaign I’ve seen,* but it does seem to cut against the grain of the U’s public aspirations to become “one of the top three public research universities in the world.” Setting aside the problems with that campaign,** there’s a pretty big gap between saying “we want to be the best university in the world” and “we want to be just like Google.” There are certainly many different benchmarks that one might want to use for measuring and comparing universities, but I doubt that the ability to transform significant research findings into pithy soundbites is likely to improve Minnesota’s ranking very much. To a certain extent, I can understand the desire to add the proverbial human face to what many people see as a large and impersonal institution. But there are probably better ways to pull off the “human face” trick well than to try and make the U into a search engine with a face . . .

. . . especially given what a search engine with a face turns out to be: i.e., Ms. Dewey. As an example of an online game with a semi-slick interface, Ms. Dewey is very distracting and very disturbing, all at the same time. Someone spent an awful lot of time and energy scripting the dozens (hundreds?) of responses that the site’s namesake — a 21st century version of an old B-movie trope (the professional librarian who’s really an uninhibited sex kitten) — offers to various searches, and so there’s a certain ELIZA-like quality to the site: i.e., it’s easy (at least for me) to spend more time playing around with quirky, random, and/or perverse “conversational” gambits — just to see what sort of response you’ll get — than to play things straight and take the program at face value.

To be sure, part of what makes the site work is that some of those pre-canned responses are pretty damned funny. The site’s gender politics, however, remain a bit tricky: “Ms. Dewey” (who’s portrayed with style and sass by Janina Gavankar) offers up the occasional dose of (post)feminist self-reflexivity about how brainy women with multiple degrees get paid more to be eye candy than to strut their intellectual stuff . . . but most of the site still leans heavily on Gavankar’s ability to purr and coo suggestively for an audience of straight guys. And I’m still trying to sort out just how I feel about the site’s racial politics: Ms. Dewey’s style has more than a little racial/ethnic ambiguity to it, which is both cool (insofar as people of color aren’t often depicted as encyclopedic repositories of infinite knowledge) and not so cool (insofar as women of color are routinely depicted as fetish objects).

In the end, though, the site is still nothing more than Microsoft’s “Live” search wrapped in a fancy Flash interface*** . . . and all that flash and style ultimately makes Ms. Dewey into a pretty lousy search engine. If you’re serious about going online to try and learn about something, you’re probably not going to be happy with a search process that requires you to sit through 10-20 seconds of Ms. Dewey’s schtick (however amusing that might be at times) before you’re actually given a long list of sites in a box that’s (a) way too short, (b) difficult to scroll through, and (c) impossible (because of that Flash interface) to grab URLs from without copying them by hand.

Similarly, if you’re serious about promoting a university — any university — as a source of first-rate knowledge and cutting-edge research, you probably don’t want your sales pitch to imply (even obliquely) that your school is long on flash and short on substance.

My neighborhood coffee shop is a very child-friendly place — which I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, there’s a lot to be said for the existence of public (or semi-public) spaces where parents can bring their young’uns, especially when it’s too cold or wet (or both) to hang out at playgrounds and public parks. On the other hand, the mad frenzy of screaming, running, misbehaving toddlers is not always conducive to the prospects of using the coffee shop as a comfortable space for reading, writing, grading, and the like. Sometimes, my iPod cranked up to 11 is the only thing that allows me to concentrate on my work. Other times, even that’s not enough.

Today was one of those other times. And my breaking point came at the moment when one of the mothers attached to the small army of boisterous three-year-olds laying siege to the place pulled one of them aside and started singing to him. And while I suppose that I should have appreciated the song in question — it was, in context, intended to help remind the wee one in question that he wasn’t supposed to be running laps around the coffee shop and screaming — the moral embedded in the words of the song was actually more frightening than the prospect of a half dozen toddlers on sugar-induced rampages. “Rules are cool,” she sang, “rules are cool.” Over and over and over again.

Not exactly a childhood mantra that’s likely to inspire a generation of independent thinkers.

As the semester winds down, my graduate seminar is reading a small stack of essays (okay, okay . . . it’s not that small a stack) about the future(s) of cultural studies. Essays that grapple with questions of what’s currently wrong (and right) with cultural studies, how we might fix those problems, where we should go from here, and so on.

Which made Melissa Gregg’s comments on last week’s CSAA conference in Canberra seem extra timely. I especially appreciate her ability to offer up an honest and modest assessment of some of the limitations of what cultural studies is able to do, while still managing to present a clear picture of why cultural studies still matters . . . and, perhaps more crucially, a hopeful vision of what it might be able to accomplish.

I’ve already lost track of what blog I normally read that lead me here, so my traceback-ing will skip a step. My apologies to the missing link for that.

The meme in question:

You can hire any band/singer/music artist in the world to cover any song you want — Who is the singer and what is the song? Difficulties: band/singer/artist must be alive and working; also, the cover version must not currently exist in the real world. Also, make it something you’d actually want to listen to — don’t make it wacky just for wacky’s sake. That’s too easy, you know? “Fields of the Nephelim doing ‘MmmBop’ by Hanson!” Yes, yes, very clever. But to listen to it would be madness.

Ask me again tomorrow, and I might tell you something different. Right now, though, I’m groovin’ on life in my new hometown — and I wanna hear Prince doing Bob Dylan. My first thoughts were along the lines of “Tangled Up in Blue” — which the Purple One could probably sauce up quite nicely — but I think that a better musical fit would actually be “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” The artist who originally wrote and recorded “Nothing Compares 2 U” should be able to do justice to one of the sweetest songs of love and heartbreak ever written.