"A Round Unvarnished Tale" ... in 140 Characters

I decided that I will take a break from talking about the House of Fame and will instead regale my readers with a round unvarnished tale—of how my students read Othello and related the play to their own lives by creating Twitter accounts. This activity started out, I have to say, poorly. I put very little thought into it and just wanted to motivate students to be more involved in class discussion. Yet, it developed into something very good, thanks to my students. I set it up by putting them into groups of three or four, depending on the class size, and assigning each group a character from the play (usually Cassio, Desdemona, Emilia, Iago, Othello, Roderigo and, if need be, Lodovico—I’ll tell you why later). They are told to create a handle, follow all the other characters and to follow me. I create an account called “The Doge” that facilitates their initial connection. If they all follow me, then it is easier for them to follow each other. Then, as they read the play, they are to compose at least 15 messages from the perspective of their assigned character. I tell them to try their best to become that character and think the way, say, Desdemona would think. At least one of the 15 has to be private and at least one has to be public. So, they could theoretically send out 14 private messages to other groups. However, without fail they send out 14 public and only one private message. I have been doing this activity for over a year with many groups of students. I always begin the activity with a primer on Twitter (they wind up teaching me more than I them—I now know what subtweeting is. I think.) and go through the Twitter “privacy statement” and remind them that this is for the whole world to see, so they should be mindful what their character would want to share with the whole world. Yet, I found out that they are much more prone to publishing private matters, such as who’s really got the handkerchief or who is plotting to kill whom, than the original characters and even more so than I thought they would be. Here are some screenshots I took that show their openness in the Twitterverse:

In this conversation, taken from the first class that tried this exercise out, Othello gets a little more than he
bargained for and winds up saving Desdemona's life, unraveling Iago's plan with one little public tweet.

This displays another version of that same handkerchief conversation in another class,  but with less Othello. This could go either way: either it is really good or really bad for Desdemona. Some students speculate that, even this late in the play, Othello is too concerned with his reputation to do something he thinks would jeopardize his career as general. Thus, they argue, knowing everyone would see this, he would back off and not kill Desdemona since everyone can see that she and Cassio are not trying to hide anything.

Desdemona is much more outspoken here than in the play. It is difficult to imagine her saying this in Act 4, but not Act 1, as my students pointed out to me. She is tragically silenced when she loses the handkerchief. Also, Roderigo, who has the best photo, does his part to derail Iago's plotting ways.

Here Iago comes out to gloat near the end of the play. This is seemingly the only time in the play when Iago would want to be on Twitter. Some students speculated that he would hate Twitter or that he would hack into Desdemona and Cassio's accounts and send damning messages that he would then show to Othello. #devious (did I do that right?).

Here, in another class, Iago undercuts his credibility rather early on in the play. It would be difficult for him to maintain his reputation as "honest Iago" if he is rather insensitively writing this after the brawl that left one man in need of stitches and another without his job. Iago also has a brilliant subtweet above.

Iago has a flat-out brutal subtweet here (the Mar 6 one). Just awful. A+ work for that group. Plus, Othello also spills the beans in this conversation, just like in the first screenshot. It is telling that extreme emotion seems well suited for public consumption in our digital world. But this display of emotion was what made Shakespeare's theater so attractive. What is different is that in the Shakespearean theater it was stylized in blank verse and concentrated on one stage. Now, in a cultural turn that would have tickled Shakespeare, the stage includes everyone with a Twitter account, and the result is that people think the consequences of choosing to display one's inner, private feelings are seemingly far off and as real as a play. 

In one class the Othello character stated in a public message that he was contemplating murder. The responses are priceless. In another, Desdemona asks everyone following her if they know what happened to her handkerchief. Cassio responds quickly, which could either clear up the confusion or exacerbate Othello’s desire for “justice” and hasten her demise. In yet another, Iago is actually “honest” and displays a cockiness and arrogance only seen in private or later on in the play.  

I ask the students to conclude the activity by writing a response paper about privacy in Othello and in their own lives. They are to look closely at how their assigned character behaved in the play and contrast that with how the character behaved on Twitter. This makes for some pretty insightful papers. Students suddenly realize how assertive Desdemona really is in the beginning of the play and see her sudden change—when she drops the handkerchief—as a very tragic reversal for her. Students sympathize more with Desdemona after this activity. They also comment on how much more open Desdemona and Emilia are on Twitter as opposed to the play, and note that these two women likely struggled against greater sexism than women now do. Their sympathy for these two characters is produced mainly by this exercise. The same cannot be said for Othello, who often has the most intriguing tweets and gets the brunt of the students’ wrath for his behavior and poor communication skills. One would think that Iago should receive the most ire, but students assigned to Iago actually do not do as well with this activity. They do not say as much as those assigned to other characters. Since Iago prefers to work in the dark, they instead put out tepid public tweets or outright spill the beans about Iago’s character. Yet they do not send more private messages. There seems to be a compulsion to confess among my students that is stronger than the desire to stick to the script of the play. This compulsion is manifested by all the characters. The students seem to feel almost obliged to reveal some secret before the end of the play. This could be attributable to their unconscious desire to change the tragic outcome, their status as readers (and inability to really get into the mindset of the character), but I think both of those reasons are impacted by the culture of revelation that social media fosters. 

The ultimate aim of this activity is for them to think critically about their own use of social media and how that changes their own notions of privacy. Whereas almost all characters in Othello adeptly keep secrets (Desdemona and Othello with their elopement, Iago with everything, Emilia with the handkerchief, Cassio with Iago’s plan, and Othello with the planned revenge on Cassio and Desdemona), students in every class that has done this exercise have revealed at least one crucial secret. When Othello says openly that he wants to kill Desdemona, that stops the play right there. She would stay away from their marriage bed and change into something more comfortable. When Desdemona asks about the handkerchief, one can imagine Emilia eventually chiming in (by sending, in the words of one student, a blocked text message or an anonymous email, which would have told Desdemona the location of the fateful handkerchief and would have completely changed the outcome of the play) or Othello wondering why Cassio and Desdemona are being so open about what he thought was a secret affair. When Iago says he thinks he is better than everyone else, his credibility is impugned for the rest of the play. If Lodovico is part of the Twitter conversation, then he could instantly tweet out to all his followers that he saw Othello hit Desdemona. If Othello saw that tweet, he may choose to avoid taking further violent action since he knows that his violence is already hurting his precious reputation and his chances of ensuring that men will, after he dies, speak of him as he is and "nothing extenuate." The revelation of these secrets derails the plot and could even lead to much better outcomes for most of the characters or, at least, fewer deaths.

Thus, this activity that started out as a way to get them to read Othello more closely became more of a social experiment for digital natives and a way for my students to think hard about what privacy means for them. Although it is an experiment that proves nothing, it it still holds educational value. Most students, in their response papers, acknowledge that they freely give up certain elements of privacy. Others reflect on how privacy is gone and it is none of their doing (which the exercise, in my view, seems to militate against). They claim that, even if they try to remain private, they will be mentioned on social media or roped into it somehow, and they can only avoid it by totally separating themselves from society. There is some truth to these claims. But, most students acknowledge that Othello teaches them that there are consequences—very serious consequences—to the circulation of secrets within a social network and that they are somewhat insulated from these consequences by the warm glow of their computer screens. They tend to forget through the immense and immeasurable distance created by the digital that their behavior online can have life-changing consequences. Whether they acknowledge it or not, this activity shows that they--no, we--are complicit in the erosion of privacy in our time.

Overall, the students, as the screenshots show, have a lot of fun with this, and engage more fruitfully with a text they initially approached with either apathy or trepidation. They get much more out of the play through this exercise and they see how it can relate to their own lives, which is something that is a struggle for them when reading older literature. They come to see that their compulsion to confess is a function of the specific structure of the network in which they communicate. Twitter is structured to encourage public tweets. Plus, it’s more fun that way. The design leads people to write things that would have been kept private maybe a generation ago, and the potential to read something a bit risqué is a big part of Twitter’s attraction.

Social media now seems to be little more than a distraction and a gaffe factory. However, it also has played a key role in the Arab Spring and the self-liberation of oppressed people. Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. What in the short term may seem irrelevant or detrimental may in the long run be more significant and beneficial than we can imagine. For now, we need to, along with my students, acknowledge our own role in the melting away of our privacy and be vigilant so that our culture does not lose one of the precious resources built up through centuries of political oppression. As one of my students wisely put it, "There are pros and cons of this era of self-made mass surveillance."  

To conclude, here is this post’s edition of Canon Confidential. Below is a fuller explanation of the answer to Tweet #3: Enjaminbay Anklinfray was in an ideal position to gather information at many points in his life. He was deputy postmaster-general for North America for roughly twenty years. He was America’s envoy to Paris and was involved in secret negotiations with the French for extended periods of time. While in Paris he passed along information to the British intelligence services, giving them more information on America’s relations with the French than even Washington had! Franklin was also a reputed Knight of St Francis of Wycombe, or a member of the Hellfire Club, an eighteenth-century British club for high-society men in politics who wanted to behave like rakes—and I mean rakes: sex, binge drinking, all that was part of being a member. It was a fraternity for old British politicians. As membership in this club was very exclusive, it is difficult to ascertain what Franklin’s role was in it when he joined in roughly 1758 when in Britain. However, many powerful English politicians were in it, and he might have been, according to Geoffrey Ashe in his Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality, a spy gathering information on the British politicians to be used later by the Americans (121).