UWM Lecturer and Class Add to Global Culture
By Laura L. Hunt
After Alan Aycock taught his class about the effects of big-box global retailing, their work ended up on Wikipedia.
Watch what you write in the private space that once was your syllabus. If it’s posted online, it could end up on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can add information to. It happened to Alan Aycock, a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and a trainer with the Learning Technology Center.
Happily for Aycock, the experience enriched the concepts he was teaching in his freshman seminar on “Ads and Shopping in American Culture” last semester.
It all began when he created a word to describe the effect on American companies of Wal-Mart’s global marketing strategies. “I needed a term for what was going on with Wal-Mart, comparable to the terms ‘Disneyfication’ and ‘McDonaldization,’ so I made up ‘Walmarting’ and put it in the syllabus as a course topic,” he says.
Within a couple of months, he discovered that “his” word had its own entry in Wikipedia, and his syllabus was listed as one of the entry’s sources. “I thought, ‘Wow, that was fast,’” he says, and immediately shared it with his 19-member class.
“I don’t think they were all that impressed,” he says. “But they had just completed an assignment about Wal-Mart and globalization. So I took a summary of their responses, cleaned it up a little, and posted it back on the “Walmarting” entry of Wikipedia over the weekend.”
To his surprise, he received a thank-you note from Wikipedia editors, who had been trying to decide whether to keep the entry on the site because it wasn’t well-researched. His students’ work, however, had provided the thoroughness they were looking for.
The resulting entry reads:
Walmarting is a newly formed word with three meanings. The first usage refers to competitive business practices of large corporations, derived from those of the retailer Wal-Mart. This use is similar to the concept of globalization and is used pejoratively by critics and neutrally by businesses seeking to emulate Wal-Mart’s success. The second usage refers to the homogenization of the retail sector due to those practices and is pejorative. A third, neutral usage, refers to the act of shopping at the retail chain, Wal-Mart.
Aycock says the experience offered him a teaching moment, allowing him to point out how the word had entered the vocabulary in quite a different context – as a social science concept. It was especially appropriate, considering this was the first time he had taught the course to undergraduates.
“I told my students that Walmarting had become a scholarly enterprise,” he says. “It illustrates a point that we talked about in the class. Because of globalization, when you shopped at Wal-Mart you were actually placing an order for goods from China.”
Aycock’s specialty is the anthropology of religion. In his day job, he works at the Learning Technology Center, where he coaches UWM faculty on using technology in the classroom.
He sees a parallel between the issue of Wal-Mart and globalization, and his own field of study. “We consume religion in the same way we consume merchandise,” he says. “The notion of evangelical religion as somehow being anti-modern is at odds with what we know about mass media. After all, the marketing of Bibles fits into a capitalist philosophy. The first U.S. ad agency was started by evangelical Christians.”
Check out the site at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmarting
###
