1A Lesson Plan for “Love and War in Cyberspace” and "The Consequences--Undoing Sanity" (299)

One. The Myth of Technological Panacea: Technology will create a paradise on Earth.

A myth is a fantasy, a delusion, or a belief system that animates people to their own detriment.

Two. Types of Myths

1.    iPod is the myth of creativity and being a member of the in-crowd.

2.    The CDC (Center for Disease Control) offers the myth of assurance: Government is taking care of us, but the swine flu crisis shows the myth for what it is: We’re helpless.

3.    The Myth of Masculinity: “Real men” don’t need gadgets and toys to be masculine. In truth, men rely on fast cars for higher testosterone levels.

4.    The Myth of Technology: It will afford me the power to transform myself, to be superior to others, and to connect in deeper more meaningful ways. “Love and War in Cyberspace” shows the opposite to be true. The more these nerds rely on the myth of technology, the more dysfunctional, emotionally retarded and insane they become.

5.    The Myth of the Group: a tech society or a fan base for a professional sports team, Nike Talk, and son on: You belong to the in-group and rely on shared community experience to overcome your loneliness. To unify themselves, they stir up foment and hostility against the mythic out-group, Los Otros.

6.    The Myth of Hedonism: Pursuing pleasure, thrill, and excitement will give me happiness. Hedonists are self-indulgent people and one thing self-indulgent people all have in common: They are miserable.

7.    The Myth of Wealth: Look at the Lotto winners: 95% of them end up bankrupt, divorced, and in despair.

8.    The Myth of Freedom: It is unlimited and offers you boundless possibilities. In fact, freedom requires focus and freedom. Consider Tennessee Williams after he became famous.

9.    The Myth of Self-Preservation: People who hoard things and “look out for number one” are doomed to a life of failure and demise. Consider the people ofLeningrad during the German Seize of World War II.

10.                   The Myth of Success: Discipline and hard work guarantee that you will rise above mediocrity or achieve a goal. This is not an absolute truth. It’s a relative truth. Discipline and hard work increase your probability of success but do not guarantee it.

11.                   The Talent Myth: Geniuses succeed. No. More often than not, those who follow the 10,000 Hour Rule achieve success.

12.                   The Love Myth: The infatuation that you feel during the first few months of a relationship must sustain its intensity or else “you’re not really in love.”

13.                   The Relationship Myth: I’m miserable because I’m lonely. If only I could find a mate, I’d be happy. Wrong. The reason why you don’t have a mate is because you have profound defects in your personality that repel people. A boyfriend or a girlfriend will only stick a band-aid over your psychological warts.

14.                   The College Graduation Myth: As soon as you finish your college education, you’ll be in cruise control. Wrong. There is no such thing as cruise control. There is no such thing as an easy life.

15.                   The Hakuna Matata Myth. There is no paradise with easy happiness and no worries. Life is a struggle.

16.                   The Perfection Myth: The more beautiful and “perfect” you become, the more happy you will be. Look at anorexics, plastic surgery mongers and the like. They are all ugly and frightening and appear like phantoms from our worst nightmares.

17.                   The Television Myth: If I’m not on TV, if I’m not interviewed on the E Channel, if I don’t star in a reality show, I am a NOBODY. The Octomom and the couple from John and Kate Plus 8, and wannabes on American Idolembody this myth.

18.                   The College Professor Myth: My students listen to me because I am a special person with a unique sense of humor and intellectual brilliance that my students find captivating. Wrong. Your students, if they’re polite, listen to you out of courtesy. But their minds are filled with all sorts of interests, which don’t include you in the slightest. Your students are concerned with paying their bills, their relationships, their job, and furthering their career. You’re not as special as you think, Professor, so stick your macro-cephalic ego where it belongs, chump.

19.                    The Marriage Myth. “I want to get married because marriage is a Big Goody Box and whenever I want a goody, all I have to do is reach into the Goody Box and get one. Yeah!” This mythic conception of marriage has all the maturity of an adenoidal teenage male. What happens when the “goodies,” as you call them, run out? You dump your spouse and find a new Goody Box.

 

Part Three. A Failed Experiment in the Myth of Unlimited Freedom. We learn that real freedom requires conditions. Therefore unlimited freedom, the kind we see at Walden, is a false freedom.

 

 

Unlimited Freedom at Walden Is a False Freedom

 

1. E-mail communication is not free. There must be face-to-face accountability; if you can’t say what you have to say to another human’s face, you are a coward and a fraud. Too many people hiding behind their computers speaking reckless thoughts from their mind.
2. E-mail communication is dangerous because you’re hiding under the delusional safety of your computer. In fact, your raw unedited thoughts are dangerous and inappropriate. Your thoughts should be measured, contemplated, and edited. That’s what makes you a mature, thinking person. The stream of consciousness that spews forth in an e-mail is the rant and tantrum of a spoiled child.

 

3. Squandering all your free time on an addiction is not freedom; it’s enslavement and the Multi-User Dungeon gamers are slaves to their addiction. See 380
4. Technology without wisdom will kill you. These renters have the broadest band-width in the world, but they can’t handle it. The computer modem attaches to their brain and their minds become warped; they go insane. See page 383
5. Walden gives the loners and computer geeks a sense of belonging, which you need to be free, but this is false belonging. This is symbiosis; an unhealthy mutual dependence that results in retarding your emotional growth. See 381
6. A cohesive healthy community must have protocols of etiquette to create a sense of safety, respect, and dignity. But there are no boundaries at Walden. See the “bombastic” and violent language on page 386.
7. A healthy community has diversity of people with diversity of ideas to challenge one’s way of seeing the world. But the people at Walden are a monolithic tribe. They’re all the same and as a result they’re maladapted to the real world, which is diverse. The world isn’t a bunch of computer geeks and hiding in a cell with other computer geeks isn’t the answer. See page 383
8. See page 390 in which we learn that hedonism leads to despair. That kind of extreme behavior is always followed by a crash. Your whole life can’t be a party. You’ll burn-out. You’ll find yourself lost. People who party all the time age faster than the rest of us. They look old. Hedonism wears you out. It’s not freedom. It’s a desperate attempt to escape your sense of loneliness and isolation and it never works. Read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.
9. There are no moral absolutes and no sense that this is right and this is wrong; as a result, Walden is a place of chaos and confusion.
10. A Virtual World is a place where you don’t find freedom. You lose yourself to insanity. 

 

Part Three. The 8 Characteristics of Virtual World

 

1. The VW allows you to escape your daily frustrations.
2. The VW allows you to escape from the intense pain of having no intimacy in your life, both romantic and social.
3. The VW becomes a way of procrastinating your responsibilities.
4. The VW can incite chemical reactions in your brain that become addictive.
5. The VW presents you with manageable challenges, giving you a sense of control and achievement when you would otherwise feel overwhelmed by a lack of control and a sense of personal failure.
6. It’s easier to go back and delete your mistakes in a VW and star all over again than it is in real life.
7. The VW allows you to erase or hide your real self, the one you either despise or feel is inadequate or both, and it allows you to recreate yourself with bells and whistles so that you have more confidence.
8. The VW provides you with a sense of belonging in the “online community” when in the real world you’re overcome by a sense of constant loneliness and isolation. 

 

 

McMahon’s thesis for “Love and War in Cyberspace”

 

Cause and Effect Thesis Uses "can be attributed to" and "and results in"

Example:

The swine flu hysteria can be attributed to its unpredictable mutability, disproportionate coverage of a few deaths (far less than the common flu), the stigma of an animal-to-human contagion and this hysteria will result in wild rumors inflaming public anxiety, overreactions (canceled cruises, abstaining from pork, etc.) and hypochondria (people misinterpreting every sniffle or cough as a sign of "sure death"). 

The organic food movement, as chronicled in Michael Pollan's masterful essay, can be attributed to ___________________, ________________, ________________, and results in ___________________, __________________, and ____________________. 

The intoxicating, addictive nature of war, Hedges argues, can be attributed to ________________, _________________, and ___________________, and results in ______________________, ___________________, and _________________________. 

Walden is a failed experiment in the promise of unlimited freedom through technology. This woeful failure can be attributed to ________________, ___________________, and ____________________, and results in ___________________, ___________________, and __________________________________.

 

Katy Vine’s essay shows us the dangers of living in a Virtual World, which include __________________, ___________________, _________________, and _________________________.

 

“Love and War in Cyberspace” 380. 5-page outline: In the first 2 pages, analyze the causes of social dysfunction described in the essay. Then in about 3 pages, use research to show how the apartment complex is a microcosm for an emerging social dysfunction in our Age of Information. As such the thesis would like this: The apartment complex is a microcosm for an emerging social dysfunction emerging in our Information Age, which consists of __________________, ___________________, ___________________, and _______________________. You would flesh out the mapping components for the essay's last 3 pages.

 

 

More Stylized Thesis with a More Distinct Writing Voice:

Take a bunch of socially dysfunctional computer nerds in desperate search of belonging, stick them in a yuppie techno-apartment flexing its steroidal broadband muscles and you’ve got Walden, a microcosm of the types of addictions Americans will face in the near future. These addictions will include a sick attachment to trumped-up, often noxious alter egos, the need to vent without boundaries, the preference of virtual worlds to the real world and all the chemicals the body requires to stay up in a ghoul-like existence where sleep is little more than an afterthought.

Research Links:

Virtual Reality: Danger Ahead

Real Hope in a Virtual World (unrealistic expectations)

Geeking Out (addiction)

Second Skin Documentary

CNN (addiction)

1A Lesson Plan for “The Consequences—Undoing Sanity” (299)

Part One. Lexicon

1. Anhedonia: you reach a state of unhappiness from which there is no return. Once you wear this quality on your sleeve, you become unemployable.
2. What’s harder on a man, begging for love or work? Work. Humiliation results in anhedonia.
3. Inertia (see 300 top); paralysis that feeds on itself.
4. Male vs. female hardwiring and their different effects in the workplace: Women are more adaptable, take more risks, and seek change. In contrast, men like routine, comfort, and stability. In sum, women fare better than men in the face of unemployment for 5 reasons: 1. Men's macho pride and identity are inextricably linked to their jobs. 2. Women are more resilient. They bounce back after a crisis. 3. Women are more social than men. Women cooperate. Men on the other hand negotiate. 4. Women take care of themselves during their unemployment. Men on the other hand become shut-ins, withdraw in their homes, and transform into disheveled homeless people. 5. Women thrive on change; men thrive on stagnation and fixed routine.
5. Unemployment is referred to as the “acuteness of the blow”: See page 301 in which the person is so traumatized he cannot face the anxieties, the rejection, and the sense of insignificance all over again, so he sabotages future prospects.
6. The double hit of unemployment: The feeling of being worthless coupled with self-blame: See page 301, last paragraph.
7. “Finessing layoffs”: See page 302 top. The attempt to “finesse” a layoff is futile.
8. The layoff is followed by a breaking of emotional bonds with others; it has a rippling effect. The person withdraws into depression. See page 302.
9. Despondence and apathy set in.
10. Ennui (the cycle: despondence, apathy and inertia, ennui, and then anhedonia)
11. Husband’s unemployment devastates the wife: She has to carry her soul, and his, up the mountain.
12. “Going postal”
13. Unemployment spreads shame through the entire family: See page 307 bottom.
14. Shell-shocked: You become so traumatized that you build a defensive wall that is worse than the problem that made you shell-shocked in the first place. (describe the student with the scowl on her face)  

 

Part Two: Summary of Unemployment Effects

1. family withdraws from one another

2. children are "emotional sponges" and internalize and absorb their parents' emotional trauma.

3. alcoholism increases

4. divorce increases

5. suicide (murder-suicide in Wilmington)

6. long-term stigma

7. long-term low self-esteem and self-blame

8. long-term physical ailments including hypertension, ulcers, chronic fatigue, etc.

9. women reach out for social support more than men so women tend to fare better.

10. Vicious cycle of unemployment: You become depressed, which makes you less employable, which makes you more depressed, and so on and so on. 

Part Three: Writing Options

Option #A:

Write a comparison and contrast essay that explores the similarities and differences between the way men and women handle unemployment. Your first two pages should explore the similarities; the second half should examine the discrepancies.

 

Option #B:

Write an informative essay on the psychological damage and family trauma resulting from unemployment.  

Option #C:

Using no fewer than 3 research sources, write a survival manual for someone who lost his or her job. Evaluate five things that the person must do to avoid some of the traps discussed earlier. 

Research Sources:

Predicting Self-Esteem During Unemployment

Supporting Your Spouse Through Unemployment

Unemployment Blues

How Pink Slips Hurt More Than Workers

Wolf at the Door