The purpose of a writing class is to develop a meaningful thesis, direct or implied, that will generate a compelling essay. Most importantly, a meaningful thesis will have a strong emotional connection between you and the material. In fact, if you don’t have a “fire in your belly” to write the paper, your essay will be nothing more than a limp document, a perfunctory exercise in futility. A successful thesis will also be intellectually challenging and afford a complexity worthy of college-level writing. Thirdly, the successful thesis will be demonstrable, which means it can be supported by examples and illustrations in a recognizable organizational design.
Other Website: http://herculodge.typepad.com/
Alfred Lubrano, “The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts” (580); Murray Milner Jr., “Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids” (602)
Alfred Lubrano, “The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts” (580)
One. What new value system imposes itself on working-class lifestyle?
Lubrano claims college replaces loyalty to family and friends to personal fulfillment, social obligation, pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and many other philosophical questions that are part of the Great Change.
In many ways, learning takes the students farther and father from their parents and families. Traditions are supplanted by personal lifestyle choices.
In fact, Lubrano continues to make the claim that the more distant students are from their parents the more likely they are to succeed in college. It’s as if students have to break the umbilical cord and exit the womb to achieve what Erich Fromm calls individuation, emerging as an individual as an entity separate from one’s parents. Such a process can involve a “bridge burning.”
When Lubrano came home from college, he’d eat with his family but keep his mouth shut about the new things and values he was learning because these new ideas would upset his parents, especially his father. He could not for example discuss the political theories of Karl Marx, racial equality, economic class struggle, and so on. He studied in the kitchen at night where no one would bug him.
Two. How does Lubrano describe high school?
It’s a giant, crude factory training kids to flip burgers. It’s little more than a day care center for teenagers.
Three. What are the necessary measures of the “scholarship boy”?
He must disconnect from his family. He must read alone, living a life of hibernation. He must accept that books create a “disharmony,” or strife in the family household.
Four. What is the difference of attitude that a middle-class kid has towards liberal arts education and a working-class kid?
For the working-class kid, studying liberal arts, like reading the play Macbeth, is disconnected fro reality, from money, from any kind of goal imaginable. In contrast, studying liberal arts is about many things but we’ll focus on two: Liberal arts is about advancing one’s linguistic acquisition, which is part of the language of money, class, sophistication, communication, articulation, and philosophy. Secondly, language accompanies critical thinking skills, which are important for leadership, questioning power, repelling manipulation and mind games of others, repelling groupthink (lazy, fear-induced conformist thinking), and a host of other things that advance one on the Darwinian social ladder.
Moreover, working-class kids have peer pressure to hate school, which is considered a place for effete eggheads and pencil-neck geeks.
These opposing attitudes are reinforced by the fact that teachers treat students based on their economic class, showing contempt for the poor and working class and lavishing respect on the upper class.
In working-class homes, there are implicit laws of conformity, including contempt for education.
In working-class neighborhoods, if you deviate from the norm, you're not just different; you're rejecting the community.
For working-class neighborhoods, life is centripetal; it doesn't go anywhere. In contrast, middle-class neighborhoods aspire to a centrifugal journey, which is expansive and transformative. There isn't even langauge like this in a working-class environment.
Opinions in a middle-class home are more collaborative, less conformist.
Your will in a working-class environment is imposed on others through brute force, not so in a middle-class environment as we see in the relationship between Loretta and Barry on page 586.
Essay Option from Reading the Signs, page 586, Number 2
In an argumentative essay, support, challenge, or complicate Gregg Andrews's statement that "Every bit of learning taks you further from your parents" (para. 1).
Murray Milner Jr. “Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids” (602)
One. What kind of hideous moral bankruptcy informs the idea that consumerism is the appropriate and patriotic response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11?
Something so glib, trivial, and self-indulgent, an endeavor that makes us ignorant of world politics and makes us vulnerable to the kind of hate that our arrogant, incontinent spending entails (colonizing Middle Eastern countries so we can have cheap gas, for example) could be equated with noble, virtuous behavior. It is obscene.
Our consumer binge is so deleterious to our moral health that we no longer contribute to a civil society. Our relations and connections with others are limited to consumer experiences, including selfies taken at restaurants for the delectation of our Facebook friends.
We have moved closer and closer to narcissism and farther and farther away from cosmopolitan citizen (an educated person who engages in healthy self-interested altruism).
We become preppies, philistines who care about status and use hard work to achieve the kind of status afforded by conspicuous consumerism, which of course takes money.
Two. How do some people alternate “disciplined hard work and genuine enjoyment of the good life as a high social accomplishment”?
They become Bobos, the merging of bourgeois and bohemian, a middle-class consumer and a countercultural subversive type, an individual who goes against the grain.
Bobos are their own insular clique, which is a lot like high school preppy cliques. Both are smug and supercilious.
Bobos are a contradiction: They embody “cosmopolitan provincialism.” They are cosmopolitans and tribalists at the same time.
Essay Option based on Reading the Signs, page 613, Number 4:
Read or reread John Verdant’s “The Ables vs. the Binges” (p. 152). Adopting Milner’s article as a critical framework, analyze the two families that the article describes. To what extent is each family “committed to the key requirements of a consumer society: high production and high consumption” (para.5)?
Jack Solomon, “Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising” (542); Phyllis and Debra Japp, “Purification through Simplification: Nature, the Good Life, and Consumer Culture” (553)
Jack Solomon, “Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising” (542)
One. What is a salient paradox of American culture?
America promises equal opportunity on one hand but has a ferocious hunger for privilege, advantage, and distinction on the other. Humans have contradictory impulses, to belong to the group and to rise above and be special. We want to attain “a social summit beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.” These are the two faces of the American dream.
I remind you of a study in which people would rather make 50K and everyone else make 25K than have everyone make 100K.
Equality does not quell our vanity, our libido ostentandi, the need to show off.
Two. How does advertising manipulate us through the contradiction of social equality and social distinction?
Chevrolet trucks are symbols of the everyman, the working man, the heart of America. But another Chevy brand, Cadillac, represents a rarified, elite club, a sign that you are someone who deserves to be pampered.
Status symbols are now tied to our identity. For examples, hipsters, intelligentsia, and cognoscenti prefer Apple computers while “farmers” use PCs.
Mini Coopers and hybrids tend to be the cars of cosmopolitans, the urbane, the educated, the skinny pants-wearing sophisticates.
The Subaru is also a fashion symbol, which says, I don’t need fashion. This is ironically a fashion statement.
In America, the longer the driveway, the higher one is on the social-economic ladder. Some driveways are so long, you cannot even spot the house from the driveway’s opening.
Rolex, Breitling, Omega, Panerai, and a few others are watch brands that tell the tight-knit club of the rich that you have made it into the club. There is a billion-dollar counterfeit watch industry in which you can buy the aforementioned brands, which start at five thousand and can cost well over thirty thousand dollars, for under $500.
“Status symbols are signs that identify their possessors’ place in a social hierarchy, markers of rank and prestige.”
Three. What is the life of fantasy explained on page 546?
The products’ signs embellish fantasies and are more important than the products’ substance. As an example, McDonald’s is not just a burger place; it’s an escape for people of all ages.
Four. Do ads that promise increased sexual desire and appeal really work and why?
It turns out that buying a product that is associated with sexual appeal works in many ways, not the least of which is the placebo effect. If we’re confident a product gives us added sexual appeal, then that confidence translates into added appeal. On a deeper level, this placebo affects us physically. Young college men in a Duke study had lower testosterone when sitting in a Toyota Camry but increased testosterone when sitting in a Porsche.
Phyllis and Debra Japp, “Purification through Simplification: Nature, the Good Life, and Consumer Culture” (553)
One. What is the contradictory quest in the American culture of happiness?
There two myths: The good life is based on the “belief in happiness and fulfillment through technology, the availability and acquisition of wealth and possessions, upward social mobility, and political influence.” This myth treats nature like a resource that must be mined and utilized for the acquisition of things. Nature must be conquered for human pleasure and wellbeing. “More is better” uses “nature as raw material to develop and maintain the commodities necessary for the good life.”
The second myth, contrary to the first one, is a life spare of possessions and greed on one hand while being strongly connected to nature and humanitarian concerns on the other.
The pendulum tends to shift back and forth as we go through a binge and purge cycle.
Popular culture (which translates into consumer culture) co-opts this human dichotomy for its own purposes, using advertising to appeal to these contradictory forces.
Two. What makes the “simple life” a convenient advertising tool?
Marketers can shape the “simple life” any way they want because it’s not a fixed entity but “a shifting cluster of ideas, sentiments, and activities.” The myth of the simple life starts as “hostility toward luxury and a suspicion of riches, a reverence for nature and a preference for rural over urban ways of life and work, a desire for personal self-reliance though frugality and diligence, a nostalgia for the past and a skepticism toward the claims of modernity.” This expression can be laid out in many ways in the world of advertising. The Subaru is an example of a simple life consumer item.
A lot of consumer items are symbols of “voluntary simplicity,” a growing movement of people who want to shun excess and “downsize” their lifestyle. There is a huge amount of self-help literature out there that treats consumer excess like a disease that needs to be cured. This downsized lifestyle appeals to middle-class professionals who are “torn between the need for more and the need for less as they try to manage the complexity of their lives.” The professionals have the luxury of embarking on a “personal journey” of self-imposed downsizing. For them, this downsizing is a form of “personal growth.”
Two. What parts make up the narrative of the minimalist lifestyle of The Good Life?
There must be a conversion experience, an epiphany, that at the root of their lives there is an emptiness and a contamination that needs purgation.
They repent from their old consumer excesses.
They become evangelists or spokespeople for a simpler existence that is closer to nature and human connection.
They must establish guilt of the old life, the bad life. “There must be something better.”
They must seek redemption by finding their true place in life, their “home,” their meaning.
Having found salvation, they must now bear witness to their new lifestyle discovery.
Chapter 6: American Paradox 513-541 (Brooks and Ehrenreich)
One. How are we a culture of tribes and dichotomies?
We are “red state” or “blue state”; James Brown or Pat Boone; James Joyce or Nancy Drew; elitist or populist; cosmopolitan or tribalist, individualistic or conformist, social responsibility or libertarian, materialistic or spiritual, etc.
Two. What unifying value now dominates America and transcends the oppositions discussed above?
To borrow from Jeremy Rifkin, we are now beholden to “hypercapitalism” in which “values of capitalism overwhelm all other values . . .” For example, the “blue state” ad for Diesel jeans exploits sexuality for profit; the Tea Party wants private rights, that is money, to trump all other social values. So in a way the blue and red states have something in common.
Three. Do the red state and blue state stereotypes in David Brooks’ essay, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” seem convincing? Explain.
It’s Walmart and big trucks and ripped sleeves and mullets and Christmas all year round vs. cathedral ceilings, predatory jobs, dry cleaning, gadget geeks, or if they have liberal arts jobs these blue state people drive little cars and show passive-aggressive hostility for gas guzzlers and sanctimonious bumper stickers.
He concludes, though, that we are not a divided nation; we are a cafeteria nation, meaning we are nation of cliques, niche groups, little clubs.
Barbara Ehrenreich, “Bright-Sided” (534)
One. How are the ideas of happiness and “positive thinking” a fraud?
What Happiness Is Not
1. Gloating
2. Vindication
3. Hedonism
4. Spite (the best revenge is happiness)
5. Schadenfreude, taking pleasure in the failure and misery of others
Two. Why is there a disparity between our happiness levels in the United States and our famous, or infamous “positive thinking”?
Because smarminess in the name of positive thinking is shallow and duplicitous. Our ideology of positive thinking, having optimism and trying to focus on positive things is a phony ideology and worse it’s ineffective (535). Real happiness, the author contends, is being hopeful and that we’re not.
The author further points out that positive thinking is a reaction to a bleak situation, a cover, if you will, for feeling anguish, despair, and hopelessness, so that we can conclude the more people are positive in their thinking the more hopeless they are. They positive thinking is a feeble effort to feel the opposite of how they really feel.
The author calls this type of positive thinking “self-deception” and “unwarranted optimism.”
Do not confuse positive thinking with “existential courage,” the ability to move forward with full comprehension of life’s horrors.
Three. What is the history of positive thinking in America?
It started in the 19th century by a group of mountebanks, self-styled gurus, and middle-class women. By the 20th century, it had become mainstream, part of the Christian right, the business world and was incorporated into patriotism and psychology.
An example of positive thinking and nationalism is “We’re the greatest nation on Earth!” This is not positive thinking so much as it is arrogance and hubris (pride), the author contends. This hubris leads to American exceptionalism, the idea that Americans are a special people, chosen by God to be the light of the Earth. We call this state of mind a condition: delusions of grandeur. For example, we are the only industrial society that doesn’t guarantee health care for all its people. Even though are GDP per person is higher than any industrial nation, they don’t let anyone die of treatable diseases; American, in contrast, lets 25,000 people die of treatable diseases every year. In those other countries, one death would be a scandal, but in America, “the greatest nation on Earth presumably, 25,000 people die every year and there is little outcry.
Four. What is the symbiotic relationship between positive thinking and capitalism?
American capitalism evolved from the “grim” and “punitive” type of Calvinist Protestantism that demanded delayed pleasure for hard work and the accumulation of wealth to consumer capitalism, focusing on “the hunger for more” and “the imperative of growth.” Positive thinking is needed to assert “perpetual growth.”
Moreover, positive thinking is an “apology” for the cruel aspects of the market economy. If you fail, it’s because of your shortcomings, not the market economy’s, because the market economy is infallible.
Five. What is reckless optimism?
The stock market and real estate bubbles and invading countries under the “optimism” of our political leaders can be deleterious to our nation.
Six. Review the many meanings of positive thinking.
False ideology
Self-deception
Unwarranted optimism
Smarmy manipulation
Arrogance and hubris
Hypercapitalism
Recklessness
Great Essay Assignment: Page 541, Reading the Signs, Number 1.
Steven Johnson, “It’s All About Us”; Brian Williams, “Enough About You”; danah boyd, “Implications of User Choice”; Ian Daly, “Virtual Popularity Isn’t Cool—It’s Pathetic”; ICMPA, “Students Addicted to Social Media” (469-487)
One. What are the drawbacks of Web 2.0 according to Steven Johnson?
A throng of ignorant amateurs has diluted the content so that web content is a morass that you must slog through in order to cull a morsel of goodness. As it is, the web is full of lies, myths, misinformation, legend, paranoia, repetition of the lie that becomes the truth, banality, twisted facts, faulty reasoning, etc.
Two. Is the “celebration of self,” as described by Brian Williams, really a celebration?
Williams writes that anything to do with you is considered important enough to record, post, publish; therefore, the banality of minutia, it could be inferred, is evidence of narcissism. This narcissism, and solipsism, if you will of reading news that has been pre-selected based on your cookies, viewing habits, Facebook friends, and personality profile becomes even worse as you live inside a bubble of your own tastes and preferences. Williams points out that people should be informed of real news events that might not penetrate their narcissistic bubble. Additionally, Williams observes, no one is listening to what’s going on because everyone is talking in a desperate attempt for attention and relevance.
Three. Are there really racial and social class divisions between MySpace and Facebook?
Answers will vary. Since I don’t use MySpace, I can’t comment on it. Cleary, the teens in Boyd’s research see such divisions.
Four. What are the dangers of using Facebook that Ian Daly observes, many of which you may not have thought of before?
Clearly, there’s the “hyperventilating” from having likes and friends and being “quasi-famous.” But a more troubling danger lurks: People on Facebook “think they’re actually accomplishing something.” As a result, Facebook is a bottomless pit of wasted time and a source of procrastinating from your meaningful tasks.
You also lose control of your image on a site where anyone can tag you, photo-shop images of you, and portray you as a party animal if they want to. Employers would love to screen applicants by looking at the Facebook profiles, we learn.
Five. What evidences social media addiction in college students?
Separation anxiety
FOMO anxiety (fear of missing out)
“I might become irrelevant and die to the world” anxiety
“Boredom without my social media” anxiety
Comfort dependence on social media and “that instantaneous flow of information”
Dependence on sharing every trivial aspect of my life experience on social media
Paradox of information: Students wanted to be plugged into constant stream of trivial personal information, but they had little hunger for real news and real information.
The most common addiction Launchpad for the students are smartphones.
Part Two. Dehumanization and Social Media
Example of an Effective Introduction and Thesis
If our posts on Facebook get us a lot of attention in the form of “likes” and comments and we find this attention makes us gloat like we’re the King of Facebook, we have to ask ourselves: Should we be getting our thrills in this manner? Of all the things to get thrilled about, the birth of a baby, the expulsion of a fascist leader, the discovery of a cure for some terminable disease, why do so many of us jump for joy upon getting Facebook “likes” and comments?
Could the answer be we’ve lowered our expectations about what defines our own happiness? Before Facebook, we had more exalted expectations that drove us, that defined our goals, which made us truly happy. But now we sit in a robe while eating a Pop Tart and copy and paste something someone else wrote on Facebook and the attention we get from our posts makes us happy.
Maybe we shouldn’t be happy. Maybe we should be ashamed. Maybe we should be full of self-loathing. Maybe we should be full of disgust.
In addition to a Facebook “like” category, there needs to be a “Get a Life, You Pathetic Loser” category, so that my real friends can remind me how far down the rabbit hole of a wasted life I’ve allowed Facebook and Twitter to send me.
Such are the sentiments of Sherry Turkle, the author of Alone Together who argues convincingly that Facebook and other forms of social media have denigrated the human condition by ________________, ________________, __________________, ___________________, and ___________________________.
One. What is the liminal world and how do we get lost there?
See page 213 in which we see there are worlds beyond our daily life routines where we feel encouraged to experiment with our identity and alter ego, giving it a powerful life that can get out of control. This is where we nurture our avatar and we lose boundaries with ourselves and others, surrendering to a life of excess fantasy and cutting cut off from reality.
Two. A flourishing human being experiences “flow,” we read on page 226. What is “flow” and how does the networked life impede it? What are the consequences? Flow means being fully immersed into the present, being fully focused, having undivided attention. People who are truly happy experience flow; people who are miserable distract themselves from their misery by texting and checking their Facebook status.
Three. What is the “seeking” drive and how does it make us addicted to being networked? 227
We crave connectivity so much that we're vulnerable to the ping of a new email or some other sound summoning us. As a result, we live a life of fragmented distraction.
Four. What are the rules of texting such as the ten minute response rule and others? See page 265. Also “full attention reciprocity” and its imbalance. One friend tries harder and feels less because of it.
“I text you more than you text me. And my response time is quicker than yours. What gives? Should I end this friendship?”
Five. What does the abused man on page 281 say about people, even sadistic ones, that makes them better than robots? They have a story. There is a "back story" like characters in a movie. They are part of life. Robots are not.
Six. What is the Facebook Friend Paradox? See 280. We have so many "friends" on Facebook but Americans say they've never had so few friends.
Seven. Summarize the abuse of technology and this abuse’s role in dehumanization. See 292, 293, 295, and elsewhere.
The abuse is gradual. As Marshal McLuhan writes, quoted from The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” but alter “patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”
In other words, the Net or the “Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”
The technology takes over our minds and our bodies. There are psychological changes taking places, chemical addiction, a tingle of neurotransmitter when you see a red colored “like” on Facebook.
The technology has become so small, little handheld devices, that it has become ubiquitous and as such inseparable from us. It has gotten inside us.
An example of the Net’s growing power: In 2005 adults in North America spent six hours online weekly; by 2009 that number doubled to twelve hours.
For young adults, that number is much higher.
The average American teen sends/receives 2,272 texts a month.
Average American is “on screen” 8.5 hours a day.
Our technology as “remapped the neural circuitry,” writes Nicholas Carr.
Carr points out that our powers of concentration have diminished. We quickly get “fidgety.”
Former good readers can’t read long books or even long articles anymore. They can only skim info-bites.
We call less; we read newspapers less; we spend face-to-face time with people less, we read less, we use snail mail less; the list goes on.
Eight. What is realtechnik and how is it an antidote to our dehumanization? See the definition and others in this book review.
Nine. Distinguish between our vulnerabilities and our needs. See page 295.We are vulnerable to technologically-driven narcissism, and we have lost our real needs, real human connection, replacing them with artificial needs, control and adulation.
Carr writes, “We are plunged into an eco-system of interruption technologies.” The effect is fragmentation and the atrophy of our concentration and focus.
Ten. Turkle’s book Alone Together expresses the view of a Net Skeptic refuting the Net Enthusiasts. Some would call Turkle a Luddite. Is that a fair criticism? Explain.
Nicholas Carr writes: “The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.”
Eleven. What effect does technology have on the brain? Carr writes that the brain is malleable, that it is shaped by technology, that parts of the brain die and other parts flourish depending on a changing environment. “The brain is very plastic.”
“There is evidence that the cells of our brains literally develop and grow bigger with use, and atrophy or waste away with disuse.”
Being hooked on the Net, we switch back and forth different interruption technologies and we lose competence, intelligence, and intellect.
Twelve. What effect does the Net have on our intellect?
Carr writes: “We enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.”
Considering the brain’s plasticity, “if you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Interent.”
“The Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli-repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.”
We read in The Shallows that researcher Maryanne Wolf says Net immersion makes us “sacrifice the facility that makes deep reading possible. We revert to being ‘mere decoders of information.’”
Carr writes that the Web is “an interruption machine” and “frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and makes us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”
Carr cites studies that when we go back and forth from two or more tasks, we impede thinking and competence.
Other studies show that the more we’re on the Web, the more we become Skimmers, not Readers. Brain and eye activity changes.
A skimmer is called a “Power Browser.” The PB reads more but more superficially. “Hyperlinks distract people from reading and thinking deeply.”
As skimmers, we no longer value narratives, stories that tell important truths about ourselves.
According to Douglas Rushkoff, "The traditional linear story works by creating a character we can identify with, putting that character we can identify with, putting that character in danger, and then allowing him or her to discover a way out. We meet Oedipus, Luke Skywalker, or Dora the Explorer. Something happens--an initiating event--that sends the character on a quest." The characters embark on, what Joseph Campbell calls, a "heroic journey."
With "interactivity," the remote control, for example, consumers of entertainment are less likely to absorb a meaningful narrative. They'd rather skim.
Without meaningful narratives, we become ignorant, even dumb, according to Rushkoff, who writes that Americans are immersed in a "mediated disortion field," with such misinformation that the number of Americans "unsure about evolution increased from 7 percent to 21 percent, while those questioning global warming increased from 31 percent in 1997 to 48 percent in 2010."
Skimmers are not apparently well educated.
The Internet, Rushkoff continues, makes us skinners of "Everyone Is Equal" so that legit and non-legit opinion makers share the stage. See Cult of the Amateur.
One. Multitasking results in divided energy and mediocre work as we live in a state of continual partial attention.
Two. Death of intimacy results from preference of control and convenience over compromise and reciprocity. Everyone is "pauseable."
Three. A networked life encourages narcissism and constant need for social validation from others; also a networked life makes us feel we're the center of the universe.
Four. A networked life flattens our personae into emoticans.
Five. We suffer off-the-grid anxiety because we have an always-on mentality.
Six. We live in the New Solitude, which means we're mentally absent from others but at the same time we're tethered to each other in a degraded way.
Seven. We live in present shock in which we see "the diminishment of anything that isn't happening right now--and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is" (Rushkoff).
Eight. We suffer from digiphrenia, as Rushkoff writes, using technology to be in more than one place at the same time.
Nine. Internet alters our brain circuits for the worse, turning us into "skimmers."
Common Errors: Comma Splices and Sentence Fragments
Find the comma splice:
Grading freshmen composition essays makes you lose IQ points. Why? Because there’s only one of you grading over 500 sub-literate essays a semester. You don’t raise them up, by sheer numbers, they pull you down. Try telling this to your Dean and see how sympathetic he is. He’ll say, “We hired you to change the future of America, you nincompoop!”
Identify Comma Splices and Fragments in the Following
I’m in a constant struggle to lose weight. I exercise like a fitness demon, that’s not the problem. My problem is that I eat like a crazed survivor of a famine whose every meal must compensate for the deprivation I’ve suffered in some cosmic universe that doesn’t exist. Except in my gluttonous imagination.
I embraced the six meals a day philosophy a long time ago. The premise is that you should eat several small meals, each one no bigger than the palm of your hand. Rather than eat three large meals and thereby overburden your digestive system. The problem is that my six meals aren’t palm sized, they’re more the size of a watermelon and even then I’m still hungry. Now that you mention it, I don’t even eat six meals a day, I eat ten. And not small snacks either. We’re talking substantial heaping cartloads of food.
Did I tell you I can’t stop eating after one plate? I like to take seconds and thirds. Sometimes fourths. And then there’s my daughters’ leftovers, Panini grilled cheese pesto sandwiches, popcorn, tortilla chips, pancakes, waffles, French toast. I snort it all up like an anteater as I clean the kitchen table.
Have we discussed chocolate cake? I need two large slices, about twice a week, to fend off the existential vacuum. I’ll take red velvet in a pinch. Though it doesn’t penetrate my craving sensors as deeply as the chocolate.
My wife is currently baking coffee cinnamon swirl cake because she likes to bake a dessert before we watch our favorite show Game of Thrones.
I told her I didn’t want any coffee cake as I’m trying to trim my waistline, but she reminded me that I already ate over half of it. I don’t even remember what I’m eating, I think I’m in trouble.
One. In the age of social media, what is happening to the “codes” that determine the boundaries between public and private space?
The lines between public and private space are becoming blurred. For many, nothing is private anymore. The most banal, mundane activities, like taking selfies at a restaurant, are “worthy” of “sharing” with everyone. Intimate chat becomes common fare for everyone to see. Explicit photographs of people are for the whole world to ogle at.
While the private becomes normal fare for public consumption and people want more and more attention for their “live stream of banality,” they are becoming more and more narcissistic, a condition that results in disconnection from others and themselves. Therefore, in the age of social media, the promise of greater connection results in greater disconnection.
The term “friend” is a canard, or the idea of “friend” is so compromised that it has lost its meaning. A “friend” is now someone we acknowledge through giving a “like” or a “poke” on Facebook.
Two. What is the double-edged sword of the new media?
On one hand, elitism is media should be over as common people can post and compete with the large corporations. However, the quality of this colossal media expansion is so poor in general that we the readers must sift through a morass of imbecility and banality to find any gold nuggets of truth and quality information.
Another problem is that when a common person, a user, generates content that is popular and that goes viral, then that content can be “appropriated by corporate elites.”
Another problem with the new media is that it’s always on and we feel restless if we’re “disconnected” from that live feed. Some people sleep with their smartphones under the pillow so they can hear the reassuring “activity signals.”
Yet another problem in our social media age is that more and more people are trading in face-to-face contact for digital contact as they prefer the control, convenience, and lower commitment requirements of digital relationships.
Yet another problem is the attraction of false celebrity from becoming popular on Facebook or some other social media site. “I went viral. I’ve finally made it.” This encourages narcissism and imposes more toxicity on our culture.
Yet another problem is feeling irrelevant or shunned when we post something and we’re ignored while we see “lesser folks” get lots of attention for their “crappy posts.”
Henry Jenkins, “Convergence Culture” (455-469)
One. What is convergence culture?
We read on page 456: “Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways. . . .”
Content merges “across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wants. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes depending on who’s speaking and what they think they are talking about. . . .”
Convergence culture is media on steroids: We read that “every story gets told, every brand gets old, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.”
We are not passive consumers of convergence culture. Jenkins argues that we are in the middle of a huge cultural shift in which we “are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content. . . .” We now live in a “participatory culture.”
We all create our own personal mythology of the truth, first culling information from multiple media platforms (we select because there’s way more information than we can absorb), and then talking among our own tribe about this shared information and asserting our opinions. The more we converse, the more we generate buzz, which in turn influences more floods of similar information and a cycle ensues.
Two. As we read about convergence culture and the grass roots bloggers and the consumers’ interaction with media as a way of combatting giant corporate enterprises, should we be optimistic that broadcast networks and their corporations will collapse as is suggested on page 259?
I’m skeptical. There are fewer and fewer media sources and whenever a grass roots post becomes viral, the big companies co-opt it for their interests.
However, media convergence is a long, unstable period and the big companies have little idea of what’s next: TV, music, news are all struggling to figure out how to get their market share in this unstable environment (461).
Three. How do we define media?
Quoting historian Lisa Gitelman, Jenkins writes that media is twofold: one, is that media is a “technology that enables communication,” a platform; two, is that “media a set of associated protocols or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology.” The platforms come and go but the cultural practices remain. For example, Jenkins reminds us that printed word did not kill spoken words; cinema did not kill theater; television did not kill radio. The hunger for the content is still there. It’s the launch pad that changes.
Four. What is the Black Box Fallacy?
Many believe that media content will eventually flow through a single black box, like a smartwatch, for example. Whoever invents and/or discovers this black box will have hit the jackpot.
However, Jenkins observes that there are more and more, not less, black boxes, in the living room, for example. As Cheskin Research explains on page 464, “What we are now seeing is the hardware diverging while the content converges.” There is, as Jenkins writes, “a pull toward more specialized media appliances . . .”
Jenkins concludes: “There will be no single black box that controls the flow of media into our homes.” We have different media needs depending whether we’re at home, at a restaurant, or at work, to name a few examples.
Five. What is the future of media convergence?
Telecooning, “being” with someone all the time, night and day, through digital means without seeing that person face to face. This is already happening in Japan.
Being a mother, a teacher, a lover are roles that will become functions on multi-platforms.
Teenagers will make videos of their scandals and those videos will go viral before the teens are “busted.”
Public monuments have yellow stickers with numbers that access recorded messages that give information about those monuments.
See Reading the Signs, Number 3, on page 469 for one of your typed essay options.