culture – Page 3 – Ashley J. Wollam

02.15.200912.05.2009

Happy Birthday: Now Spill All Your Secrets.

What were you doing at midnight on February 4, 2009? Sleeping? Chomping down a late-night snack? Facebooking? If the latter, you were unwittingly celebrating Mark Zuckerberg’s creation on its fifth birthday.

Five years and 150 million users later, Facebook is still the topic of heated debate. What does this construct say about our society? What impact is it having? What social mores is it changing? These questions, and others, will continue to be posed and considered for years to come and, fortunately, Facebook will keep delivering material for speculation. Take, for example, the “25 Random Things” note racing through this social network’s veins like some epidemic virus. The object is to fill out a list of 25 things about yourself, a blend of the private and the personal, and publish it to your friends. They are then supposed to fill out a list about themselves in turn, and pass it on. As John Timpane of the Philadelphia Inquirer observes, after one person sent this note to ten others, and those ten sent the note to ten of their friends, “soon Facebook – a virtual living room where people hang out and tell everyone else what they’re doing and thinking – is awash with personal revelations, admissions, info once kept private.”

Continue reading “Happy Birthday: Now Spill All Your Secrets.”

01.22.200912.05.2009

The Last Professors? This is Not a Rhetorical Question.

Yesterday a friend of mine pointed out Stanley Fish’s review of Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. According to his publisher, Donogue, a professor at The Ohio State University, uses this book as an opportunity to take “a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years…[and] outlines a web of forces – social, political, and institutional – dismantling the professoriate.” Having sat in on a class of Donoghue’s and spoken with him about my own aspirations to join the professoriate, I paid special attention to this review. One excerpt sent chills down my spine more quickly than any other:

“Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.

‘Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.'”

My interest in all of this, of course, traces back to the cultural factor. I agree with Donoghue’s logic, and his evidence is enough for me to be onboard with the idea that the Academy’s original, humanist, liberal arts roots are rotting from the inside out, from xylem to phloem. However, I’m less concerned about the fact that this is happening, than why it is happening. And I’m less concerned about why it is happening, than determining what societal elements have changed to allow this shift. What values have we set aside and which have taken their place? Is this a sign that we are comfortable ignoring our souls, so long as we fatten our wallets?

Essentially this issue raises the question (and requires an answer to): What is the purpose of life?

Comfort or inquiry? Body or mind?

The irony, to me, is that while this issue begs the question, it also represents our diminishing capacity to answer it.

01.13.200912.05.2009

Count Your Marbles

Take any given person (even yourself, if you’d like), and ask the following:

Does he/she exhibit traces of

Impaired social skills (social interaction),
Impaired communicative abilities,
Restricted interests, and/or
Repetitive behavior.

If you answered yes to a majority of those characteristics, you are either

A modern, “connected” individual
Autistic

As Janet Maslin points out in a book review entitled, “So Plugged in, Yet So Disconnected: Field Notes from Wired America,” perhaps the most valuable aspect of Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, U.S.A. was buried in a footnote: the observation of a “connection between social disembodiment and rising rates of autism, a condition that defies the conventions of social networking.”

The similarities between autism and “our isolating, newly normal adult behavior are related” are frightening, indeed.

01.12.200912.05.2009

Religion: Chicken Soup for the Soul…or Just Chicken Soup?

The JanuaryFebruary 2009 issue of The Atlantic points out an article which begs the question: is religion a spiritual quest alone, or could there be something more physical, more mundane behind it?

“Assortative Sociality, Limited Dispersal, Infectious Disease and the Genesis of the Global Pattern of Religion Diversity” published by the Royal Society in Proceedings B seems to suggest that religion could be attributed to evolution.

According to this document, “religion manifests from evolved behavioral strategies for the avoidance and management of infectious disease” (Medical News). Furthermore, the “diversity of religions in a given country correlates closely” with the amount of disease (Atlantic Monthly 21). Consider, for example, why Brazil boasts 159 religions, while Canada squeaks by with a mere 15? Perhaps it is because Brazil – poor and without a public-health system – is overrun by disease when compared to Canada – which has better than average healthcare and few known parasites.

In otherwords, people in regions with a greater chance of exposing them to a disease tend to limit travel and interpersonal interaction; which stems the flow of ideas and values responsible for birthing new religions.

Now, consider why Church pews the world over are emptying faster than you can say a Hail Mary? Could it be that the advent of new health care systems and technologies have resulted in a world where religion no longer serves its evolutionary purpose? If this is the case, then are the people who contine to visit them weak links bound to fail the “only the strong survive” test, or do they represent the next evolutionary step for religion, whatever that may be?

A lot of questions to be asked, with few answers to give. It hurts to think outside your own generation, doesn’t it?

12.29.200812.05.2009

Reconsidering Your Value (Online)

“On a social network, you’re the product rather than the customer.” That’s a blurb I took from Chris William’s article, “Facebook in Goldmine Potential Deficit,” published at The Register.

Does this describe the relationship between you and your social network(s), as you perceive it? No? Does the idea make you uncomfortable, then? Can you dispute it?

Williams makes a few poignant observations from a humanistic perspective, but those are really background noise to his major assertions: that Web 2.0 might be a bubble about to pop; that we might begin to see select Social Networks go belly-up, because they simply aren’t turning a profit (or in some cases, making any money whatsoever); and that some Social Networks might start charging users for basic services, such as video uploads.

11.28.200812.05.2009

Creating (and Destroying) Realities

At thirteen years of age and living just four-doors apart from each other, Sarah Drew and Megan Meier were your typical girl friends in your typical Missouri town living their typical teenage lives. Megan and Sarah even experienced a typical falling-out, when chats about boys turned into name-calling, bickering and, eventually, silence.

If only that had been the end of their typical friendship. Instead, in the summer of 2006, Sarah’s mother, Lori Drew, got involved. Aged forty-seven at the time, Lori created a MySpace profile for a fictional boy, Josh Evans. She sought out and “friended” Megan Meier online “in an attempt to woo [Megan] and extract information from her to determine if she had been spreading gossip about [her] daughter.” [1] For weeks, Lori Drew, her daughter, and a co-worker fabricated a romantic relationship with Meier until, in October 2006, things got ugly. Attacking Megan’s self-esteem, “Josh Evans” wrote “I don’t want to be friends with you anymore because you’re not nice to your friends.”[2] Shortly after Megan replied, asking what he meant, she realized that “Evans” had publicly posted messages she had written to him, where they could be viewed by all of her friends at school. As a result, these “friends” began posting bulletins making fun of Megan. Continue reading “Creating (and Destroying) Realities”

11.01.200812.05.2009

Mobile (banking+politics+connecing)=?

You may have noticed a good deal of hullabaloo in the press about the advent of Mobile Banking: the new technology enabling consumers to control their financial assets from their mobile phone (texting to transfer funds, schedule a payment, check balances, et cetera).

As exciting as that is, banking is not the only activity people engage in on-the-go. ABI research reports that 46% of those who use social networks have also accessed a social network through their mobile phone (70% of those had visited MySpace and 67% had visited Facebook). Interestingly, when asked why they had logged in via their mobile, 50% acknowledged checking for comments and messages, while 45% logged in to make status updates – that is, projecting what they were doing or feeling to their online audience. Continue reading “Mobile (banking+politics+connecing)=?”