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The Sexting Phenomenon and Accountability

I’m probably crossing a line with this post. I’ve been sitting on this one for about a week now, discussing this with friends and reflecting on it. My opinion hasn’t changed.

By now, you probably have heard of the sexting phenomenon. If not, in brief, it is the act of sending nude or semi-nude pictures of yourself to others via your mobile phone. Here’s the shocker: according to a survey performed last year by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 20 percent of teens “said they had sent or posted nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves” (MSNBC). Split out by gender, this was true for 22% of girls vs 18% of boys.

In the last couple of months, three sexting scandals have launched onto the media’s radar. Continue reading “The Sexting Phenomenon and Accountability”

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Still Brewing on Branding

I haven’t had much time to write in the last couple of weeks, but I still wanted to capture this train of thought somewhere.

At the turn of the month, I made my rounds to Talking Philosophy, where Jean Kazez had just written (competently, I feel) about the perils of caring too much and the virtue of indifference, especially as it pertains to religious matters. Although I’m taking it out of context, one of the passage which stirred most concerned a topic I’m passionate about:

“At least in the US, we are rather fond of definining ourselves clearly.  Each person practically has a brand (huge exaggeration–but think about facebook pages, blogs, ring-tones, and the like).  There’s also high intolerance for non-belief, making it more important to “come out” defiantly as a non-believer.  Atheism has developed something akin to a gay-pride movement, because there is in fact a high level of misunderstanding and prejudice in both cases.”

Jean says that considering Facebook pages, blogs, ring-tones, etc as a personal brand is a “huge exaggeration.” But is it really? In recent years, authors, prominent businesspersons, and media mongols have been pushing the idea that the main ingredient in success is creating a strong, irresistible brand of “You.” Considering that:

1) Are artifacts like Facebook, MySpace, ring-tones, blogs, twitters, etc precursors of the Brand-of-I mentality, or symptoms?

2) Are these precursors/symptoms healthy? Useful?

3) Where should we draw the line with our personal brands?

4) Perhaps more than anything, are we creating the brands, or are the brands creating us? (Corny, I know, but chew on it: Is the effort of perfecting our image for consumption causing us to burn away something more important?)

I’m reminded of Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm. He suggested that we relate to people most through narrative. This trend is exemplary evidence to support that theory. Further more, this trend may end up showing just how constructive – or destructive – narrative can be.

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Drinking Age Debate

To some, it’s simply “to drink or not to drink.” To others, it really is “to [die] or not to [die].” For the first time in twenty-five years, it seems now is the time to rehash the question. But, before considering whether or not the current drinking age of 21 years should be adjusted, it is best to examine this issue from its roots to its shoots, so to speak. After a brief historical survey, I’ll opine away.

The History

drinkingageWhile popular opinion would have you believe that this saga began in the 1920’s, contention on the topic began brewing much earlier. In 1629, the Virginia Colonial Assembly ruled that “Ministers shall not give themselves to excess in drinkinge, or riott, or spending their tyme idellye day or night.” In 1637, Massachusetts decreed that no one should stay in a tavern “longer than necessary occasions.” Meanwhile, Plymouth Colony outlawed the sale of alcohol to newly arrived strangers which cost “more than 2 pence.” These efforts to control excessive drinking are humorous, considering that Puritans took 42 tons of beer and 10,000 gallons of wine with them on the trip to Massachusetts – and only 14 tons of water.

Throughout the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, the spectre of prohibition made its presence known only in efforts to control individual consumption. During the last quarter of the eighteen century, prohibitionists realized their efforts might be more successful if they attacked the source. Thus John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, denounced distilling as a sin and called for its Prohibition in 1773. Despite a burgeoning number of people denouncing alcohol altogether, the camp in favor of alcohol remained staunchly unconvinced. When Harvard students were “left ‘wanting beer betwixt brewings a week and a week and a half together,” the first master at Harvard was fired.

Continue reading “Drinking Age Debate”

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Reading Notes on Loh’s “Class Dismissed”

In the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic, writer and performer Sandra Tsing Loh reviews Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System on its 25th anniversary. She finds it prescient and relevant, despite the two and a half decade gap between its publishing and now. Apparently American society hasn’t changed too much in the intervening years.

In any case, out of my continuing interest in self-hood, identity construction, etc, I was intrigued by the following:

  • “It’s not just that Romantic Selfhood—Walter Pater’s notion of burning with a “hard, gemlike flame,” which is the true emotional underpinning of bohemia—has become commodified. Fairly harmless is the $4 venti soy latte purchased amid Starbucks’s track lighting, Nina Simone crooning, and a story about Costa Rican beans that have sailed around the world just to see YOU! It’s that Selfhood has its own berth now in the psychiatrist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” a generational shift presaged by American sociologists who, as early as the 1970s, posited that, while hungry people are concerned about survival, those who grow up in abundance will hunger for self-expression. In the relatively affluent post–Cold War era, the search for self-expression has evolved into a desire to not have that self-expression challenged, which in turn necessitates living among people who think and feel just as you do. It’s why so many bohemians flee gritty Los Angeles for verdant Portland, where left-leaning citizens pride themselves on their uniform, monotonously progressive culture—the Zipcars, the organic gardens, the funky graphic-novel stores, and the thriving alternative-music scene.”
  • This economic catastrophe is teaching the Xers that their prized self-­expression and their embrace of personal choice leads to … the collapse of capitalism. Time to inculcate not those self-satisfyingly hip and rebellious values—innovation! self-fulfillment!—cherished by the creative class (a class, after all, that includes in its ranks those buccaneering entrepreneurs who’ve led us down the primrose path), but those staid and stolid values of the bourgeoisie: industry, sobriety, moderation, self-discipline, and avoidance of debt. Out with the grungy baseball cap (cheap on its own, but not so thrifty when accompanied by those other accoutrements of formerly affluent hipdom—the iPhone, the rain-forest-safari vacation, the richly appointed LEED-certified house) and in with the dowdy JCPenney suit. The age of narcissistic creative-class strivers has brought this country cool new neighborhoods and an infinitely better selection of coffees and greens, but it has also brought shameful social stratification and a consumer binge that our children’s children may well be paying off. The Xer is dead. Long live the burgher!
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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.

facebook-evolution

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.”

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(The Good) Life and Leadership Laboratory

I’m a regular reader of about two dozen blogs. One of my favorites is Talking Philosophy, which recently featured a really compelling post by Jeff Mason, entitled “Philosophy and the Good Life.”

I’m not sure what inspired it, but I’m glad Mason indulged himself. A couple of excerpts intrigued me:

  • “Religion, as it were, does the thinking for the people who do not have time to think things through for themselves. Philosophy, however, asks people to think for themselves, to question doubtful premises and assumptions using reason, logic, and experience to provide the best arguments for their own position, while being able to put forward objections to rival arguments, and to answer objections to their own.”
  • “Finally, there are some people who appear to pursue truth and wisdom rather than pleasure, riches, fame or power. These, of course, are the philosophers. To be honest, when philosophers talk about the good life, they stack the deck in their own favor. Whenever they discuss it, the good life is the philosophical life. This does not mean that they are wrong, but we should be cautious how we receive their arguments. There is no such thing as the good life for everyone, and neither philosophers nor religious expositors have any right to lay down the law about it.”
  • Mason mentions how Aristotle suggests the philosophical life begins, which I think would be a good way to begin each morning: “in wonder at the universe and the spectacle of life.”
  • “The good life is a life devoted to the discovery and communication of truth within a community of like-minded people possessing moral integrity and a genuine desire to learn.”

That last quotation seems more appropriate to me as the definition of an ideal society: a society of leaders.

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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.


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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

  1. A modern, “connected” individual
  2. 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.

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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?