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Endangered Reading

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

As a knobby kneed seven year old, sporting a bobbed hair cut and a smile fragmented with empty spaces, there were countless evening hours spent snuggled up next to my Dad in the hours before bedtime with an open book propped between us. We went on adventures with Max the dog as he cavorted thorough Paris and fell in love with a poodle named Fifi. We played quidditch with Harry and Ron, and I dreamed of becoming Hermione. There were the orphaned boxcar children who inspired the theme for games of “house” with the neighbors, and National Velvet to remind me that I could always compete with the boys. Eventually, colorful illustrations faded into tiny text, and it was my voice that read aloud until my father drifted off to sleep. I stored those characters all away in the shelves of my mind. They had entire homes, neighborhoods, and social networks in there. I missed them when the cover closed and the ink came to an end, but in my head their imagined world still existed.

Being read to at a young age initiated my hunger for literature. In elementary and middle school, my punishment for sassy comments and fighting with my little brother was given through restricted reading time. I wasn’t given candy or stickers for reading books (as I see so many parents do with their children today), but loved the imagined worlds books created so much that my punishment blocked me from visiting them. Today, living in a realm of Sparknotes, Google, and an addiction to multitasking and gadgets, the incredible power contained within bound paper pages has been largely diminished for my generation. Reading is a chore. Sitting in blue plastic chairs beside the 4th graders I tutored in my second semester away at college, listening to bored monotone voices stumble through word after word in books chosen based on predetermined reading level, I attempted to draw their drifting eyes away from the lure of flashy computer screens. I wanted them to know the imaginary worlds I loved when I was ten. When I told them to read over the summer, they smiled and shook their heads. Why would they spend an hour with a book when it could be spent with a video game instead? I understand the case made for reading-based computer games, but I wish the use of technology to peak interest wasn’t so necessary. I wish the satisfying scent of fresh pages flipped beneath thumbs was universal. I wish that children’s reading became less associated with future success and standardized test scores (though it undoubtedly does impact these two things), and more with developing individual identity and traveling to places beyond the physical world. Technology makes life easier, but not always better. There is something to be said for the simple things. We don’t need Baby Einstein Videos or complex computer games for cognitive development—we just need to continue to read for the sake of the experience

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Plugged In Part III

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

This morning I read an article in the New York Times about the dangers of multitasking, and the evolution of life and re-wiring of the brain in a technological era. Ironically, as I read the 5 page article online, its text surrounded by ads and speckled with various links to click, I also watched TV and sent about a dozen text messages. Between the buzz of my iPhone against my thigh, the poignant words of Colin Firth on a flat TV screen, and the words illuminated on my laptop, I embodied this electronically archived article. Sitting with three screens in front of me, my back to the window and turned away from the green leaves of the outside world, my thumb pressed the rewind button three times on the remote control before I fully comprehended the end of the movie I was watching. It took me twice as long to read the “convenient” online version of an article than it would have to leaf through the filmy pages of the paper copy. These scenes of admittedly ridiculous multi tasking occur daily in my life. They are the way I have learned to exist. Toggling between windows on screen, streaming Pandora music a constant soundtrack to my every activity, I convince myself of my productivity as I cross off to do lists and marvel at the number of birds I killed with one stone. Matt Ritchel’s article, “Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price,” discusses this mentality as the norm in a world of flooded e-mail inboxes, watches replaced by cell phones, and text message induced adrenaline. Ritchel states that; “For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as e-mail and TV, has exploded. In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.” We live in an age that is never unplugged. We are constantly interacting, but also constantly withdrawn. Our social norms are unprecedented. Can we adapt to lives lived through technology and multi-tasking, or are we destroying experience by attempting to do so? Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, answers this question as he reveals that “We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do…We know already there are consequences.” To me, the most prevalent and disturbing of these consequences is the loss of face-to-face human connection. Our gadgets offer escape. As Apple boasts in their sleek and undeniably attractive advertising campaign, there is an application for everything. You can order tickets to a newly released film at your local movie theater through Facebook while simultaneously inviting all of your friends. You can track oversized cartoon characters on the family vacation to Disney World with a Disney designed GPS application for your phone—avoiding the alternative trek across miles of tourist ridden pavement and the frustrated tears of munchkins in tow. Yes, technology does allow us to continue to increase the pace and “productivity” of our already fast-paced lives, and gives us an opportunity to expand our contacts and social networks further than ever before. But what about the ability to explore? Isn’t there something to be said for finding something that goes beyond typing words into a search engine? Have we lost the ability to live without instant gratification?

Technology has both eased and created stress. It has brought families closer together through movie nights and the expectation of “staying in touch” due to the simplicity of pounding out a simple message in an e-mail once a week. However, it has also torn families apart. Marina Stefan, in another New York Times article entitled “More Americans Sense a Downside to an Always Plugged in Existence,” performed a study about technology use in which she found that “One in seven married respondents said the use of these devices was causing them to see less of their spouses. And 1 in 10 said they spent less time with their children under 18.” Perhaps this trend of occasionally neglecting playtime for screen time explains the miniature adults of America’s youth. At younger and younger ages, American children become indoctrinated into the world of technology. 4 year olds clutch sparkly pink plastic toy cell phones, as elementary schoolers argue that iPods are a social necessity and 6th graders beg for laptop computers to accompany their growing and coveted collection of gadgets. What it means to be a kid has changed. I’m only 19, and already I can see that. I don’t think that it’s possible to go backward with our technological progress at this point, nor do I think we necessarily should. I enjoy my digitized library of music and endless information at my fingertips as much as the next person. However, I do think that we need to think about the consequences of the way we use technology—that is to say the way that we never stop using it. I think that everybody needs to take a break. Schedule it into your blackberry, iPhone, or electronic calender: Go Explore.

2e95

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Plugged In Part II

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Squeezing through the crowded aisles of airplanes over the past year, nearly every passenger, after grunting and sweating baggage into beige overhead bins, was tapping, talking, or typing on some sort of hand-held personal electronic device before grudgingly stowing it away at the last possible moment before take off. Conversations were carried out as if no one else were present, I love yous and I’ll be there soons echoed to invisible ears on the other end of the line. When those big metal birds started taxiing down the runway, their passengers entered the world of the in-between. They were lost without the constant connection they couldn’t escape on solid ground—left only to their thoughts and the strangers surrounding them. I’ve always seen this as a good thing. However, though loudspeakers still prohibit cell phone use in flight, wireless internet access is becoming more widely available. It has become less and less acceptable to sit idly on airplanes. Time is money, and fast-paced life can’t be interrupted for even a few hours in the clouds. Blue striped seats and folding tray tables become substitute offices. We all bring our own personal music and headphones and avoid conversation.

Sailing at an altitude of hundreds of feet, we watch the panorama of pinprick lights grow closer and brighter as we descend. We marvel at the beauty of the neon show, the civilization and the headlights of ants, but we don’t think about what we’ve replaced. National Geographic recently featured a story and photo spread entitled “Our Vanishing Night.” The lights are never off in this world of ours. The beauty of those nights of clear skies and domes of stars are reserved for country famers and undeveloped nations. The line between urban life and nature becomes more and more defined.

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Plugged In

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Rubber soles pounding against suburban sidewalk, the two white strands of my headphones flapping against my collar bone, I hear the music blaring in my ears stutter and die as I wipe beads of sweat from my upper lip. Now that the rhythmic beats of MGMT had been extinguished, I have only the sounds of the street to accompany me. My first thought is this: My run is ruined. I debate turning around. I envy the man who jogged past me in the opposite direction. Bobbing his head to a beat that is his alone behind his headphones, he has a spring to his step that I now lack. It seems that everyone in sight is plugged into a private world. The girl walking her black lab across the street has those familiar wires emerging from her ears, the man mowing his lawn is attached to a sleek black iPod, and every runner in the area sports an arm band equipped with countless songs. Looking at these people, all zoned in to a place where no one else can reach them, I see the isolation of technology. Reflecting on that moment, I think of the Rhapsody bubble commercial.

Diving from the roof of an urban building into her own music filled bubble, a racially ambiguous and beautiful woman smiles as she spins in her clear plastic floating circle. She leaps to a new bubble, encased in a song from a different genre, and still beaming. The ad boasts “The freedom of rhapsody…music without limits.” It’s an entertaining advertisement, and utilizes a great soundtrack, but its message is somewhat contradictory. Are we really that free when we seek to create and exist in our own private bubbles? Music should bring people together, and though I feel that it still does for the most part, it is beginning to become more and more individual and isolating. Beyond music, technology in general follows the same trend. We have drawn ourselves away from nature and from each other in many ways. There are very few places remaining where we can escape the “plugged in” mentality of America.

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Ellis Island Infographics

Monday, July 19th, 2010

This spring my family and I went to New York City for vacation.

A highlight for me was Ellis Island. Both my wife and I had relatives come through Ellis Island so it has a personal significance like it does for so many Americans. One of the interesting rooms at Ellis Island was the room that showed off the statistics of people coming to Ellis Island. They did a great job of using infographics to convey the diversity and scale of people who came through there in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Ellis Island infographics

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When I Was a Kid…

Monday, July 19th, 2010

As I rub the sleep from my eyes, feeling the morning sun hit fluttering eyelids while pupils adjust to streaming light, I grope for that familiar rectangular piece of my life that fits in the palm of my hand. Squinting at a blue screen as I slide a thumb across smooth plastic to disarm its vibrating alarm, it is the first thing I look at every morning. My phone never leaves my side. It sits on desktops in corners of the library, counting down the hours and minutes until the next study break. It houses conversations of dinner plans and blossoming relationships and typed words that would never find the courage to be said aloud. It plays music on walks across campus and flights home. It tells me what time that movie is playing and ends the quarrel over checkable facts. I sleep with my phone. When it is lost, friends offer sympathy.

My parents did not have cellular phones strapped to their bodies at all times when they were my age. In college, they answered phone calls from home with large handled receivers pressed to their ears, a twisting cord wrapped absentmindedly around their fingers and the flush of embarrassment stinging their cheeks as they talked in the middle of crowded dorm hallways. They didn’t Skype with friends from their hometowns, but left them behind as they befriended new neighbors and peers. There were half-hearted letters and winter breaks where no one seemed the same. Now, I call my best friends once a week. My thumbs pound out hundreds of text messages on a daily basis. Every moment of my life is shared with someone in an instant. Social life ceases to exist when technology is lost.

The infamous argument for simplicity that stems from “When I was a kid…” has become meaningless. Life has adjusted to the constant outpour of technology. It is almost impossible to go backward. Though living without a cell phone or the internet is liberating in theory, and can feel good for short periods of time, it isn’t realistic. I want to believe that my connections and communication would remain strong without the aid of artificial devices, but the truth is that I have come to depend on them—learning to use them to express myself and to create my identity. We are a generation of little privacy and constant connection. Every form of communication has etiquette to learn, and this etiquette changes every moment. Does this party deserve a mass text or a sanctioned Facebook event? Wall post, status comment, or inbox message for the boy I’ve got a crush on? Text message or phone call? Abbreviation or correct grammar? We are incredibly transformable beings. Our social norms change with the bat of an eye, and we adjust.
Is this malleability a good thing or a bad thing? I wonder often if we are losing a sense of our past, and becoming too enveloped in a faster and faster paced America. We hardly have time to breathe anymore. Everything is planned, and we know what everyone is doing at every moment. To a certain extent, we have lost the ability to lie. And yet, these metamorphoses have occurred throughout history. Can tradition be true? Culture and society are always mutating. We repeat ourselves, but we also constantly extend. I want to recognize and understand the past to inform the modern world I inhabit, but I also embrace the changes in technology. In an age of global warming, over-processed products made in the name of efficiency, and blooming, horrifying images of oil spills that threaten to kill, technology may easily be associated with disillusion. When we can learn to evaluate and use technology with both benefits and consequences in mind, working to maximize the former and minimize the latter, we will be in an ideal situation. We must exercise moderation. We must use our technological knowledge to build windmills and solar farms rather than continuing the development of coal mining and oil drilling. We must use endless resources of information and communication always at our fingertips to foster relationships rather than to micromanage our lives and withdraw ourselves from the reality of the leaves on the trees. These notions are broad and lack evidence or analysis, but they are still important. Visionaries must continue to exist. Too often we dismiss dreams of improvement and sweeping solutions with the statement that they are “unrealistic.” We have to remember that every idea begins with the “unrealistic.” If this weren’t true, the notion of progress would be impossible.

2d9c

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A Cyber Connection Conundrum

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Reflecting on the way Facebook has altered my behavior and influenced the construction of my identity, I wonder if the way I depict myself on Facebook is actually authentic. Did I put that picture up because it actually meant something to me, or did I do it so that my ex-boyfriend would see me in a tight blue dress with a boy very much the opposite of him? Are the lyrics posted as my status a reflection of what makes me hum along and ponder life, or are they what I want people to think they represent the way I think? It is a circle of confusion and a web of connections and influences in which I can’t figure out who I actually am. In a Time Magazine article by Laura Locke called “The Future of Facebook,” Mark Zuckerberg comments on this idea of authentic identity on Facebook. Discussing his goals in starting Facebook and concerns about misrepresentation in a cyber realm, Mr. Zuckerberg states;

“Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real… We’re not thinking about ourselves as a community—we’re not trying to build a community—we’re not trying to make new connections.”

Due to my experience with Facebook as a first year student at an elite private college, I found this statement conflicted. Facebook as a connection with pre-existing friends and family is a believable and valid original intention for the site, but I don’t think that this is the function of the site any longer. Facebook does help to build a community. It forms relationships between people that never would have existed before. My experience one night on a darkened dance floor of a college dance, pulsating beats thudding in my chest as I moved alongside a mysterious guy, getting to know him through our exaggerated and somewhat bizarre dance moves and without words, exemplified this. Without Facebook, my time with that mystery man would have likely ended that night (and even with Facebook…it still might.) We left the dance without even exchanging names—just the memories of our spontaneous interaction. Asking around that night, I learned his name from a friend who remembered him from one of her classes. This scant knowledge in hand, I added my dancing partner of one Friday night as a Facebook friend. I did what is referred to as “Facebook stalking” as soon as he accepted my request. I quickly knew what kind of music he liked, what friends we shared, the places he’d been, and analyzed his gallery of photographs.

Mark Zuckerberg claims that Facebook is meant for furthering communication within already established relationships, but he doesn’t mention the sorts of interactions on Facebook that happen without any previous face-to-face connection. Countless first impressions are made through his site. Facebook was a huge part of my process of creating a circle of friends when I first came to college. Before even stepping foot onto my hilltop campus of limestone buildings and brochure-worthy-book-toting students, I already had several Facebook friends from my Freshman class. They found me in a group set up for incoming students, and, after approving of my interests and personal information, established a connection before we ever had the chance to run into one another in our student commons or the cafeteria. Facebook formed relationships between us that may never have occurred in just our daily real world interactions. Furthermore, the information presented in a Facebook profile allowed the opportunity to manipulate a relationship and an identity with it in mind. If I decided that mystery-dancing man (mentioned previously) was someone I wanted to be interested in me, I could use the information in his profile to influence the way he perceived me. He loves the film Memento? I could watch it and bring it up in conversation later. His favorite band is Bon Iver? I could make their lyrics my status. This sort of name dropping has occurred for decades in dating to impress the opposite sex, but Facebook allows it to happen at an entirely different level.

This brings me back to the cyclical notion of authentic identity in such a technologically advanced world. Have we become more or less individual with the addition of social networking sites like Facebook, personalized advertising, and consumerism that allows you more options than ever before and instant gratification? Are we using technology to more fully express our true selves, or constantly alter ourselves to fit the perception of the rest of the world? How will our methods of forming relationships change in the future? These are the kinds of questions I intend to continue to ask and explore. I study the dynamics of the street corner, the restaurant, and the vastly expanding alternate reality of the World Wide Web. All lead to potential answers to the one over arching question: Why is it that we do what we do?

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Facebook and Friday Nights

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

There are 1000 channels… what should I watch on TV? This word document is not enough to hold my interest for more than thirty minutes. iTunes plays in my ears to encourage productivity, and there will be breaks to check statuses on that famous social networking page. It is likely there will be a digression to one of those advertisements in the side bar that always appeal to my penchant for vintage clothing and equestrian gear. In a National Public Radio interview on May 23, this type of personalized and malleable advertising (which so often sidetracks and sculpts my time spent online) was determined dangerous by Ryan Singel, a staff writer for Wired. Attacking Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, Single stated that Mark Zuckerberg “wants to change the way the Internet works, and he wants Facebook to be the place where everyone defines themselves. It’s an amazing vision, and he’s brought some great things to the Internet, but that vision worries me deeply.” Are the selves we portray on social networking sites our true selves? Have I defined myself through Facebook? I believe that to a certain extent I have. My life in the Facebook world undeniably transforms my life in the real world. Getting dressed in my dorm room to go out with friends on a Friday night, mascara in hand, Pandora generated music playing from my MacBook speakers, my four closest friends chatter excitedly between glossed lips and vow not to “tag” each other in pictures deemed unsuitable for Facebook. Arms around waists and wide smiles in backgrounds that show where we’ve been, the photos in our profiles boast of our true “college experiences.” There will inevitably be constant flashes from pocket sized digital cameras tonight. Every event is a photo-op. At any moment, you must look the way you want your hundreds of friends to perceive you. You are constantly the person you want the world to see.

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A World Without Interaction

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Hurrying across sidewalk squares in high heels and weaving through the morning rush hour traffic while glancing sideways at the illuminated green digits that dictate life, the woman pauses at a brightly lit vending machine. She inserts her credit card with a quick flick, and receives her morning dose of caffeine in a coffee cup. No personal interaction required. One block over, she presses buttons on another vending machine, but this time grasps a new designer blouse, or make up that will cover her work-induced dark circles, or fresh produce for the dinner she plans to make this evening, or the newest gadget that promises to make her life easier and allows her to control the digits on her dashboard. Her computer tells her what she likes, and where to find it. Everything she owns is fit to her personality—or at least what the advertisers presume it to be. There are no department stores or retail employees. There isn’t time for that anymore. As the mysterious woman goes about her day, flitting between technologies, she has all she wants and needs.

This scene, though admittedly exaggerated, is a portrait of a potential America in the not so distant future. Technology has come to define us. This morning I sat across from my Mom at our local coffee shop. She read the New York Times on her brand new and reaction evoking iPad, while I leafed through the paper copy that suddenly felt obsolete. The front page boasted an article entitled “The New Touch-Face of Vending Machines.” Reading about tobacco vending machines in Tokyo that scan wrinkles for age recognition, Canadian rest rooms with flat iron machines for late night hairstyle touch ups, and European machines dispensing everything from underwear to strawberries, I imagined a future reality of vending machine lined-streets and extremely personalized consumerism. I thought of the mentality of our country of millions—a mentality of instant gratification. I replayed in my mind the countless moments I’ve sat in front of a computer screen, tapping my toes impatiently as the internet page I was trying so desperately to reach takes more than 10 seconds to load. My attention span in this era of self-service, contradictory communication that says more and less simultaneously, music without album covers or tangibility, Facebook pages checked dozens of times a day, and the necessity an appearance of “business,” is that of a small child. However, unlike a small child, my attention deficit is not due to dueling desires to play on the swings and participate in a game of tag, but is instead the product of the overwhelming possibilities on so many screens.

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Guest Blogger at GRD

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Over the next couple weeks we have a guest blogger, our college intern, Andi Gomoll. Welcome Andi!

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