Christmas

The semester's done, but I still have to deal with work stuff. It doesn't help when people don't respond with important information, which means you can't do your job, which makes you look bad. I'll send some emails tomorrow morning. I can justify not responding to emails because of the weekend and Christmas, but tomorrow I'll work for a half hour or so.

I had a great Christmas. Last night we went to the "midnight" Mass (9 p.m. for carols, then 10 p.m. for the Mass). This was the first year in a long time that my mom hasn't been involved with the music for this Mass. She's been stressed and trying to find a new job, and she decided to take a year off. When we got there I didn't feel like being there, and I didn't feel like singing (unusual for me). During the pre-Mass music, I loved the songs that were just the choir - fancy motets, things with lots of harmony, often in foreign languages. They were singing something beautiful, and I started thinking about Teresita, one of my housemates in El Salvador, and her mom, who is dying (maybe even dead; I'm not sure if anyone would tell me). I pray for her mom, Blanca, every week at Mass, and as I was listening to this beautiful music, I had one of those wonderful prayer moments where it actually feels like you're getting through to God. But more than talking to God, I was thinking, "This is for you, Blanca. This is for you Teresita. This is for you, sister of Teresita whose husband went to the U.S., abandoned you, and started a new family." This beautiful music is for you, a humble campesino family from El Salvador. You are important - very important to me.

There was a lot of music devoted to Mary (this being a Catholic church and Christmas), which reminded me of praying the rosary at Lupita's house. (Lupita was my other Salvadoran housemate.) Her brother was shot on a bus three and a half years ago, and they prayed a novena in her community for the nine days following the anniversary of his death. I had the honor of visiting her home during this time, and participating in the prayers. I kneeled on the hard, dirt/cement floor of a beautiful but humble home, praying the Hail Mary as fast as I could in Spanish, trying to keep up with the women from the community. Dios te salve Maria. Llena eres de gracia. El Señor es contigo, Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús. Santa Maria, madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. (Say that 50 times fast.) It was one of the most amazing experiences I had in El Salvador. Despite having so much privilege and the power that comes with it, sometimes I feel like all I can do is pray to make things better. I'm usually a positive person, but I have a hard time finding hope for the world, hope for justice and peace.

While I'm talking about El Salvador, I'll tell a story that involves Teresita's mom, which Fr. Privett told at the USF graduation Mass a couple weeks ago. The coordinators of the study abroad program I did, Kevin and Trena, went to visit Blanca and the rest of Teresita's family, and they brought their young daughters. One of them, Sophia, went straight to Blanca's side, and stayed with her for most of their visit. When Kevin and Trena and the girls got back home in the evening, as Sophia was going to bed, she asked Trena whether what Teresita's mom has is contagious. It's not contagious, but how amazing it is that a young child, thinking she may catch this illness, sat at the sick woman's side, holding her hand. It was such a beautiful, selfless, and powerful act - one we should all learn from.

But back to Christmas. This morning we went to Mass again, and this time I sang in the choir. We didn't rehearse much because it was mostly very familiar Christmas music, but that meant that right before Mass, the choir director asked me to solo on a couple songs. Then she added a couple more solos during the Mass by whispering to me and the choir as she played introductions to songs. It was fun, and I sang pretty well. Every year we sing a verse from Handel's Messiah for the Alleluia. "And the angel said unto them, 'Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a savior, which is Christ the Lord.'" It was a good Mass.

We came home, had a simple lunch, and my brother came over. We opened presents, and I got some really good ones, including an Edward Gorey calendar, AIDS and Accusation by Paul Farmer, a couple social justice-y prayer books, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and slippers for my cold cold feet. La hermana got Little Miss Sunshine, so we watched that in the afternoon, then had red and green enchiladas for dinner. It was a nice Christmas.

Off to read and sleep. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it - because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it - his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.

-From "The Time of No Room" by Thomas Merton

Postmodernism and MySpace

Thousands of people flock to MySpace.com every day, often as a part of their daily routine. It is a social networking website where people can create and update personal profiles, see if their friends have left comments or messages, listen to music, upload photos, or write blog entries. MySpace.com is one of the most-visited websites in the world (“Alexa”). A lot has changed since 1990, when Mark Poster wrote The Mode of Information, especially in the realm of electronic communication and the Internet (which was just starting to see usage beyond the military ARPAnet), but at the same time, much of what he wrote is still accurate to this day. MySpace serves to illustrate some of the concepts of postmodernism in relation to electronic communication, in particular the Superpanopticon, as described by Poster.

In the spirit of postmodernism, it seems appropriate to begin this essay with a disclaimer from an essay I wrote last semester with a classmate:

We have quite a few limitations and boundaries in our research and analysis. Fundamentally, there is no such thing as universal truth, so we cannot proclaim the truth of anything we read nor anything we write. How we interpret what we read and how we present our analysis are products of the situations in which we have been raised, the educations we have received, and our own individual understandings of life and reality. (McChesney-Young and Ericksen)

This concept of the nonexistence of universal truth is one element of the elusive concept of postmodernism. In The Mode of Information, Poster repeatedly criticizes philosophers for falling prey to “totalization”; that is, presenting their concepts as metanarratives, encompassing and explaining reality with the truth, such that it applies to everything and every situation (23). Thus I will take care not to “make claims that are beyond the situated finitude” of myself (Poster 64).

To begin, Poster distinguishes electronic communication from previous forms of communication, saying that it transcends the boundaries of time and space by which we have been limited so far. He says, “The body is no longer an effective limit of the subject’s position” (15). I can be looking at the MySpace profile of someone across the country, while my profile (a representation of myself, a subject) is being viewed on the other side of the world. As Poster says, I am “dispersed across social space” (16). Last year there were well over 100 million user profiles on MySpace, from all around the country and all around the world, from many different walks of life (Cashmere). Unlike books or other physical media, electronic media are not material. A MySpace profile does not sit on a shelf, nor does it need to be put in a mailbox to be sent to another person to see. This is a fundamental difference, according to Poster: “Speech is framed by space/time coordinates of dramatic action. Writing is framed by space/time coordinates of books and sheets of paper…. Electronic language, on the contrary, does not lend itself to being framed. It is everywhere and nowhere, always and never” (Poster 85). In its nature as electronic communication, MySpace (and all of the Internet) is postmodern.

With hundreds of thousands of user profiles, MySpace is a huge collection of information about people. It is a database of people’s interests, favorite things, and demographic information. Poster describes the computer database in relation to the “Superpanopticon” as another facet of postmodern society. The Panopticon was conceived as a tool for efficient surveillance in prisons. One guard would be in a central tower that could see into all the prison cells, but the prisoners would not be able to see which way the guard was looking, so at any given moment, they may be watched. The idea, then, is that they will behave as if they are always being watched without the need to hire a guard for every prisoner. Foucault borrowed this concept from Bentham and expanded it to describe society. “In capitalist society, regulation takes the form of discourses/practices that produce and reproduce the norm. The school, the asylum, the factory, the barracks to greater or lesser degrees and with considerable variation all imitate the Panopticon” (Poster 91).

In contrast with the prison, today’s structure could be called a “Superpanopticon, a system of surveillance without walls, windows, towers, or guards” (Poster 93). Both technical and cultural change have allowed this. People readily participate in this system of surveillance without the overt coercion one would experience in a prison. We freely give away our information to get library cards, credit cards, driver’s licenses, magazine subscriptions, and so on. Our information is stored in many databases, and our records could be examined at any time. Since the Patriot Act, the government is able to demand access to library records, which may make people think twice about checking out books on Islamic fundamentalism and suicide bombing, even if it’s just for a research paper. “The discourse of databases, the Superpanopticon, is a means of controlling masses in the postmodern, postindustrial mode of information” (Poster 97).

The databases that Poster describes are basically one-sided. Someone inputs information, and it stays there, as opposed to a message being sent to a person, who then may respond. MySpace, however, is different. While the user does submit his or her information, which is stored on a server somewhere (which could be anywhere in the world), that information is then available to anyone with an internet connection, unless the user sets their privacy settings otherwise (most don’t). Poster refers to databases in which one’s information is probably not regularly viewed, but still serve as sufficient surveillance for social control. MySpace, however, is designed so users’ information is viewed regularly, by many people. One can search, browse, or navigate from one profile to the next. From personal experience, I’ve searched for and found old friends on MySpace, and I’ve also received messages including, “wassup girl what's poppin enjoying your precious face is a trip to heaven , just wanna get to know , please you and make love to your mind.… I live near downtown oakland by my self so ain't go none to worry” (d-jay). Not only do News Corp. and Rupert Murdoch have access to my information, but Christina, my friend from ten years ago, and d-jay, the lonely man in Oakland, may be looking at my profile at any moment. This is an extra component of surveillance to be added to the Superpanopticon.

I did a study of gender performance on MySpace and found that user profiles are very gendered in their appearances and content (for example, women’s profiles have a lot of pink and hearts and men’s profiles have a lot of violent images and black). This is an example of the normative function of MySpace. We act according to conventions so when someone looks us up, we are presenting our public identities. Foucault says, “It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies” (qtd. in Poster 93). Online identities, like profiles on MySpace, can construct us as much as we construct them.

Postmodernism is a broad theory that encompasses others rather than replacing or going side by side with them. For example, we can look at MySpace and the Superpanopticon from a Marxist perspective. MySpace is owned by a huge media corporation, News Corporation. To begin with, the database compiled by the site has a wealth of marketing information. What are people’s favorite TV shows? What are their interests? The services are free, but there are advertisements on every page. The text ads appear to be done through Google, which comes up with ads that relate to your searches. If I go onto a forum and search for “textbooks,” before there are any results, there are links to Amazon, Alibris, and other online booksellers. Interestingly, when browsing through some forums I saw the sponsored links on the side included “Edward Gorey T-Shirts” and “Find Singer Jobs – Free.” It seems an unlikely coincidence that I say in my profile that I like to sing and I like Edward Gorey, and these rather obscure ads just happen to show up. It appears that they look at the user profile content to target ads. Poster writes that, “The principle of private property is threatened in the domain of information” (73). Since information is not material, it is not subject to the same market rules of supply and demand as conventional products, which makes it more of a challenge to commodify. Through advertising, however, MySpace maintains the capitalist order.

We can use other theories within postmodernism as well. As we speak of surveillance, we can look at MySpace and the Superpanopticon in terms of psychoanalysis as well. As in viewing films, there may be elements of scopophilia and ego-identification when we look at profiles. Semiotics is a significant field in postmodernism, though it does not play much of a role in the Superpanopticon (in that it is not discussed as such by Poster, though anything that can be conceived of as a sign falls under the realm of semiotics). However, semiotics can be used to show polysemy, which undermines metanarratives, which I discuss in the beginning of this essay. Content analysis is potentially problematic under postmodernism, because it claims to be objective, at least relatively speaking. The problem occurs if the analysis does not recognize that there is no true objectivity and proposes a universal truth, which is not acceptable in postmodernism.

Postmodernism is complex, difficult to understand, and some people say it doesn’t even exist. Some say that it’s great and others that it’s terrible. I say that there are valid points within postmodernism, but I am yet to be convinced that the distinction between modernism and postmodernism is so great that it calls for a newly-named era. Postmodernism can be used well to describe aspects of our culture and social structures, but it should not be seen as the all-encompassing reality—certainly not a universal truth, as that would involve the totalization which it decries. We can see that phenomena like MySpace, which postmodernism can explain, do exist, so there are useful ideas. There are other concepts from postmodernism, like intertextuality, which could explain MySpace well, though they did not fall within the focus of this essay. Ideas from postmodernism can be useful and need not be a cause for pessimism, but the theory is not a complete description of the world as it is today.


Works Cited:

“Alexa Top 500 Sites.” Alexa: The Web Information Company. 10 Dec. 2007 http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none.

Cashmore, Pete. “MySpace Hits 100 Million Accounts.” Mashable: Social Networking News. 9 Aug. 2006. 15 Dec. 2007 http://mashable.com/?p=826.

d-jay. “wassup.” MySpace message to the author. 11 Apr. 2006.

McChesney-Young, Amber, and Ryan Ericksen. “CAFTA, ALBA and Public Discourse.” 26 Apr. 2007. Not published (needless to say), but available from amccyoung at gmail dot com upon request.

Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990.

Finals

Two classes down, two to go. My final today went pretty well, especially considering how little I studied. We'll see if my professor can read my horrifying handwriting. I think I at least got all the multiple choice and true/false right. My first essay was pretty good, I think, second was okay, third was very poorly organized, but I think I conveyed the important points.

I'm working on my MySpace paper, but MySpace slows down Firefox so much, it's annoying. It doesn't help that I have ten profiles open right now. Heh.

My goal for next semester: Not have to pull a single all-nighter.

My goal for today: finish this paper by 3 a.m.

What I think is more likely: finish most of this paper by 9 a.m.

Then I have to finish my other paper. How does this happen? It's not entirely poor time management, but I should have spent way less time in front of the TV. Media has such a grasp on our lives! Good thing it's my major.

Also, I'm going to Peru next May and I'm excited. :-) I'm just sad that I'll probably be missing graduation parties, but whatever. It's Peru.

Sully

I'm in an anti-people mood right now. I opened up MySpace to work on my paper, and it's so depressing to me. And then I feel bad for being so judgmental, but these people disturb me. Way too many 30-year-old moms who didn't go to college and have lots of sparkles on their profiles.

I try to be nice and open-minded and loving, but I'm a pretty judgmental person, and sometimes people get too ridiculous or depressing.

Also, I'm in love with Sully from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman:


My three roommates and I all love Sully, and normally we have different taste in men. He's kind of the ultimate representation of masculinity. Except for the girly hair, which we love.

Extensions

I suck at school. Turns out I'm not too great at researching and writing a 10-page paper in one afternoon and night. I have about 1 page written, and it's 2:40 a.m. I have lots of resources, but I haven't read through all of them and I didn't do a good job (or any job) of keeping track of what information is in what article, so it's very disorganized. My class starts in 7 hours. Ain't gonna happen. Fortunately, the professor mentioned the possibility of extensions till Friday. It wasn't clear whether we had to clear it with him individually, but I don't think so. Also, I think he's not going to be in class tomorrow because Monday night he left to fly to Australia to talk at some conference or meeting or something. Flying to and from Australia takes a really really long time, and it seems unlikely and maybe impossible that he be back Wednesday morning.

I wanted to do this paper on time so I could be done with it and focus on the other two papers I have to finish in the next week, but I'll do as much as I can tonight, sleep for a few hours, and finish it tomorrow night and Thursday.

The future

I thought of something I would like to do as a job: helping undocumented women who have been/are victims of violence or abuse and are afraid to report it because of the fear of deportation.

I don't have any of the knowledge I'd need to do that, but it's nice to think of concrete things I could do.

Songs for the People

I love this poem.

Songs for the People
by Frances Watkins Harper

Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.

Not for the clashing of sabres,
For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
With more abundant life.

Let me make the songs for the weary,
Amid life's fever and fret,
Till hearts shall relax their tension,
And careworn brows forget.

Let me sing for little children,
Before their footsteps stray,
Sweet anthems of love and duty,
To float o'er life's highway.

I would sing for the poor and aged,
When shadows dim their sight;
Of the bright and restful mansions,
Where there shall be no night.

Our world, so warn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.

Music to soothe all its sorrow,
Till war and crime shall cease;
And the hearts of men grown tender
Girdle the world with peace.

Cold Fingers

I have a paper due Wednesday on NAFTA, immigration, and women. Fascinating, I know, because I chose the topic. I also chose the topic thinking there would be tons written about it, and research would be easy. For whatever reason, it's not being easy. I don't know if it's because the information is not readily available, if I'm looking in the wrong places, or if I just gave up way too soon (quite likely). All I want to do is curl up with a blanket and watch Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Also, my fingers are cold which makes it hard to type.

Roommate drama is happening. It seems to me that drinking in excess always leads to bad things happening. Why do people keep doing it?

There's an open house going on right now. Our landlords are selling the house, so there are have 1-2 open houses almost every week for a couple months now. It's kind of weird and awkward, but at least it pushes us to clean our house more often. They think it'll take a while to sell (hasn't sold yet!), but when it does, if the new owners don't want to keep us as tenants, they could kick us out. Fortunately, they'll have to give us 90 days, and I think they can't kick us out until we've found "comparable housing." If we did have to leave, though, it would be very hard to find a place that wouldn't make us sign a year-long lease, and we would never find a place this cheap and convenient. Hopefully they'll let us stay through May. Or the house won't sell. The open houses are kind of annoying though.

I have this NAFTA/immigration/women paper due Wednesday (approx. 10 pages, have just started to research). I have a final exam for Global Economic Justice on the 11th (I'm very behind in the reading, but I did skim it all). I have a postmodernist critique of some new media thing (I'll probably do blogging of Facebook or something -- I'm not sure, though, since I haven't done that reading either) due by the 13th. And finally, my MySpace and gender project is due the 13th. That's about 30 pages, plus a test, in the next week and a half. Which is why I should be researching my paper right now.

My dad sent me an article on procrastination. My response: "I'll read it later."

Initial MySpace Thoughts

Initial thoughts on my MySpace research:

1. I don't like MySpace.
2. This is going really slowly.
3. It is disturbing how gendered the profiles are. It seems like all women care about is family and sparkles.

Other thoughts: I'm tired, and I need to plan out my week so I can get everything accomplished.

Tonight:
record contents of 5 more women's profiles, 5-10 men's profiles
finish Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl
finish finding resources for African American Literature paper
look at some reading for Global Economic Justice

Tuesday:
finish recording contents of MySpace profiles
skim the huge amounts of reading I have not done for GEJ
brainstorm/outline literature paper

Wednesday:
write literature paper

Thursday:
put together presentation for Gender and the Media class
finish editing and proofread literature paper

Friday:
sleep

Gender on MySpace Project Proposal

I wrote this a few weeks ago, and in my classic procrastination fashion, proceeded to ignore it until now, when I have to report my progress on Thursday. I reread it and decided it's not half bad, so I'm posting it. Why not? No one reads this anyway. :)

Project Proposal: Gender on MySpace

Research Question and Rationale:

How is gender performed and portrayed on MySpace? I will look at MySpace profiles of men and women and analyze the way people present themselves and others in terms of gender.
MySpace is one of the most popular websites on the internet. A huge number and wide variety of people are members of this social networking site. So far in this class we’ve mainly examined conventional mainstream media. The internet has been heralded as a change in the media landscape, an increasing democratization of society, and an opportunity for every person to make media. MySpace has given millions of people a place on the web to show their friends, acquaintances, and strangers a representation of who they are. This sort of participatory internet is called Web 2.0, and it seems to be the direction in which the internet is going. With the impact of the internet on how people spend their time and where they get their information from, it is especially important that MySpace be studied in terms of something so important as gender.

Gender performance is mostly, if not entirely, a social construct, and it is maintained through our everyday lives, not just because the voice of the mainstream media is telling us to do so. We perpetuate these social constructions in how we personally perform our genders. MySpace profiles are a way for people to express their own identities, and they are a space where many people see others’ expressions of identity. Because of the relative anonymity and freedom of the internet, it can be an opportunity for people to represent themselves differently than in their day-to-day lives. MySpace profiles are also a place for standard gender identities to be maintained or subverted. Many people spend hours upon hours on MySpace, and so are viewing large numbers of these profiles. I will be comparing the profiles of women and men, but I am not looking to find essential differences between the two, just to see how people perform their genders in the context of a medium like MySpace.

There has not been very much research in this general area, and as far as I can tell, no one has done an analysis like the one I am proposing. There has been research done about gender and internet usage, as well as digital divide issues in relation to gender. There are some studies on social dynamics like friending, and more general studies of identity and self-representation on the internet, but I was only able to find a couple articles that specifically dealt with gender and MySpace, and none of them are on the same topic I’m researching.

Methodology:

I will do a text analysis of approximately 60 MySpace profiles: 30 by women and 30 by men. (This number is relatively arbitrary, and if I seem to have not enough or too much information, I may modify it.) I will gather the pool of profiles with MySpace’s Browse feature. I’ll browse for men and women between ages 18 and 35 within the United States who have photos in their profiles, with results organized by most recently updated. While this is not an entirely random sample, it is relatively random, and the fact that the profiles are recently updated suggests that there will be substantial content and fewer profiles that are completely empty with no information. The sample is between 18 and 35 because that is the age range of the majority of MySpace users, and that is the default age range when one goes to Browse. If other people are browsing profiles, they are likely to be looking within that range. For the sake focusing the study and because of potential language limitations, I am only examining profiles of people in the United States. I will look at the main page for the profile, and if there is a blog on the profile, I will include the entries that show on the main page in my analysis. I will also view the photos the user has uploaded.

My research will be mainly quantitative, but I will also incorporate qualitative analysis. I will “ask” each profile a set of questions (see list attached). I will record the answers and categorize and count them for a quantitative analysis (for example, the number of men with shirtless profile pictures). Because of the complexity of gender representation, and because not everything can necessarily be categorized and counted, I will also analyze a selection of the profiles qualitatively for a more in-depth and holistic understanding.
I will present this analysis in the form of a 12-15 page research paper.

Timeline and Resources:

November 8-15: Do more background research into field of internet and gender. Incorporate feedback from 11/8 class into proposal. Create document to track content of each profile. Begin to gather information from MySpace profiles.
November 16-22: Finish gathering information from MySpace profiles. Begin analysis.
November 23-29: Complete analysis. Finish first draft. Submit to professor for feedback.
November 30-December 6: Revise draft, incorporate feedback.
December 7-13: Complete, edit, and proofread paper. Turn in to professor.

I will need a computer with internet access, which I have at home and at school. For the background information I’ll be seeking, I will use the internet and the resources of the library, looking at journals and books. I may contact Professor Silver to see if he has any resources related to my topic.

Questions for analysis:

What components are included in profile? (e.g. blog, about me, favorites, videos, music, etc.)
What sort of profile picture is shown? (e.g. sexually suggestive, face, object, etc.)
What colors are used?
Are they associated with femininity or masculinity?
What images are included? (e.g. cars, celebrities, friends)
Are they associated with femininity or masculinity?
What written text is included?
What is said in “About me”?
What is said in “Who I’d like to meet”?
What are their interests, favorites, etc.?
What is stated for Status, Orientation, Body Type, and Children?
What sort of gender identity, if any, does the overall profile suggest? How/in what way?
How are women and men portrayed within the profile? (e.g. in pictures, in text)
Is there an apparent purpose for the profile? (e.g. looking for a relationship)
What are the significances of the elements included in the profile?
How does the content of the women’s pages compare with the content of the men’s pages?
What are the implications of my findings?

Lacanalysis

Word du jour: lacanalysis

The Lacanian-inflected psychoanalysis that has dominated film theory in the academy for several years now is usually presented as the alternative to a classically Freudian film criticism. Too often in the lacanalysis of films, however, will-of-the-wisp theoretical positions are read back into films with such iron rigidity that some of the most salient aspects of a film are entirely overlooked.

One of my favorite Spanish words from my Sociology of Public Communication class was neohegelianismo.

Psychoanalysis is so not my thing. Argh. Well, if I get a C on this paper and full credit on the next one, I'll still have a solid A in the class.

Craziness

I am exhausted and unmotivated. I want to go back to El Salvador. I do not want to write about psychoanalysis because I don't get it and it's weird. I also don't want to have to do all the other things I have to do in the next few weeks. And even when I'm done I'll be freaked out by the fact that I'll only have one semester left.

Tomorrow is a Digital Literacy Taskforce meeting. I always enjoy those, enough to sacrifice that bit of sleep. I'll have to leave a bit early to go to work, but it's all right.

So, I had dinner with Fr. Privett, the other ACEs, and the Public Service Honors minors. That was fun. I was expecting the non-ACEs to have questions prepared for Fr. Privett, but they definitely appeared to have nothing, and it seemed like the conversation was carried most by the ACEs. Yay for us. I wish people had challenged Privett more, but I kept expecting the Public Service people to do it, and they didn't. I liked almost all of what he said. I usually do. His words are wonderful, but sometimes his actions aren't so great.

Now I'm falling asleep, and I have so much to do!

If I am Number 6, who is my professor?

When I read blogs, I tend to get on an intellectual high, probably because the blogs I read are either my professors' or other scholarly sorts. Funny how that doesn't get any homework accomplished.

Okay, here's a question on my midterm due tomorrow: If you (that is, me) are Number 6, who am I (that is, my professor)?

This alludes to the fantastically strange show, The Prisoner. I'm going to brainstorm here. He could be Number 1, but, as the professor kindly points out, we don't even know for sure if Number 1 exists. We can be relatively sure that the professor does exist. That doesn't definitively mean that he is not Number 1, though. Just because we don't know who was Number 1 doesn't mean he was not in front of us the whole time. We trust the professor to be on our side, to be teaching us things to help us learn and be good thinkers, but is he not part of a system structured to maintain the status quo? He claims to try to teach otherwise, which makes us trust him even more, but perhaps he's calling the shots without us even realizing it. What about Number 2? Number 2 is the visible person in charge (as is the professor). Number 2 tries to extract information from Number 6 (as does the professor from his students). As the professor notes, if he were Number 2 that would mean he would be a prisoner too, in a way. As a matter of fact, he is a prisoner to many norms and conventions, but my impression is that he is not a willing prisoner, unlike Number 2. Maybe, as he suggests, he is Number 5. Perhaps his "sickness" which caused him to miss class on Wednesday was not in fact a cold, but that he lost his hair, gained weight, and turned yellow, becoming Homer Simpson. Hmm... I don't think I'd have much to back up that argument. What else could he be? One of the women? He is not a woman, nor does he cry or swoon regularly (in front of us), nor does he seem particularly manipulative. Rover? As far as I know, he does not physically hurt or kill any of his students, and if we leave the classroom, he doesn't stop us. What's left? Maybe he's just another person in The Village. He's too self-aware and critical for that. Could he be the penny-farthing bicycle? That wouldn't make sense, but I'm beyond that point. This is way too much fun.

Okay, my favorite is the professor as Number 2. I'll explain away his apparent criticism of the status quo with capitalism's ability to absorb anything and make us believe that we are hearing something subversive, when in fact it is just perpetuating the system. We are paying thousands of dollars to listen to this professor, whose lectures make us think that now we are smarter than everyone else because we say things like "repressive tolerance" and "signifiers and signifieds," but in the end we'll get our degrees and become economically productive adults, allowing ourselves to be exploited and alienated. We'll just use big words as we do it.

Here's a Language Log posting with some of my favorite things: Semiotics, rethinking homosexuality, and challenging middle-aged conservative white men.

A happy note: I just realized that I don't have to illegally track down episodes of The Office online when we have them in the house on DVD. By the way, I am doing this for purely academic purposes, to do a Marxist critique for a paper. I've been waiting for the day I could count watching The Office as homework.

The Internet and Family Relationships

I'm writing my application for next semester's Davies Forum on Digital Literacy, and something occurred to me. Before my family got the internet in 1996, when I was ten years old, if I had questions or wanted information, I would ask one of my parents or look it up in the encyclopedia. I wonder what impact the internet has had on relationships between parents and children. It used to be that curious children had to ask people (parents or teachers, though in my case they were the same people), but now they don't even have to open their mouths. Google tells all. It would be interesting to study.

Also, why does everything take so much longer than I think it will? I need to learn how to focus.

Wise Words

Me: I just made a new blog instead of studying.
Wise Roommate: You shouldn't do that.
Me: I know. *headdesk*

New Distractions

My new favorite form of procrastination is creating blogs. I have a midterm and a quiz tomorrow, neither of which I am well prepared for, but I've wanted to have a general blog for quite a while now. Just a blog where I can post assorted thoughts or links or insights or new bits of information. Things that catch my attention. Part of what's been holding me back is that every blog needs a name, and I didn't want a boring lame name like "Amber's Thoughts" (though that's probably the most accurate title), and I couldn't come up with anything deep and meaningful or fun and catchy, so it occurred to me to call it In Progress. That way, I can change it if I want, or I can say it's because I am in progress. I am a senior in college, growing up (or pretending to), facing new responsibilities and an unknown future, trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life.

So, here's something thought-provoking (thanks to Professor Goodwin): Will society reproduce itself today?