Matter over mind

I hate when people say they are losing their minds.  You can't lose your mind, you can't even misplace it. It is impossible to stop thinking- although I will admit I have tried many times to stop thinking.  But it's impossible,  your brain is constantly running and thinking, and you are constantly aware of its presence.  But your body can be lost.  How many times has a part of your  body lost feeling because you were so comfortable you forgot it was even there?
This is why I enjoy the cold.   I enjoy feeling my ears and my finger turn numb, I enjoy the chattering of my teeth, I enjoy the goosebumps appearing on my skin, but mostly I enjoy the sensation of feeling real.  When  I am warm, I am comfortable and I hate being comfortable.   With discomfort your body constantly reminds you through pain, or sensations, that you are conscious and alive.  When I am comfortable it is much easier for me to drift off to a place of non-being, a place where most people now spend most of their days. It has become so easy to become less aware of our bodies, of our physical selves and to focus only on the screen in front of us.  

 I can spend hours searching the web, watching television and/or virtually chatting with my friends and not even be aware of the time passing.  It is only when my body reminds me, with a rumble of the stomach or a droop of the eyelids, that I remember that I am  real and that I have needs. 

The internet is not tangible, you can't hold it, feel it, smell it, or even comprehend its size or capacity. Yet we spend hours, days, even years trying to discover how we can use it to our advantage.  Whether this means online shopping, connecting with people or making a name for ourselves, we try every day to find meaning in the screen, and ultimately in our own existences.   

It's so easy to lose yourself in digital age.  I get lost too sometimes, but the difference is when I walk outside and feel a sharp wind on my back I realize that this is my life, not my Facebook page, or my email inbox.

When I walk outside and embrace the cold my body comes back to me.  As long as I still have the reactions I know I'm still living, I'm still here and I still have a chance.

hope

DISCLAIMER: This entry is a little more personal, don't read it if you aren't prepared to read half developed ideas and a little bit of a rant.

Information is easily accessible thanks to the internet. But even with the internet how do you find information on things that don't really exist? Especially abstract things. If you search on Wikipedia for ideas such as freedom, love,wisdom, friendship, faith,hope ect. can you really believe what is said about them? Despite all these technological advancements in the way we receive and process information there are still some concepts that we have to materialize on our own. Lately I have been trying to figure out what hope and strength are. 

My family and friends view me as a strong and independent young woman.  But isn't strength a relative concept?  I am not physically strong, yet I am viewed as strong person.  But I believe my strength only compares to the situation I am put in.   Strong is something people perceive me to be because I show them that side of me.   But what I am seen as on the outside, might be not who I am on the inside.  The inside-- the important part.  Where we find meaning and depth to everyday occurrences.  Where we find meaning to abstract ideas such as hope. 

My mother has always been  one of the strongest women in  my life.  My mom is in the hospital, and maybe that is why she is still alive and fighting- because of her inner strength.  This weekend was a milestone weekend in my eyes, but not to the experts who are taking care of her. As a victim of a stroke that caused a cerebral hemorrhage the doctors know nothing about her mental state or what the future holds for her. She has been taken off her sedation for a few days, and she finally opened her eyes. She looked frightened and scared, but there was a familiarity in her eyes when she looked at me. Although she can not talk I believe she knows who I am, but the experts disagree.   The doctors continue to tell me that although she might know who I am, she probably does not.   Every question we ask we don't receive a complete answer, always a maybe, might be, or a we'll see. The doctors seem to never have anything positive to say. My dad says because they don't want to instill a false sense of hope. False hope?

But isn't all hope in a way false? You are wishing for something to occur but you aren't in any way certain it will. 

The brain is an incredible thing, the way it conceptualizes thoughts and forms them into concepts and ideas. But something abstract like hope is not always on your mind, but I believe it is always in your mind. Around the holidays, especially thanksgiving most people bring forth the idea of thankfulness and happiness from the back of their mind. People begin to reflect, usually only this time of the year, about what they are thankful for. Instead I am going to spend my Thanksgiving hoping for things that I can be thankful for in the future.

I have hope for a lot of things. I have hope that one day my mom will be moved out of the ICU and eventually resume her duty as my loving mother. I have hope that those suffering will one day find a way to leave the suffering behind and move onto a better place with their lives.

And similar to William Powers' view in Hamlet's Blackberry, I have hope that the way society is today will soon change, and we will leave this era of technological obsession, or at least find a happy medium in between it all.  Humanity is becoming less and less self efficient everyday, and less and less self aware in the process. What is really that wrong with society? In MY OPINION the degradation of our society and culture is threefold; the destruction of language, the lack of human interaction, and the diminishing of the expert.

Starting with the obvious, the destruction of language.  The rise of the computer age came coupled with the invention of the cell phone, the main two perpetrators in the slaughtering of the English language. The evolution of instant communication has lead to shortening of words and lessening of technology. One of Postman’s points in Amusing Ourselves to Death is the value of our attention.  People in our society have short attention spans and require simple talk as a result of our television culture.   Our short attention spend is also reflected in our use of language.  People more widely communicate through text in the form of text messages, emails, instant messages and comments, where the laws of grammar are null and void.  It goes beyond the obvious text acronyms such as LOL, OMG,LMFAO to spell check and instant thesauruses. The importance of words goes down with each generation that learns the way of the computer. Learning phonetics has been replaced with spell check, as vocabulary has with digital thesauruses.  I don't claim to have the best vocabulary or spelling in the world (in fact I can't spell at all), but when  I am editing a paper or article I have written, I go much further than spell checking it- I actually hand edit it.  I highly doubt many of my peers go much further than spell check.  To once again cite Orwell's “Politics and the English Language”, our language reflects our culture.   As our culture becomes more decadent, so does our language.  Every decade it seems our culture becomes more and more decadent which is evidently coupled with the destruction of our language.  It is ironic to me, because I would think the more someone writes the better they become in using the language.  But maybe writing and typing are two separate entities.  

Human contact because less important with each new technology advancement.   Connections to people have always been a positive perk to have in life, but now it seems that life IS ABOUT connections.  Social networking sites such as Facebook allow friends to "catch up" with each other, without actually having personal face to face conversation.  It even goes beyond that- we now have the ability to learn about what someone is doing in their lives, without even letting them know.  Friends have become a delusion.  I have 585 friends on Facebook.  Out of the 585 I consider about 30-40 my actual friends, talk to about 10-15 on a regular basis, see 5-8 in person on a day-to-day basis and probably only like about half of them. Then why am I connected to so many other people?  The same reason everyone else is- to avoid face-to-face contact with them.  I can see how acquaintances are doing, without ever having to have a face-to-face conversation with them.  The importance of human interaction is also diminished with texting and instant messaging.  Basically a text or an IM is just emotionless  words instantly sent to another person.   The fact that the person receiving the messages cannot  hear the senders tone of voice, or see their facial expression changes these "conversations" to just words and sentences.  It is IMPOSSIBLE to have a conversation without a person.  That is why I believe IMs and texts are not conversations, but just statements.  How can you have a conversation with someone if you can't hear their tone of their voice(are they yelling, laughing, whispering?) or see their facial expressions (are they smiling, frowning, excited?).   Although all three topics are connected, I feel that human interaction  and language are the most connected.  The way we interact with each other is a reflection of our culture, and our language is suffering because of that. 

The rise of the internet lead to the downfall of the expert. People who are trained for a certain field have no use anymore, since the internet allows less qualified people share their knowledge on topics they may know little to nothing about. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that knows all- all you should know about a topic, not necessarily all there is to know.  To test this idea I search University of Georgia on Wikipedia.  As I predicted the page said nothing about the brutality  the first two black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, integrated into the college.  This could be because the person(s) who wrote the article on the university had no knowledge of the event (because they are not an expert), or because the person(s) who wrote the article had ulterior motives in hiding that event from the public.  Wikis, and many basic websites, make it easy to disguise what the reader needs to know, and replace it with what the create wants the reader to know.   Google displays a similar problem.   I am learning in one of my PR courses how to manipulate a Google algorithm to get your website to appear towards the top of a search.  Even if your website is not the most relevant page to the topic the user is searching about, you can make them think it is.  People tend to click the first few searches they find, regardless of who the site is created by.  This makes it so easy to manipulate people into believing what ever you are saying is fact when it may not be.  Why is this?  Society has begun to put both the amateur and expert on the same pedestal.    The internet seems to display a Communist ideal- no  matter what you do you get the same pay.  In  this case, pay becomes peoples attention.    People trust too much information from the internet, regardless of where it is coming from.  Perhaps this is because people are so hungry for the answers to their problems, that they don't care who is telling them the answer, as long as they can BELIEVE it is the answer. 

Maybe hope is one of those ideas that can lead to action, to change.  I hope so.

A phone to replace phones

Before I criticize the advertisement and the phone itself, I have to admit this is a great advertisement. Maybe because it's funny, maybe because it's so short, or perhaps it is the familiarity of the music but regardless of I can watch the ad over and over again. And that's kind of scary- because that's what they want.
The advertisement itself is a viral success, being viewed as often as amateur videos.

The slogan for the phone is an interesting one, "It's time for a phone to save us from our phones."
This is saying this phone is the solution to societies obsessions with "smart" phones. So this is technology to replace technology, but aren't all new devices and technologies created to improve past technology? Every new model of a technological device is created to improve the problems that past ones had. Our society is obsessed with the idea of creating new technology to better our current technology. Why? to make our lives easier, but what our we sacrificing for that?

Human interaction. This advertisement clearly shows that physical human contact has been replaced with digital interaction. People are attached to technology, putting it before social interaction. The commercial displays this in a dramatic way by trivializes the most important celebrations in our culture, such as a wedding, and puts it behind technology. By showing all these different people in different situations where they are focusing on their phones rather than their lives around them.

Although this commerical does focus on a major issue in our society, and makes a promise that this phone with solve it, it seems that the phone will probably only add to the problem.
This phone may be quicker, but it still allows people to focus on their digital lives instead of their real lives. Windows claims it will get you "in and out" but with all the new features the phone has, Microsoft office, xBox live ect, people will spend just as much time obsessing over their phones as they have in the past.


Nice try Microsoft, but I highly doubt your phone is going to solve the problem our society is so deeply emerged in. Your probably only going to make it worse.

Cult of the Amateur- More like Cult of the Professional

Reading Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur is making me much more cynical than I have ever been.  And not just about life itself, but about my life in particular. 

  In all of my PR classes I am taught that the new social media craze is an excellent marketing tool for us.  I am starting to believe that maybe marketing is being used as a euphemism for manipulation.  The internet allows anonymity, where PR practitioners or advertisers or CEOs of companies can pose as an average Joe (or Jane) and blog about how awesome a product is- and there readers will never know they are getting paid to say that. Andrew Keen is convinced that most of the internet is people posing to be something they are not, he is right but he has got it the wrong way.  Yes, people are pretending to be doctors and college professors when they are nothing but  a pre-pubescent middle school boy, but there are also advertisers and PR professionals posing as stay at home moms who give you home remedies for illnesses(which the companies products.) 
This "Web 2.0" revolution has not only lent that spotlight to anyone with internet access, it has also allowed for false information and lies to be spread much more fluently and quickly.  As I read Cult of the Amateur I feel guilty, because this falseness of truth effects me every day.  I admit, I go to Wikipedia for many of my questions.  I usually take the information as fact, although it may not be.  While people who write traditional encyclopedias are trained experts in their fields.  It's pathetic that my most trusted source of information is written by anonymous users, whose motives to tell the truth may be skewed.  Being a PR major I am taught to manipulate information that would usually be taken as advertisement into fact.  My professors tell me that there are wrong ways to do PR and right ways to do PR.  I think the right way is to skew unpleasantness in nicer ways and the wrong way is to skew the unpleasantness in nicer ways so the public thinks we mean something completely different. When we are able to hide behind usernames why not take the easy way out?  It's a lot easier for people to like you if you lie to them - as long as they never find out your lying. 


Andrew Keen constantly refers back to The Long Tail   by Chris Anderson.  It's interesting because as I am reading Cult of the Amateur, in which keen condemns Anderson's work, I am also reading The New Rules of Markerting and PR which commends Anderson's work.  One of the main rules of this 'long tail' of PR is to participate, not propagate.  By participating in the internet the PR practitioners are supposed to throw away old rules of press releases and PSAs and move on to blogs and comments, where there identity may or may not be revealed. In The New Rules of Marketing and PR David Meerman Scott says that PR has once again become public, instead of just focusing on the media.  If by public, he means anonymous than yes- that is true.  For my PR classes we experiment with the new social medias in PR perspectives- making blogs supporting businesses, making Facebook client pages and of course playing around with Google algorithms to make sure we are the first thing the searcher finds, even if we weren't what they were looking about. We are practicing manipulation techniques.  I think I always knew that, but I am just bringing this to surface now.  There is no longer a right and just way to do PR.  And if there is- not many people are doing it anymore. 

Well if "Web 2.0" is not about originality, it is about falseness and copying.  People pretend to  be something they are not, and compromise the integrity of human nature by posing as someone they are not.  The loss of the physical being and physical interaction has made my future career so much easier. 


Maybe I need to reconsider what I want to do for the rest of my life.  I sure as hell don't think I am going to be the one to change all of this.

The Never-ending, Never-changing Story

My roommate and I never discussed the possibility of not paying for cable television this semester.  Our main focus was whether or not to order HBO for an extra $15 dollars a month.  Looking back I realize that television is such a prominent force in both of our lives that neither of us could contextualize living without it.  In fact the first two days after we moved in we were without cable and internet.  It was not until then did I realize how often I watch television, whether it is consciously or just as background noise.

In Eating a Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman quotes Ted Kaczynski, the legendary Unabomber, "Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom."  This is a very bold and true statement.  People sacrifice many things for technology, in facts our lives revolve around it.  People will spend ludicrous amount of money for the latest technology, thousands of dollars of state of the art computers and televisions, "smart"-phones, cable television with thousands of channels.  All of these seems unnecessary, especially when people begin to choose to spend their money on  these luxuries verses the necessities of life. 

Television is a life conquering force.    Everyone is exposed to it, and many of the times it shapes our ideas and experiences.  Klosterman also discusses how our internal images, how we picture things, most likely originate from television.  Television is a world wide medium that allows us to believe other peoples opinions and leaves little room for interpretation or our own opinions.  Television is one of the sole mediums that has the ability to take away our freedom and our voice.  Television is run by the elite, the images seen are created by  the minds of the elite, the information given to us is from the mouths of the elite.  The average person does not have a say in what people say or do on television.  They do not create television shows,and they do not benefit from  what television offers.

Using my own  life as an example I will admit that I am a fan of the television series True Blood.  I watch it regularly and this was the main reason my roommate and I debated ordering HBO (which we did by the way).  This show is by director Alan Ball.   Of course this show is entirely fictional, but Alan Ball definitely contributes many elements to the show that are detrimental to our thinking.  The show is violent, sexual and racist.  Abuse is consistently seen through out the show, as well as sexual violence and murder.  This show does not show that these things are wrong,  or what to do if they  happen to you, but instead tells us it's normal and everything will be fine next episode.  Television is unrealistic, many people realize that, but the ideas that they  reinforce constantly such as abuse against women, whether sexual or violent, are prevalent in our society.  This must mean that television does effect some, if not most, of it's fans. 

Knowing all  of this- knowing what it does to me and the ideas I am exposed to because of it, I still watch it.  I am smart enough to look beyond what they are saying to me and contextualize that this is not real life, that it is a television show.  Even if I did stop watching, what difference would it make?  Television will never die.  It will only grow stronger.

my hd lullaby

I can’t fall asleep without the TV on.   I am twenty years old and I cannot fall asleep unless the TV is on.   I don’t watch what is going on, I close my eyes and listen.  It’s as if I need to television to sing me a digital lullaby before I can fall asleep.   It’s pathetic.  Last night I was up until 3:30 a.m. with my eyes shut tight trying to fall asleep, but I couldn’t.  I gave in at this point and turned on the TV, lowered the volume and put the sleep timer on.  I was asleep in a matter of minutes.   It is just noise, noise that helps block out the things I am actually thinking so I can have a clear enough mind to sleep.  Television has become a safety blanket for so many people in our society.  It has become a toxic life force that pollutes everyone who participates. 

The media, television in general, is addicting.  Its main purpose has shifted from to inform, to entertain and ultimately to distract.  When we watch television we are trying to distance ourselves from the real world for a bit and indulge in this fantasy world, where you can focus on others misfortunes to distract yourself from your own. 

Television is so dominant in our culture, but what kind of effect is it having on society?  Even television that is meant to inform the public is full of frivolous information told to us by beautiful people to grab our attention.  What the media strives to take from us is more valuable than money, our attention.  Our attention is priceless, and limited, so media is in competition with itself to obtain this precious entity.

How do we choose what to waste our attention on?  Sometimes things we are genuinely interested in, but usually it is the most outrageous and shocking thing we come across.     Information has become pre-packaged into “infotainment.”    This information overload has made our society brainless and inattentiveness is a major result.  How do we make more constructive use of our time and attentions?  Skip the television, read a book, but it’s not that easy.  Television is everywhere, when I pump my gas, buy groceries, go on an airplane, my attention is redirected towards a television.  Television has invaded and majorly altered our culture.  This blog is going to talk about the many ways in which the media, but television in particular, has changed our society and how our attention has become our most valuable commodity.    Stay tuned!