I learned a thing in my Anthropology class about the niche. An open niche, in nature, is an unoccupied opportunity for a species to prosper. It could be a habitat that’s uniquely safe from predators, it could be a source of food relatively untapped into, and so forth. If a species can successfully occupy that niche, then they thrive. If they occupy no niche, then they die.
Chimpanzees had occupied a great niche living in trees where they were safe from their enemies and had plenty of food. But the theory of evolution suggests that one day a lot of chimps were forced to find a niche elsewhere living in the grasslands, eventually developing tools for hunting, and over the course of millions of years, turned into the Johns and Janes like you and me in the process.
The most significant change over these millennia was their brain size, which itself created another niche, not for wildlife, but for ideas. In fact, the Human Brain may be the single largest and most diverse niche in the history in the world, its capacity for ideas responsible for the unspeakable variations of culture throughout all the eras and parts of the earth. It created diversity of opportunity, and that’s essentially what a niche is: an opportunity.
But it’s the diversity of that opportunity that’s the tricky part. Diversity doesn’t just create good and productive ideas, but bigoted and asinine ones as well. Without diversity, all the chimpanzees had to do was eat and sleep. And at the start, certainly all we wanted to do was make some better tools and get together some organized hunts, and to have the thought capacity to handle it all. But, whether it was God or Mother Nature, someone instead gave us these brains that are so big, we don’t know what the hell to do with them.
With brains like these, where will our thoughts go after we’ve conquered eating and sleeping? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs says that once we’ve achieved needs of Survival and Safety, we then move on to needs of Belonging and Self Actualization. So once we have a job that’ll pay the bills, the next thing we worry about is having a feeling of accomplishment, which must not have been hard to do before the Industrial Age. Every product had to be made from scratch, and the same worker probably saw most products in their development from beginning to end. So for many workers, it was easy to feel a sense of pride in what they were making.
It was the Industrial Age that took it way. Stuart Ewen, from his 1976 book Captains of Consciousness suggested that once Industrialization and Assembly Line Processing took the creativity away from work, the working class were robbed of their fulfillment of individualization. Classical Management, to twist the knife, left the few people running the company to make all of the decisions for the employees devoted to their specialized tasks without any room for craftsmanship.
Their placement on the Hierarchy of Needs was left empty, and was waiting to be filled by something else. This is what I mean by the Brain being a niche: there was an open opportunity for fulfillment in peoples’ minds, and in a variety of forms, it would be filled by the media
Ewen described how the development of advertising in the 1920s had attempted to fulfill our need for individualism with material wealth. As an example, Ewen cited a humorously ill-conceived magazine add for an “Alpine Sun Lamp” that promised the joys of ultraviolet rays in the comfort of your own home (by then, the constraints of industrialization and city life were recognized for being at odds with the joys of nature.)
Silly products like the Alpine Sun Lamp promised sensations in place of genuine realities, similar to how cars have long been advertised with images of care-free drivers traveling through grassy prairies. Cars embodied the escape fantasy, but most only use it to drive between their entrapment at work and their entrapment at home. Of all the goods in the product market, the vast majority was mundane, but the advertising industry manipulated them into the sensations and expressions that the peoples’ dulled senses were craving.
But advertising wasn’t the only thing turning mundane objects into expressive ones. The culture itself was creating fashions to achieve individualization. Or, well, fashion had existed long before the Industrial Revolution, but afterwards it was needed far more in a growing crisis of self expression.
Edward Sapir analyzed the nature of fashion and noted on how the clothes we wear are used as a safe rebellion; as a means of disassociating ourselves with the monotony of culture without necessarily offending the values of that culture. Sapir stated how people over the ages have criticized in vain against fashion for being an attack against modesty. And they were right in saying so, but it will never diminish fashion because, as Sapir noted, fashion serves a paradoxical need that people have to be modest and immodest at the same time.
The media, essentially, has catered to that niche for fulfillment in our brains with stories of rebellion and escape fantasies in television and movies. Through watching fictional accounts of the like, we have felt all the sensations of attacking the system without ever having to disrupt it. As it were, we tend to be filled with many a paradoxical need, as we seem keen to contradict ourselves in our many efforts to reach Self Actualization.
Adorno and Horkheimer made scathing criticisms of the entertainment industry for being a superficial imitation of genuine artistic expression. By virtue of being run by an industry, they stated how any signs of spontaneity in films were deceptive, and by contrast, all forms of expression and art were monitored carefully by studios who all approved the personnel and talent. Campaigns that boasted what talent were involved in a film, Adorno and Horkheimer suggested, were substitute arguments for actual quality of the film.
They were awfully mean things to say about the movies, but they had a point. Adorno and Horkheimer feared a future where consumers will regularly accept superficial quality from a capitalist market that feeds them a superficial interpretation of reality. That’s not too far off from the voting public being fed images of a prosperous America instead of solid evidence to believe in a political candidate. The human race, in a self-contradictory manner, is somehow willing to accept the image of quality over quality itself.
It’s weird, because certainly we want what’s best for ourselves, but with the market of our needs in the hands of the media, we are somehow left with knockoffs and manipulations a lot of the time. So is that the media’s fault? In their competition with one another to get our attention, perhaps they tend to gravitate towards whatever we’ll respond to first, so maybe they can only be blamed for catering to our human nature, and it’s our human nature that’s riddled with self contradictions.
Naomi Klein, for instance, in her lecture at Sydney that was transcribed by The Media Report, discussed how many people tend to put more value in brand names and logos than in the literal quality of the products they purchase. Right there is an example of the media succumbing to tactics of familiarity in place of building a case for why we should purchase their products. The contradiction that we tend to be guilty of is that, as consumers, we tend to settle for what appears to work just as well as what we may genuinely want. Klein expressed concerns for a public that not only accepted brand names in place of quality, but also got attached to their familiarity, creating surrogate relationships with the products they were so used to, as though they were settling for convenience and getting sucked into them as habit.
Virginia Postrel, from her article Consumer Vertigo published in Reason Magazine, also addressed the concern for consumers siding with convenience over informed choice. Her arguments were more of a rebuttal against criticisms over the overwhelming variety that the public has, not just with flavors of cheese and sizes of jeans, but where to live and what career paths to take. Critics had speculated that consumers are stranded to agonize over their decisions, but Postrel argued that they don’t have to when they need only arrive at decisions that will satisfice.
But it’s an interesting concern that people, once again, contradict themselves when they would theoretically agree that variety is a good thing, but instead return to buying the same brands that they’re used to over the other varieties competing for their attention. But Postrel certainly argues in favor of variety, and I guess I agree with her, not just on consumerism, on the Human Mind. Life wouldn’t be much fun if we lived in trees and only thought about eating and sleeping. But with this diversity of thought came a heaping bag of complication.
That’s the way that diversity tends to work out. It’s a good thing only because good consequences are among the possible outcomes. Bad and counterproductive outcomes are also just as possible. A nation run by democracy is great when it allows all men to be created equal, but when progress in office is muddled by interest groups and elected officials are exposed for scandals, then you’d have to admit that totalitarianism would get things done faster, whether or not for the better.
The Internet is a provocative example of the ups and downs of diversity. It is, on one hand, celebrated as the flag ship of the Information Age, allowing endless possibilities for publishing and storing information, conducting business and for communicating instantly across endless distances. Any kind of information can be stored on the Internet, and any kind of conduct can be exercised between communicators. And that includes asinine statements and an assortment of scams.
Even the good and useful storage of information on the Internet is seen as a conundrum by Nicholas Carr in his article Is Google Making us Stupid?, published in The Atlantic. The diversity, he says, began for him as an excellent means for doing quick research, but soon afterward realized that hopping from site to site had lazed his attention span for single readings.
It would seem that the Human Brain, in all its diversity, can only handle committing itself to a few things at a time. When exposed to too much, its senses become dulled. It’s a similar concern that Thomas de Zengotita had in his article The Numbing of the American Mind. He was concerned that the overexposure of a diversity of sensations by the media left the public numbed to them.
So many emotions are presented to us in the news and advertising and entertainment. Many we ignore, but we’re also effectively provoked by many of them before moving on to the next thing. It was Zengotita’s explanation for why the American Public moved on so quickly after the events of September 11th. Provoking and real though it was, our short emotional attention spans could not sustain interest for longer than six months before directing our attentions back to the labored and artificial sensations offered to us by the quick moving media.
In the tradition of the Be Careful What You Wish For sort of moral, there tends to be some unforeseen consequences to what you would think would be a good thing for the Human Mind. And it seems like it refuses to be satisfied. Expand its size and lift its restrictions and it won’t know what to think. Offer it choices and opportunity, and it won’t know where to start. Point it in specialized directions and then it can’t think for itself.
The Mind seems to be a conundrum where if you solve one problem, then you create another. Therein lies again, a problem that comes with diversity. There will always be problems. Therefore, when the media tries to fill the niches of the Mind’s needs, there are consequences. The Internet has allowed people to expose themselves to an audience of friends and strangers, and people might fulfill a need to have their voices a little more heard over a social network, but even that comes with consequences.
Elliot Gould, in her essay Exposed, published in The New York Times Magazine, spoke about how her blog started out as enjoyable outlet for her thoughts and feelings dissolved into a destructive exposure of personal information about herself and her loved ones. One thing that I can give Emily Gould credit for is her ability to write about her experiences in activities that I inherently hate—gossip journalism, vanity blogging—in a manner so well spoken and articulate that I could read it feeling complete empathy for what she went through, and all the while never remembering that I hate everything she does.
Tabloids on celebrity gossip are something I so despise. It’s the type of superficial reporting events that I don’t think the culture had any business of knowing—the latest scandal of some pop star; the latest breakup of a celebrity couple. It’s the type of thing that panders to a public uninterested in genuine facts or quality that makes me worry if Adorno and Horkheimer’s fears had come true.
The worst part about celebrity gossip and the media that reports it is that reporters and consumers alike superimpose drama-queen-esque emotions over the events that it reports whether they’re there or not. It’s the same criticism that I could make for narcissistic blog writing. People sitting at home updating their web pages may be sensationalizing the events that have happened in their lives when they may not really want to find an outlet for their emotions, but they want rather to garner attention. Another credit that I can give for Gould was the sense of shame she expressed when her blog writing had nearly ruined her life.
Personally, I embrace the Internet and the Information Age. I love the concept of Facebook and being able to tell web patrons things about yourself that they otherwise may not have had a chance to find out. The web has had an effect on filling that niche in our brains and the media that caters to it like nothing else before. But that contradiction kicks in somehow on the web, in the form of what Gould called “oversharring,” when our need to display ourselves is blurred in the desire to completely expose ourselves to vanity.
And it’s the diversity of our minds that creates the problems that allow us to contradict ourselves like this. One of my professors had told me about a book that compiled innumerable different theories of how the mind worked from different scientists, doctors, psychiatrists and otherwise, but the kicker is that virtually none of the theories overlapped each other. The mind is so diverse, so complex, that we can hardly begin to figure how it works, and for solving problems such as achieving Self Actualization, there are unspeakable numbers of ways to get there, also diverse and complex.
We contradict ourselves because there are so many different ways of achieving what we would consider the same thing. Ewen says we seek individuality, but we may instead settle for materialism. Sapir says we seek expression, but instead find safety and acceptance. Adorno and Horkheimer say we merely seek entertainment, and unwittingly get entangled in deception and superficiality. Postrel and Carr said we look for variety, but settle for predictability and convenience. Gould says we seek recognition and friendship, but may indulge in vanity. The Information Age is fantastic, but it’s overwhelming us. We’ve constructed this vortex of information and culture and media, and it’s all because our minds weren’t content to just eating and sleeping. So how are we expected to deal with it all?
The simple answer would be to know what you put in your Mind and know that you can handle it. My favorite defense out of all the critics that I’ve read from is Postrel’s, because she knows to refer to the Brain as something that belongs to you and that you’re in control of it. Many of the others wrote of the effects of media as a something that we have to be worried about, but Postrel understood that we’re responsible for ourselves and what we choose to consume from the media. It’s a chaotic world out there in the Information Age, no doubt, and my Mind may never be at rest searching for ways to fulfill its needs, but it’s certainly a lot more fun than living in a tree.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Things I've Said About Emily Gould
I guess I’m a sucker for good writers, because I was able to read Emily Gould’s life story about blogging her personal feelings to strangers, writing for celebrity gossip editorials, and about her overall addiction to Internet Attention and consistently feel sympathy for her experiences without ever remembering that I inherently hate everything she does.
She makes it sound so harmless to scrutinize celebrity behavior and so rewarding to open herself up to an anonymous public, or as she described, to achieve “recognition via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.” It’s a type of behavior I’ve scoffed at, and at the same time derived a dark entertainment out of.
It’s one of my vices that I’ve taken so much joy from the Facebook notes written by my peers that have attempted recognition through confessing deep feelings when in turn they’ve come out as narcissistic and unintentionally funny.
The examples beg the question of where to draw the line on how public we should make ourselves in the advent of the Internet boom. For me, these people on Facebook cross the line when they attempt to celebrate their emotions and tag everyone on their friends list to attain as much attention as possible. Gould as well revolved her story around how her “oversharing” of information had become self-destructive.
But Gould also makes an important point about how the Internet is redefining where the barriers of privacy are being held, and part of it is a good thing. I enjoy publicizing the quasi-personal information about myself on the Internet, including a profile of my tastes and photo albums of my activities. It provides an opportunity to know me on a surface level when privacy would have built a wall preventing it. But Gould at her worst and the aforementioned Facebook bloggers craved a need to inform us far deeper than we would want (or should want) to know.
So I guess the question of sharing yourself on the Internet is making yourself available versus exploiting yourself. It wouldn’t hurt to maybe let the world know of a personal tidbit or two about yourself, but going too far places your situation in the attention mongering territory that I both hate and laugh at.
She makes it sound so harmless to scrutinize celebrity behavior and so rewarding to open herself up to an anonymous public, or as she described, to achieve “recognition via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.” It’s a type of behavior I’ve scoffed at, and at the same time derived a dark entertainment out of.
It’s one of my vices that I’ve taken so much joy from the Facebook notes written by my peers that have attempted recognition through confessing deep feelings when in turn they’ve come out as narcissistic and unintentionally funny.
The examples beg the question of where to draw the line on how public we should make ourselves in the advent of the Internet boom. For me, these people on Facebook cross the line when they attempt to celebrate their emotions and tag everyone on their friends list to attain as much attention as possible. Gould as well revolved her story around how her “oversharing” of information had become self-destructive.
But Gould also makes an important point about how the Internet is redefining where the barriers of privacy are being held, and part of it is a good thing. I enjoy publicizing the quasi-personal information about myself on the Internet, including a profile of my tastes and photo albums of my activities. It provides an opportunity to know me on a surface level when privacy would have built a wall preventing it. But Gould at her worst and the aforementioned Facebook bloggers craved a need to inform us far deeper than we would want (or should want) to know.
So I guess the question of sharing yourself on the Internet is making yourself available versus exploiting yourself. It wouldn’t hurt to maybe let the world know of a personal tidbit or two about yourself, but going too far places your situation in the attention mongering territory that I both hate and laugh at.
Things I've Said About Virginia Postrel
Man, Virginia Postrel really tore through Barry Schwartz’ argument about how freedom of choice overwhelms society. She, nor I, had any qualms with Schwartz’ observations on how so much variety can intimidate consumers from wanting to make decisions, but she made such a thorough case against his notion that variety was a bad thing that she made Schwartz sound arrogant by the end of the article.
Schwartz’ initial observations, however, I can sympathize with plenty. When given so many options, I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve excruciated, just as Schwartz has, over which article of clothing to buy at a store. To choose between several products that are essentially the same, I’ve had to visit every outlet in the mall twice before finalizing a decision.
And if it’s not with scrutiny, then I may approach a decision with intimidation. Homework is a good example. A multi-page research paper, for instance, would offer so many options on where to begin that I’d rather choose not to.
Worse still is the option between several challenging homework assignments in several different subjects. Which one should I decide is more “important”? I may single out the one with the closest forthcoming due date or highest grade percentage and justify that none of the other options would have been viable.
This is where Schwartz’ comes in with his notion that society would be happier if their choices were limited. I would, in fact, take comfort in more of my decisions if I knew I didn’t have a choice. And by contrast, pondering the possibilities of the options I’ve left behind is one of the greater anxieties of decision making.
But then Postrel enters the spectrum to argue that I can handle that anxiety. She says we need only satisfy rather than scrutinize over options, and in the end the opportunity we have is beneficial. And she says that we can come to those decisions when have the help of familiarity, or if we have the expertise of a friend to guide us. Deciding on a college, for instance, was a decision that would have taken a lot more scrutiny than choosing a pair jeans, and I likely could have never made the decision by myself. With the help of my parents who helped research some campuses, I was able to decide on a school that was reasonably affluent and convenient.
With the knowledge that I’m at a good college, I don’t have to worry about the possibility of a better one. That’s a comfort that greatly outweighs not having a choice. It’s the comfort of having a satisfying choice, even if I’ll never know if it was the best one.
Schwartz’ initial observations, however, I can sympathize with plenty. When given so many options, I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve excruciated, just as Schwartz has, over which article of clothing to buy at a store. To choose between several products that are essentially the same, I’ve had to visit every outlet in the mall twice before finalizing a decision.
And if it’s not with scrutiny, then I may approach a decision with intimidation. Homework is a good example. A multi-page research paper, for instance, would offer so many options on where to begin that I’d rather choose not to.
Worse still is the option between several challenging homework assignments in several different subjects. Which one should I decide is more “important”? I may single out the one with the closest forthcoming due date or highest grade percentage and justify that none of the other options would have been viable.
This is where Schwartz’ comes in with his notion that society would be happier if their choices were limited. I would, in fact, take comfort in more of my decisions if I knew I didn’t have a choice. And by contrast, pondering the possibilities of the options I’ve left behind is one of the greater anxieties of decision making.
But then Postrel enters the spectrum to argue that I can handle that anxiety. She says we need only satisfy rather than scrutinize over options, and in the end the opportunity we have is beneficial. And she says that we can come to those decisions when have the help of familiarity, or if we have the expertise of a friend to guide us. Deciding on a college, for instance, was a decision that would have taken a lot more scrutiny than choosing a pair jeans, and I likely could have never made the decision by myself. With the help of my parents who helped research some campuses, I was able to decide on a school that was reasonably affluent and convenient.
With the knowledge that I’m at a good college, I don’t have to worry about the possibility of a better one. That’s a comfort that greatly outweighs not having a choice. It’s the comfort of having a satisfying choice, even if I’ll never know if it was the best one.
Things I've Said About Nicholas Carr
When figuring out how to analyze Nicholas Carr’s argument about how the Internet has changed our ways of thinking, I keep going back to my observations on my own ways of thinking when I attempted a twenty-four hour period with no access to media at all. I discovered that my brain is a remarkably impatient processor of the abundance of information that it has such easy access to. Carr says the accessibility of information stored in the internet not only shortens the hours spent in libraries to minutes spent on Google searches, but it also shortens the attention spans of the people using the internet frequently, who find that once they break away attention-deficit web browsing, they find themselves challenged to commit to a single reading. As much as I sympathize with that struggle, I find myself inclined to agree with Carr for the most part.
For another class, I read an article by Kathleen Jamieson about how speeches (from politicians and other orators) have dwindled down over the years from multiple hours to twenty minutes or so, and she blames the public in part for their shortening attention spans. Families used to walk for hours to hear a single politician give a three hour speech, and when books were the predominant form of private entertainment, reading for hours was common place. You get the idea that people didn’t have anything much better to do. And I guess it’s odd that less access to information would make someone keener to the details of an elongated speech or text, like the reverse effect of exercising a muscle. But then again the abbreviated snippets we choose to skim through on the Internet would be like doing half a pushup, then half a jumping jack and so on.
Carr goes back to Plato’s criticisms of the written word threatening to replace genuine thought, and Guttenberg’s printing press threatening close to the same thing. And they’re valid observations; the advancing development of the media has been resulting in our shortening attention spans. And in turn there seems to be a feedback loop where our shortening attention spans prompt the media to offer us shorter and easy-to-consume snippets of information, such as Carr’s example of The New York Times devoting some of its pages to “article abstracts” so readers can get a nutshell understanding of the articles’ main points.
But Carr also acknowledges the benefits of the Internet and having vast access to all this information. Just as the written word was invaluable in passing down information to develop cultures, and the printing press in proving information to the common man for the first time, the Internet is a splendid resource, and since he’s not quite attacking the Internet so overtly, it’s hard to find his argument, well, arguable. The way I see it is that our minds belong to us; we can feed them whatever we want, and it’s our responsibility to exercise them and take care of them. If we don’t, we can become lazy and impatient with the way we consume information and turn into the things Carr has essentially worried about.
For another class, I read an article by Kathleen Jamieson about how speeches (from politicians and other orators) have dwindled down over the years from multiple hours to twenty minutes or so, and she blames the public in part for their shortening attention spans. Families used to walk for hours to hear a single politician give a three hour speech, and when books were the predominant form of private entertainment, reading for hours was common place. You get the idea that people didn’t have anything much better to do. And I guess it’s odd that less access to information would make someone keener to the details of an elongated speech or text, like the reverse effect of exercising a muscle. But then again the abbreviated snippets we choose to skim through on the Internet would be like doing half a pushup, then half a jumping jack and so on.
Carr goes back to Plato’s criticisms of the written word threatening to replace genuine thought, and Guttenberg’s printing press threatening close to the same thing. And they’re valid observations; the advancing development of the media has been resulting in our shortening attention spans. And in turn there seems to be a feedback loop where our shortening attention spans prompt the media to offer us shorter and easy-to-consume snippets of information, such as Carr’s example of The New York Times devoting some of its pages to “article abstracts” so readers can get a nutshell understanding of the articles’ main points.
But Carr also acknowledges the benefits of the Internet and having vast access to all this information. Just as the written word was invaluable in passing down information to develop cultures, and the printing press in proving information to the common man for the first time, the Internet is a splendid resource, and since he’s not quite attacking the Internet so overtly, it’s hard to find his argument, well, arguable. The way I see it is that our minds belong to us; we can feed them whatever we want, and it’s our responsibility to exercise them and take care of them. If we don’t, we can become lazy and impatient with the way we consume information and turn into the things Carr has essentially worried about.
Things I've Said About Naomi Klein
The first thing I thought of when I read Naomi Klein’s transcribed speech about the separation between brand names and the products they represent was how I never consider the cheaper breakfast cereal brands while shopping at supermarkets. None of the “Great Value” knockoffs of familiar cereals nor the dirt-cheap bags on the bottom shelves that aren’t even packaged in boxes look like they they’re worth the effort to take seriously. For all I know, they taste exactly the same or have the same nutritional value, but they’re not in the same league as the Kellogg or Post products boasting such recognizable mascots as Lucky the Leprechaun or Snap, Crackle, and Pop.
It’s an odd criteria to judge cereal by, and that’s sort of Klein’s point on how symbolism substitutes as “the mark of quality on the product.” Klein spoke about how some industries increase their profit margins if they don’t own their factories, but instead outsource their production. What they do own, is what she called the “intellectual property:” Under her illustration, these cereal companies would own the recipe and the copyrighted packaging design. So essentially the only unique thing these guys would be selling me is the idea of Lucky Charms and the opportunity to see Lucky the Leprechaun on the front of the box while I eat.
But I’m so used to it. And I don’t know how else to single out quality products. We as consumers are inherently naïve, and rather than scrutinize the details to every product we buy to single out the best one, we instead depend on the symbol of an affluent production brand. It starts out that way, and then we get comfortable with these brands. I guess that’s the argument that struck a chord with me the most, was Klein’s observation on how consumers are creating “surrogate relationships” with the products they buy. I not only look to Lucky for a seal of approval, but I would begin to miss him if I ate one of his cheap knockoffs.
Or maybe that's putting it too harsh. To be certain, there's a middle ground most of us
dwell in between our genuine instincts and being duped by brand names. I'd quit eating
Lucky Charms if it tasted like crap. I come for the familiarity, I stay for the
satisfaction. But what Klein worries about is blurring the line between the two, but that certainly depends on the individual. Another example is when I’m shopping for music on iTunes, if I don’t know much about what I’m considering, I go with what I’m familiar with: the prestige of the artist, the customer reviews, the popularity (as measured by download history.) But in the end it’s my personal taste that carries me through my purchase decisions.
It isn’t necessary to be antagonistic against product brands, but it’s important that we’re conscientious about them. I obviously can’t scrutinize everything I buy, but I can’t get too comfortable with these brands either, because like Klein argues, I don’t have an actual relationship with these products. I need to eat, and that’s it.
It’s an odd criteria to judge cereal by, and that’s sort of Klein’s point on how symbolism substitutes as “the mark of quality on the product.” Klein spoke about how some industries increase their profit margins if they don’t own their factories, but instead outsource their production. What they do own, is what she called the “intellectual property:” Under her illustration, these cereal companies would own the recipe and the copyrighted packaging design. So essentially the only unique thing these guys would be selling me is the idea of Lucky Charms and the opportunity to see Lucky the Leprechaun on the front of the box while I eat.
But I’m so used to it. And I don’t know how else to single out quality products. We as consumers are inherently naïve, and rather than scrutinize the details to every product we buy to single out the best one, we instead depend on the symbol of an affluent production brand. It starts out that way, and then we get comfortable with these brands. I guess that’s the argument that struck a chord with me the most, was Klein’s observation on how consumers are creating “surrogate relationships” with the products they buy. I not only look to Lucky for a seal of approval, but I would begin to miss him if I ate one of his cheap knockoffs.
Or maybe that's putting it too harsh. To be certain, there's a middle ground most of us
dwell in between our genuine instincts and being duped by brand names. I'd quit eating
Lucky Charms if it tasted like crap. I come for the familiarity, I stay for the
satisfaction. But what Klein worries about is blurring the line between the two, but that certainly depends on the individual. Another example is when I’m shopping for music on iTunes, if I don’t know much about what I’m considering, I go with what I’m familiar with: the prestige of the artist, the customer reviews, the popularity (as measured by download history.) But in the end it’s my personal taste that carries me through my purchase decisions.
It isn’t necessary to be antagonistic against product brands, but it’s important that we’re conscientious about them. I obviously can’t scrutinize everything I buy, but I can’t get too comfortable with these brands either, because like Klein argues, I don’t have an actual relationship with these products. I need to eat, and that’s it.
Things I've Said About Zengotita
Reading Zengotita’s article, I couldn’t escape making comparisons between his analysis of how people’s minds work and my own observations from my media-free day report. Zengotita’s argument, in a nutshell, was that people got over their emotional response to September 11 so quickly because the events from September 11 were merely pieces of information trying to sustain relevance in a culture where information is so disposable. And information is disposable, he explained, because of peoples’ needs to keep their minds in motion with new information to concentrate on. His article struck a chord with me and how my mind worked. I wrote that my mind is impatient and always needing something to consume, never discriminating what information is being fed to it, consequential or true or otherwise.
The thing is: a big reason why my mind needs information is because it’s so spoiled. My iPhone lets me check my e-mail and listen to music at literally any moment of the day. The media—and information—is so available to me at such large quantities that my mind can be kept occupied during any moment of boredom. Zengotita wrote that this was a big difference from societies, oh say, two hundred years ago when media wasn’t advanced enough to inform the masses of major developments so quickly. And with the development of the media, the masses can be served information in both increased speed and quantity. We’re told on the fly of developments so substantial as September 11 and so trivial as celebrity gossip. And they’re both reported with such importance: reporters around the same time telling me the fact that Ben Affleck is dating Jennifer Lopez is the most important information that I need to know right now. All information is suited with hyperbole that it numbs our senses, so that when something as truly evocative as September 11 happens, then we can’t respond to it in earnest. Or at least we can’t maintain our response in earnest before getting on with our lives and concentrating on the the next thing. Information in this age has become a product; our minds are so used to being fed this product of artificial importance, that when something real happens then we treat it with the same disposability.
So, to sum up, I thought Zengotita’s observations were great because they nailed how I saw my own mind and how it worked so impatiently. And to his credit, his article was a much more pleasant read than previous assignments.
The thing is: a big reason why my mind needs information is because it’s so spoiled. My iPhone lets me check my e-mail and listen to music at literally any moment of the day. The media—and information—is so available to me at such large quantities that my mind can be kept occupied during any moment of boredom. Zengotita wrote that this was a big difference from societies, oh say, two hundred years ago when media wasn’t advanced enough to inform the masses of major developments so quickly. And with the development of the media, the masses can be served information in both increased speed and quantity. We’re told on the fly of developments so substantial as September 11 and so trivial as celebrity gossip. And they’re both reported with such importance: reporters around the same time telling me the fact that Ben Affleck is dating Jennifer Lopez is the most important information that I need to know right now. All information is suited with hyperbole that it numbs our senses, so that when something as truly evocative as September 11 happens, then we can’t respond to it in earnest. Or at least we can’t maintain our response in earnest before getting on with our lives and concentrating on the the next thing. Information in this age has become a product; our minds are so used to being fed this product of artificial importance, that when something real happens then we treat it with the same disposability.
So, to sum up, I thought Zengotita’s observations were great because they nailed how I saw my own mind and how it worked so impatiently. And to his credit, his article was a much more pleasant read than previous assignments.
Things I've Learned About Living 24 Hours Without the Media
Perhaps I had picked a bad day to attempt twenty-four hours completely abstained from electronic media. It was Thursday and NBC was thriving with entertainment that night, boasting new episodes of The Office, My Name is Earl and the season premier of 30 Rock. And to make it worse, I could have afterwards changed the channel to FX and watched two new episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: about three solid hours of great entertainment I was missing all for the sake of experimentation. But miss it I did. In fact, I made it the whole day without breaking a sweat. For a good twenty-four hours, I neither watched a television, answered a phone, looked at a computer screen nor listened to recorded music. And the music was the hard part. My dorm room is decorated profusely with posters of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia and so forth, and listening to their bodies of work has filled in the nooks and crannies of my day for years now. It felt weird not being able to turn to them for my boredom pangs, or even to make my walks to the campus cafeteria more interesting.
And harder still was abstaining from Facebook. It was such an innovation to come from the Internet Age to have communities where I can get immediate contact with virtually any of my friends. It’s a positively addictive medium and is just as prominent in my daily routine as my music, if not more, and the ease in which I could check my Facebook on my iPhone made it all the more irresistible.
My iPhone, for that matter, is something of a ringleader to my media access. It has all of the obvious functions of modern cell phones, but also allows me to carry three days of music in my pocket. Every morning I use it to check the weather, and it’s a decidedly more convenient means of checking my e-mail than it is to tediously log on to MyTU so many times a day. And since Facebook sends e-mail notifications for every comment that someone leaves on your profile or on your photographs, then checking e-mail has a two-in-one effect. I simply cannot estimate the number of times a day that I’ve reached into my pocket and looked up anything I wanted to know while walking to my next class or eating a meal or retaliating against a moment’s boredom.
So the forms of media, then, that I use the most are such a common part of my day because of how explicitly easy it is for me to access them. So why, then, did I say that I managed the whole media-free day without explicit difficulty? Well, the most important reason for my successful abstention is that I was decidedly busy with two tests that I needed to study for by the end of the weekend. I had already printed off all the needed study materials from the internet the day before, and then I spent the latter half of the Thursday in question cramming as much information into my skull as I could manage, and the attention that I put into my studies served as a necessary distraction from my needs for media. The earlier part of my day was the part that had more noticeable challenges. That morning I couldn’t check the weather, so I had to go “feel” the air outside and estimate how much warmer it would or wouldn’t get that day, and then dress myself accordingly. My roommate was watching some Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the eighties on AMC, and having caught a glimpse of it I thought “Well is my experiment failed already?” but I diverted my attention and refused to let it count, but then on my way to class I could clearly hear “Still the One” by Orleans from a stereo I couldn’t locate. It’s everywhere, the media. But for as long as I’m not seeking it out for myself then my experiment continues.
After my first class I was done for the day since Mass Com and Society was canceled, and I go strait to lunch and eat with some friends, which is one of the innumerable scenarios in which I check my phone. It was obvious from the start that I could not afford to have my iPhone on my person for this experiment, even when turned off, and the whole day it felt weird not having it weigh down my right jeans pocket. After lunch I returned to my apartment, accompanied only by sounds of blowing winds and passers by’s dispersed chatter. The hard part was over, and I could now focus my attention on my pending exams, which took up most of the rest of my day.
The big idea that I had gotten from this experiment was better understanding the role that media played in my life and how replaceable, or irreplaceable it was. Media’s functional purpose to me was to inform me of things I needed to know and keep me in contact with people, and its entertainment purpose was to keep my mind occupied. I did so well making it through this experiment because my campus life fulfills these purposes already (albeit not to a complete extent.) The people I need to be in contact with are comprised largely of my campus friends, all off whom are within walking distance from where I am now, and I can already count on meeting them at predisposed times of the day, such as lunchtime at the cafeteria, so contacting them is of little issue. I’ve come to realize that as far as entertainment, I’ve needed the media merely as an idol distraction, and I get plenty of those in the company of my friends. Studying for my exams, however, was a much more comprehensive distraction, and although I could not check my Facebook intermittently (I’ve checked it an uncountable amount of times while I’ve been writing this essay,) I had plenty to focus on to keep me psychologically content. And from this I’ve learned that my mind is something that needs to be kept busy, whether from challenges or friends or consuming information, and the media fills in the spaces wherever I let it, and the more access I have to the media, the more I let the media play a role in my life.
P.S.
I suppose another import thing to think about is that there isn’t necessarily a direct link between my need to consume media and the content of the media. It doesn’t matter if I’m consuming consequential information or entertaining information or true information. What matters is that I have something to consume, which furthers my point in that my mind is something that needs to be kept busy; it won’t reject sub-standard information, it’ll just process whatever media I subject it to.
And harder still was abstaining from Facebook. It was such an innovation to come from the Internet Age to have communities where I can get immediate contact with virtually any of my friends. It’s a positively addictive medium and is just as prominent in my daily routine as my music, if not more, and the ease in which I could check my Facebook on my iPhone made it all the more irresistible.
My iPhone, for that matter, is something of a ringleader to my media access. It has all of the obvious functions of modern cell phones, but also allows me to carry three days of music in my pocket. Every morning I use it to check the weather, and it’s a decidedly more convenient means of checking my e-mail than it is to tediously log on to MyTU so many times a day. And since Facebook sends e-mail notifications for every comment that someone leaves on your profile or on your photographs, then checking e-mail has a two-in-one effect. I simply cannot estimate the number of times a day that I’ve reached into my pocket and looked up anything I wanted to know while walking to my next class or eating a meal or retaliating against a moment’s boredom.
So the forms of media, then, that I use the most are such a common part of my day because of how explicitly easy it is for me to access them. So why, then, did I say that I managed the whole media-free day without explicit difficulty? Well, the most important reason for my successful abstention is that I was decidedly busy with two tests that I needed to study for by the end of the weekend. I had already printed off all the needed study materials from the internet the day before, and then I spent the latter half of the Thursday in question cramming as much information into my skull as I could manage, and the attention that I put into my studies served as a necessary distraction from my needs for media. The earlier part of my day was the part that had more noticeable challenges. That morning I couldn’t check the weather, so I had to go “feel” the air outside and estimate how much warmer it would or wouldn’t get that day, and then dress myself accordingly. My roommate was watching some Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the eighties on AMC, and having caught a glimpse of it I thought “Well is my experiment failed already?” but I diverted my attention and refused to let it count, but then on my way to class I could clearly hear “Still the One” by Orleans from a stereo I couldn’t locate. It’s everywhere, the media. But for as long as I’m not seeking it out for myself then my experiment continues.
After my first class I was done for the day since Mass Com and Society was canceled, and I go strait to lunch and eat with some friends, which is one of the innumerable scenarios in which I check my phone. It was obvious from the start that I could not afford to have my iPhone on my person for this experiment, even when turned off, and the whole day it felt weird not having it weigh down my right jeans pocket. After lunch I returned to my apartment, accompanied only by sounds of blowing winds and passers by’s dispersed chatter. The hard part was over, and I could now focus my attention on my pending exams, which took up most of the rest of my day.
The big idea that I had gotten from this experiment was better understanding the role that media played in my life and how replaceable, or irreplaceable it was. Media’s functional purpose to me was to inform me of things I needed to know and keep me in contact with people, and its entertainment purpose was to keep my mind occupied. I did so well making it through this experiment because my campus life fulfills these purposes already (albeit not to a complete extent.) The people I need to be in contact with are comprised largely of my campus friends, all off whom are within walking distance from where I am now, and I can already count on meeting them at predisposed times of the day, such as lunchtime at the cafeteria, so contacting them is of little issue. I’ve come to realize that as far as entertainment, I’ve needed the media merely as an idol distraction, and I get plenty of those in the company of my friends. Studying for my exams, however, was a much more comprehensive distraction, and although I could not check my Facebook intermittently (I’ve checked it an uncountable amount of times while I’ve been writing this essay,) I had plenty to focus on to keep me psychologically content. And from this I’ve learned that my mind is something that needs to be kept busy, whether from challenges or friends or consuming information, and the media fills in the spaces wherever I let it, and the more access I have to the media, the more I let the media play a role in my life.
P.S.
I suppose another import thing to think about is that there isn’t necessarily a direct link between my need to consume media and the content of the media. It doesn’t matter if I’m consuming consequential information or entertaining information or true information. What matters is that I have something to consume, which furthers my point in that my mind is something that needs to be kept busy; it won’t reject sub-standard information, it’ll just process whatever media I subject it to.
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