Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs - Chapter 1

So I said I'd post once a week, but let's go with a maximum of one week between postings. I just got the book "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - A Low Culture Manifesto" by Chuck Klosterman, and after finishing the first chapter I needed to post somewhat of a response.

The first chapter, This is Emo, was a long, cynical rant with liberal swearing about how love can never work. At first I thought, man, this guy is way too negative. Now I think man, this guy has a point. People are always saying they're in love with celebrities. In love with people they've never met. Well, Klosterman is right in saying that what people really love is the characters played by a particular actor or actress. Personally, I love Patrick Dempsey. At least, that's what I used to say. Now I realize that other that the fact that Patrick Dempsey is hot, I said I love him because I see him as doctor Derrek Sheppard, a.k.a McDreamy of Grey's Anatomy fame. I have never met him, but I doubt he is as kind, sensitive, and sacrificing for love as his character is. He probably doesn't really have much to do with Ellen Pompeo, his onscreen love interest. Crushes on celebrities are a normal part of life, unquestioned, and natural. But really, how normal is it to fall in love with a representation of a person seen only on a screen?

Movies and television, according to Klosterman, don't only warp who we love. They also warp what we expect of love. Media love always works out so perfectly in the end. The chapter talks about "When Harry Met Sally" situations, where best friends discover they've loved each other all along and they all live happily ever after. I'm sure it works sometimes. Sort of. But real life is generally a little more complicated. One person is usually the only one of the two with any romantic feelings. The other person has kept it at friends so long for a reason. Or else that person has never even considered romance there because it isn't really there for them. A lot of the times, hoping for a "When Harry Met Sally" situation is just a whole lot of false hope.

I'd love a turbulent road ending in true love like Ross and Rachel. I'd love it that everything would almost inexplicably work out perfectly no matter what mistakes were made, like Bridget Jones. I'd love true love that can transcend everything like that shared by the characters in the musical Rent. That would be so great, that it took a book like this to remind me that none of those stories are real. They are fictional stories that never really happened. Yet people base their whole love lives on these fictional stories, suffering crushing disappointment when the real world doesn't match up. Sometimes there doesn't need to be life changing conversation every second. As Chuck Klosterman says, there's nothing wrong with silence because you don't have to always say something. Look for meaning in words, because silence usually doesn't really MEAN anything.

Now this chapter hasn't made me give up on love all together. It just made me realize that's it's silly to expect the kind of as seen on TV love that everyone thinks is the way things really are. If I were always to expect something Ross and Rachel - esque, I don't think I'd recognize something much more real and much more magical.

Mourning Dove

While I appeared to have abandonned this blog, I have just been doing other school things. Now that it's summer, and I have a simple job, I'm going to attempt to update this blog with things I'm thinking at least once a week.

So on Sunday I went to see the play Mourning Dove since I had free tickets. It is a play based on the Latimer case, in which a man killed his severly disabled daughter because he said he wanted to stop her suffering. Before I actually this play I felt that the man deserved to go to jail. A life is a life, and you should go to jail for taking one away.

This play changed my perspective completely, and I think that's a testament to the great acting. You could see that the mother and father loved the child very much. They did everything they could do to make her laugh and smile. Yet every day they had to endure her suffering with seizures, and constantly gasping for breath. There was nothing they could do. She was going to have more surgery to cut off her thigh bone. Even that wouldn't alleviate her pain. If I were in a state like that, I would prefer death, because that's no way to live.

So the father should have killed her right? It's not that simple. They had no way to KNOW what she wanted, since she couldn't speak. Who knows whether she wanted to live that way or not, she certainly couldn't have been given her consent. No one knows what it was like to be her, since she was never able to tell them. Yet the impulse when a child is so obviously in pain to have that child drift off peacefully into sleep and never wake up, yet never be in pain again is extremely understandable. When you see him in the play wishing to be able to fix his daughter's pain and knowing he can't, my heart broke for him, because he did what he thought was the only thing he can do.

The other character Keith (I believe that was his name) complicated the question a bit. Keith was a man with developmental disabilities that was a friend of the family though I couldn't quite understand his relation. Keith was a kind man who didn't quite understand what was going on all the time, but just wanted to make Tina (the girl killed by her father in the play) and the rest of the family happy. When Keith found out that Tina's father killed her, he couldn't understand when the father said it was to kill her. As he said, killing doesn't help, it hurts. He felt that the father, Doug, killed Tina because she was different and would never heal. He says that as he is also different, called a freak, and will never heal, Doug should kill him too and stop his pain.

While I do not believe this man killed his daughter because she was disabled, and only because he believed her to be in unbearable incurable pain, this raises a whole new set of issues. If euthanasia is legalized to allow killing in compassionate circumstances, who is to decide what is compassionate? Who is to decide what is severly disabled? Do we just kill people because we believe they would be better off dead? It leads to a slippery slope which leads to leniency in cases like this to be thoroughly questioned.

This play touched me greatly, and had more than a few of the audience in tears. The small intimate theater added to that effect. Last year in my Plays of the Modern Era class, we saw several plays at this theater, all of which were deep, profound, and entertaining. If anyone who happens to read this wants to see a good play, I recommend seeing any play that is shown at Tarragon Theater, you definately won't regret it.

Thus concludes my blog, anyone who's interested can attempt to find a copy of Mourning Dove, or listen to it (it was originally a radio play). It is my summer goal to blog once a week, but we'll see how it goes.

If you would like to read my poetry I intend to write every day, go to my other blog ideasinarhyme.blogspot.com

Toothpaste for dinner

I've been thinking a lot about the fact that most of what we learn about media, or anything at all, comes from the Media itself. In class yesterday we talked again about Rupert Murdoch and the vast amounts of media outlets that he owns. The question came up, why does one need to own exactly that much? The first thing I came up with was power and control. Rupert Murdoch can use what he controls to make people think what he wants them to think about whatever he wants, and that's both pretty cool and pretty scary. Real post on this muuuuuuuuuch later (who knew school work takes up so much time?), but for now, look at the above cartoon from the awsomely cool website toothpastefordinner.com that kind of sums up what I was thinking of, and hopefully gives you something to think about too. If you can't read what the newspaper says, it says "Mass Media not Harmful: 'Read more newspapers', scientists said Monday". Very interesting newspaper headline, I think.

Lawrence Lessig on The Colbert Report

Well, I actually thought I'd never update this blog again, but here I am with something to say. Not as academic or thought provoking as my other entires, since my brain isn't used to thinking like it used to after that long break.

So a few days ago, I was watching the Colbert Report like I do many mornings. And who should the guest be but that guy who wrote that book I had to read for class. You know the one, Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I paid a little more attention, because I actually wanted to know what he had to say.

He was talking about his new book, Remix, which has the same theme as most of his work, copyright laws, and how they're outdated. He told Stephan Colbert that his show was like taking other peoples' work, and remixing it to create his own. He also talked about how that's exactly what young people like to do , and he's right, I love doing that. As with how it usually works on the Colbert Report, Lawrence Lessig was interupted several times, but I believe he made his point pretty well.

One thing that stuck with me was how he said that copyright laws are making kids into criminals, and yet they still don't work. He talked about the war against illegal downloading that has been "fought" for such a long time, and yet everybody still does it. Of course, Stephan had to be his hillarious self and remark that Lessig was saying because of illegal downloading, 9/10 kids are now in jail.

Generally things like that leave the guests flabbergasted, but Lessig just remarked that it is a kind of a jail, because there are laws that trap them into not being able to be creative without breaking the law. Stephan Colbert then got into the topic of remixing (taking someone else's work and using parts of it to make your own). Stephan Colbert took Lessig's book and said that if he were to write his own name on the book and add some Mickey Mouse ears, it would now be his own work, and Lessig should let him do it. Of course Lessig said that was great, since that is after all the whole point of his book.

Stephan Colbert continued to see that he is not like Lawrence Lessig, and no one can ever ever remix anything of his. While this was an extremely funny segment, it couldn't have been done in a more appropriate venue. So why this long recap? Well, if I didn't just spend way too much money on tuition and school books, I'd want to buy Remix, and see what else Lawrence Lessig had to say. And if anyone who happens to read this isn't as monetarily challenged as I am right now, they should look into reading it.

P.S. If anyone wanted to remix anything in this blog, go for it. I like what I write to be enjoyed and possibly inspire other creativity.

Your mind, your choice - Book Banning Activist Project

If you want to read a book, you can just go to a local library and get it, right? Well sadly in some cases the answer to this is no, you can’t. For decades people have petitioned to get books removed from library shelves, and even bookstores. They say these books are too violent, to sexual, or contain satanic references. Many of the books most frequently banned in the late 20th and early 21st century are among such popular works of literature as the Catcher in the Rye, The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn and the Harry Potter Series. All over the country, and in fact all over the world, many people, often concerned parents, try to limit everyone’s access to certain information. This includes whoever may be reading this blog.

This has become so prevalent that the last week of September is now Banned Books Week. The dates for this week in 2009 are September 26 to October 3, and the purpose of this week is to celebrate the freedom everyone has to not only have their own ideas, no matter how crazy, but also to have access to a wide variety of ideas, even those contradictory to their own. “One of the most cherished freedoms in a democracy is the right to freely participate in the “marketplace of ideas.” (Stauber and Rampton). This marketplace of ideas is not possible if people keep taking books off the shelves, denying people access to great works of literature simply because they deem them to be inappropriate. In many cases these challenged books are not banned because officials in charge of such decisions realize that we have the right to information. Many books, however, are banned, and some people have that right taken away from them.

Banned book week started in the states 27 years ago to remind Americans not to take for granted the fact that they have the freedoms to read whatever they want. It has spread into other democratic countries because they all take for granted how unique the enormous access to information they have actually is. There are very few places in the world where you can read books presenting such a variety of viewpoints. Yet in North America especially, we take that freedom for granted until someone tries to take it away in the form of book banning. “Granting archives and libraries a broad freedom to collect, claims of property notwithstanding, is a crucial part of guaranteeing the soul of a culture.” (Lessig, 185). One of the wonderful things about our culture is the large collection of information we have, and the fact that everyone can access it. When book banning starts to happen, that is no longer true.

So the important question is, how can we help? What can we do to stop book banning from happening? One good thing to do is to read frequently banned books yourself, or recommend them to your friends. The list of 100 most banned books of the 1990s is a good resource for this. Stay informed; make sure you know if a piece of literature is being challenged at your local library “The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom estimates they learn of only 20 to 25 percent of book challenges. Let us know if there is a challenge in your community. Find out what the policy is for reviewing challenged materials at your school or public library.”(American Library Association) There is also the Intellectual Freedom Action News (IFACTION) e-list, which is good to join if you want to show your support. The most important thing is to get the word out. Tell everyone you know how important the freedom to read what you’d like is. Write letters to the mayor or your MPP or MP telling them how important the freedom to read and asking them to proclaim “Banned Books Week – Celebrating the Freedom to Read.” This blog for me was the first step in doing my part; anyone who reads this blog will have gotten the message, and will hopefully pass it on.

"All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship."--George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession

Works Cited

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture. New York, USA: The Penguin Press, 2004.

Stauber, John, and Rampton, Sheldon. Toxic Sludge Is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lie and the Public Relations Industry. 1st ed. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995.

"Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read." ALA - American Library Association. 2008. American Library Association. 22 Nov 2008 .

Prank? Advertisment? - Culture Jamming

Where do we find advertisements? Do we find them on TV, billboards, in magazines? The true answer is they’re everywhere. Every step you take when walking outside is a step bombarded with images telling you to buy something. It seems like every message we get is concerned with what product we have to get next. It seems issues that really cause suffering, such as homelessness, poverty, and human rights violations are pushed away by this rush to consume. “Many public issues and social voices are pushed to the margins of society by market values and commercial communication, making it difficult to get the attention of those living in the "walled gardens" of consumerism.” (CCCE, 1). Culture jamming was created as a kind of a way to remedy this problem. Those who participate in culture jamming say that since society is saturated with branded images or icons, they will use these same branded images as vehicles for their social messages.

Take the image above right for example.



Everyone is familiar with the logo for FedEx. It symbolizes a way to get packages quickly from one place to another. Anyone who sees this logo will automatically make this identification. One could argue that this logo constitutes a symbol which “are the images we use to represent concepts, ideas and philosophies.” (McCloud, 27) If that is the case, then what is the original FedEx logo really trying to represent? FedEx reinforces the consumer culture that culture jamming is trying to represent; it implies that what we need is lots and lots of stuff, and we need to get it fast. Culture jamming attempts to make this true ideology so transparent that someone viewing this image would question what FedEx is really about.

FedUp – With excess: a simple statement but it has much greater implications. Firstly it makes clear that FedEx is contributing to our culture of excess. No longer does great distance from the products we want to buy prevent us from buying them. FedEx allows us to buy anything from anywhere in the world, and get it quickly. “Many culture Jams are simply aimed at exposing questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture so that people can momentarily consider the branded environment in which they live. (CCCE, 1).” This is exactly what this culture jam will do. People who see it almost have no choice but to stop and think. They will ask themselves, what does this mean? Why is it written? Culture jamming requires people to actually think, and come to the realization that we live with excess everyday, and FedEx and other companies will contribute to its continuation unless we let it be known that we are fed up.

Culture jamming is one of the most effective ways to get the message out there on social issues. Sure, whoever is responsible for this culture jam could have written a page about how FedEx contributes to over consumption and how that is so. The problem with doing things in writing is that it doesn’t catch peoples’ attentions. People are more likely to pay attention and be affected by things that are visual, as opposed to written. “Pictures, to be sure, are more imperative than writing; they impose meaning at one stroke, without analyzing or diluting it.” (Barthes, 110) In using this familiar logo to get the message across it is even more effective. People already have context when it comes to the FedEx logo. There are already particular associations produced so that one viewing this message in the form of a culture jam would be more likely to understand it.

I leave you with this comic about culture jamming, which will hopefully remind you that viewing culture jams is only the first step. The next step must be doing something, even something small, to spread awareness about social issues. It is also important to remember that culture jamming isn’t about going against corporations, but about bringing to light their issues.

















Works Cited


McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. 1st. New York, USA: HarperPerennial, 1994


Barthes, Roland. Mythologies . 1. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.


"Culture Jamming and Meme Based Communication." Culture Jamming. Centre for Communication and Civic Engagement. 22 Nov 2008 http://depts.washington.edu/ccce/polcommcampaigns/CultureJamming.htm.

Images:

http://www.woostercollective.com/2007/06/07/fedupwith.jpg


http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/022407/culture-jamming.gif

Your Internet? No, it's MY Internet! No there's net neutrality!

Nobody really owns the Internet, right? I mean, how is it possible to own something so vast that contains such a large quantity of information?

Well the answer, for now, is that nobody owns the Internet. Anyone can put anything they want (and I do mean ANYTHING) online for little or no cost. There is a free flow of information, with the people producing the content no different than the people consuming it. If you wanted to video tape yourself talking about issues your passionate about while playing Sum 41 (totally random example), then put it on YouTube for millions of people to possibly see, then more power to you.

Such a thing would be impossible in the "traditional" media of television or newspaper. If you wanted to start a TV station, you'd need billions of dollars and a lot of help. All you need to post whatever you want on the Internet is a computer and an Internet connection. Big companies that used to be in charge of what media texts you consume, such as cable companies, saw that the Internet could give you for free much more than they could, and it scared the hell out of them. They saw that they were losing their control over the media, and they saw the Internet as an opportunity to regain that.

In essence, that is what net neutrality is. It makes you and me equals in terms of what we can access on the Internet, and what we can contribute. http://www.savetheinternet.com/ supplies a very practical definition. "Net Neutrality prevents Internet providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination." Basically it's the principle that allows everyone equal access to the Internet.

After reading all this you might be thinking, as Ian Reilly often puts it:

WTF?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Well don't worry, hopefully after my blog post, everything will be clear. Firstly, the Internet has tremendous possibilities to aid in democratic processes. In a democracy, anyone is allowed to think anything. With the Internet, these thoughts can be heard by the masses. The Internet makes it easier to get your message out there, but it also does something more. The Internet creates a participatory culture, a two way culture where the consumer, after consuming content, goes on to contribute. "the technologies of communication will serve to enlarge human freedom everywhere, to create inevitably a counsel of the people." (Stauber and Rampton, 195) With the technology available to us the common phrase 'by the people, for the people' takes on a whole new meaning. When there is net neutrality, the Internet becomes a platform for ideas in which truly anyone can participate.

There is, however, a darker side to this new realm of possibility. Corporations who fear losing their control over what kinds of content you see in the media are thinking of charging to post certain things online, or accessing certain websites. They want the Internet to function more like television in that what you get is very controlled and costs you money, and only a very elite group can have their voices heard. People who use the material that others have the copyright too are already being called "pirates" and "thieves". "My fear is that unless we come to see
this change, the war to rid the world of Internet “pirates” will also rid our culture of values that have been integral to our tradition from the start." (Lessig, 26) Here Lessig is referring to the right to free speech, and the fact that the government can't sensor any speech. He is, of course, against people blatantly using the copyrighted work of others. His fear, however, is the collapse of net neutrality. If you put restrictions on what one can or cannot do online, eventually no one will be able to do anything.

The biggest problem with the fact that net neutrality is threatened is that nobody knows about it. The fact that I'm posting this online, right now, for free, wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for net neutrality. Hopefully this blog entry at least gets the word out. Although I wouldn't say I'm IN love with the Internet, I do love it. I love it just the way it is, and I don't want it to change. If this keeps being an invisible issue the floodgates of information opened by the Internet will be closed forever.

Works Cited

"Frequently Asked Questions." Save the Internet: Fighting for Internet Freedom. Free Press Action Fund. 12 Nov 2008 http://www.savetheinternet.com/.

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture. New York, USA: The Penguin Press, 2004.

Stauber, John, and Rampton, Sheldon. Toxic Sludge Is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lie and the Public Relations Industry. 1st ed. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995.