Blog 10: The End of the Line

This class has taught me a lot of things. At the top of the list is cynicism. Starting at the very beginning with Culture Jam, I've read a lot of literature that tells me this world isn't always all it's cracked up to be. I've learned that we're on a slippery slope as a society, and a lot of things can go wrong if we're not careful. Exploitation, stupidity, addiction, dependency on technology, and censorship are all prevalent in the world today, and this class gave me a first-hand look at where we could end up if we let it get the best of us.

I found myself actually getting into books like Hunger Games, and responding with anger to books like Culture Jam. 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 made me think, and I learned a lot of things just because they were good for me. I was always sort of a realist, so I appreciate the fact that this class took what's wrong with society today and made me more aware of it. Literature doesn't always have to be "Once upon a time" and "happily ever after", because that's not always how life turns out.

Blog #9: Burn Before Reading

A world without books is a world without knowledge or creativity. It would be a world full of idiots who do whatever the person/thing in charge tell them to do (Feed, anyone?). It's as simple as that -- a world of gray, nothing vibrant or original, and when we lose our originality and uniqueness, we lose our freedom.

Would I miss books if they were suddenly made forbidden? Absolutely. Just because I do not read books often does not mean I would not miss them. I like to be creative, and if books were banned, the ability to share creative ideas with others would be very limited. We'd all have to rely on word of mouth for history, entertainment, and sometimes even help.

Every day we burn books in one way or another. The burning of books resembles the destruction of what makes us ourselves. It is a form of censorship, and we are constantly being censored or having information censored from us. We burn a book every time we blindly believe something. We burn a book whenever we pass on an opportunity to gain knowledge. Any time somebody tells us what to think, or how to act, or what to do, and we obey without asking ourselves why, we burn a book. These are books that we should be reading and writing, but without our individuality, they are instead thrown into the fire, and eventually we will run out of books.

Blog 8: It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses a Life

Hunger Games is one of those books that you're reading and thinking, "OK, we get it. Times are tough, dystopian literature, yada yada yada, in-depth description of everything, when is this gonna pick upHOLY CRAP INTENSE VIOLENCE AND GORE YESYESYES". I hated putting it down when I knew something good was about to happen. I expected a little bit more tiptoeing when it came to how children died, but much to my surprise, there was barely any censorship at all. I actually felt like it could have been real because there were no euphemisms or language that was clearly added to make the book more suitable for sensitive eyes. I really enjoyed this book and (time permitting) I'd like to read the other two. Not surprisingly, Katniss got most of my emotion and responses. I love a good underdog story, and that clearly played into this novel. The government-controlled living space is a pretty common theme in the material we've been reading, most notably 1984. The Lottery, though shorter, is not unlike Hunger Games in most of its themes (embrace of brutal tradition and awareness of senseless violence). Dystopian literature is the core of most of our reading material this semester, and Hunger Games is no different.

One of the core requirements of a Computer Science degree is making Tron references whenever applicable, so you can imagine my excitement in posting this:

Look familiar? Newbie underdog fights a stronger character to the death for apparently no reason, much to the amusement of a huge audience, all while the game maker watches. If Hunger Games had LightBikes and featured multiple versions of Jeff Bridges I wouldn't be able to tell the two apart. The dashing young blonde gentleman named Sam is Katniss, and Lizor is one of the many unfortunate teens who fell victim to the power of irony.

Blog #7: Keepin' It Real

For my reality TV viewing experience, I chose to offend my senses with Teen Mom 2. It's basically a show with four different girls, all of whom are teenagers with babies. These teenage mothers are filmed and exploited to show the struggles of having a kid and trying to live the life of a "normal" 18 year old.

In the episodes I watched, one of the girls (Chelsea) was fighting with their mother over the possibility of her babydaddy taking the baby and moving out of state. Another (Leah) was arguing with their fiance over marriage. The third girl (Jenelle) pretty much ran away from her family and took her mom's credit cards, who quickly canceled and left Jenelle with no money. Finally there's Kailyn, who is having trouble finalizing a custody agreement with her ex-boyfriend.

Here's Jenelle, the runaway mommy. Note how the cameras ran away with her.

Honestly, this show is pathetic. It does an awful job of showing the world the difficulties of teenage motherhood. I'm not sure how they made it through a season, considering nothing even really happened in the two episodes that I watched. Every episode is pretty much the same thing, with no major progression or advancements. All of the "action" seems forced, and even when Jenelle's mom is yelling at her, it seems like she's only doing it because it adds to the show's drama. There is very little reality in this boring and depressing show. Maybe I can't really relate because I've never been through this kind of struggle, or maybe it's a "girl thing", but there is honestly nothing exciting or watchable about it. I'm actually sort of mad that I watched it because that means their ratings just went up a little bit. The girls with the most explosive attitudes definitely get the most showtime. Melodramatic, bitchy nothing-fights are rewarded with more spotlight on the show, so naturally all of the girls are prone to getting involved in senseless arguments.

One interesting thing is that, for the most part, these girls aren't even that attractive like you'd expect TV stars to be! (I guess that makes it seem more real.) It's like they just found four girls who wanted some cash in exchange for the complete exploitation of their lives (and the babies' lives). I think I responded the most to Leah, because she actually seemed the most levelheaded. The other girls were redundant and uninteresting (though I guess being annoyed is a response).

The hardest part about this blog is trying to come up with reasons why people watch this garbage. Perhaps they want to feel better about their own miserable lives by saying, "Hey, at least I'm not an irresponsible young lonely mother without a job or money!", or maybe they feel bad for these young women, or maybe it's just what comes on after Jersey Shore and everybody forgot to turn the TV off before they fell asleep. It's a slow-moving show with very little going on, so I would have to think that many of the dedicated viewers have to be mothers themselves, or have daughters (thus leading to the realization that their innocent little princess might be out getting knocked up in the backseat of a 2005 Eclipse with a cheap spoiler and primer-colored paint job by her disrespectful jobless punk of a boyfriend at any given time). My role as a viewer is to feel bad for these girls and their current situation, and perhaps to pretend that these are just normal girls who could be living down the street from me. The only emotion I felt is depression of the fact that I can never get that hour of my life back.

Party Like It's 1984

Big Brother is certainly alive and kicking today, just not (yet) to the extent that Winston experiences it in the book. You're being filmed everywhere you go with the hopes of keeping society safe, but that is a scenario that could be misused very easily, should it fall into the wrong hands. Normally, nobody really cares about the video logs of the dumpster behind Sheetz, but I know I'd be a lot more paranoid just walking in the alley nearby if I knew there was a government official on the other side of that, watching my every move. It's not like I have anything I'd try to hide, but what if they think I do? I could end up in the basement of the Ministry of Love in no time at all!

Before I start to sound like I should be wearing a tin foil helmet, I want to stress the fact that I do believe privacy still exists, you just have to look for it or know where to go to get it. For instance, right now it's late at night and my roommates are all asleep. Their doors are closed and I have no clue what any of them are doing. They also have no idea what I'm up to. I could not be wearing pants right now and nobody would know the difference. Any place where I can go to and confidently say "I would feel comfortable pantsless right now" is a place that is private enough in my mind. But who's to say that I'm not being watched by some robotic fly camera or through some pinhole in the wall? Well, to an extent, I think privacy can exist largely in one's own mind. There are tangibles behind privacy, but it is also a feeling. If I feel safe and private, I'll be content.

It's hard to decide how much privacy I'm willing to sacrifice in order to feel safe. On one hand, it would be great if Big Brother was purely Mr. Nice Guy, and only looked after us because they want what's best for us. Unfortunately, in 1984 that's not the case. Big Brother wants what's best for Big Brother, and if you don't like it you can just shut the hell up. Their privacy is being invaded as opposed to being sacrificed for a greater personal good. I guess I wouldn't mind if telescreens were everywhere (except in my house), or if there was a Feed in my head, because that has potential to be epically cool. It just sucks that as soon as somebody gets a sweet idea like internet in your brain, jerks have to come and exploit it and ruin everyone's good time.

Blog #5, Choice 4: The Times, They Are A-Changin'

Waking Up in the Future
I awoke today in a very different world. It appears that I was transported into the future. I spent the first few hours gathering myself and walking around town. Everybody seems to have somewhere important to go, so I walked into a corner store that smelled of rich nuts and coffee and was loaded with people on fancy machines that looked like thin typewriters. All the customers' clothes were ripped or faded, as if they had just come from a fight. Nobody really wanted to talk, but I saw a calendar on the wall that read February 20, 2011. I have a lot to learn.

Life
All day, every day, everybody seems to be rushing around me. The life in the streets seems to be nothing more than a segue between buildings, where I'm still not really sure what people do all day, because all I see are large groups of people sitting at desks, looking at lighted screens attached to thin typewriters. Bright lights and loud noises consume every aspect of life, both outdoors and indoors, sometimes advertising products, and sometimes I have no idea why they are occurring. I need to get out of here. I have decided to go back to my cabin at Walden Pond, on my mentor's old property, where I should be able to clear my mind and gather myself before I return to life here in the city.

Unable to Leave
When I went to the location of Emerson's old cabin where I had stayed before, I was horrified to find that the pond was not where it should be, nor was the cabin, and nor were the trees! The land had been cleared and replaced with several large buildings, and large areas of land where many automobiles could park. I found that one building was a hotel where I could spend some time alone, though I had people playing loud music and causing lots of noise through all hours of the night. Unfortunately I only had enough money to stay for one night, so I wasn't able to get much thinking done.

Going Home
I need to go home. There is nothing appealing to me about this world; the people are unfriendly, the wilderness is gone, the air is dirty, and every one of my senses is offended with some form of advertisement or cheap gimmick. This future is bleak indeed for humankind. In terms of my own life, it really makes me appreciate our lifestyle of the past. I have nowhere to escape to without paying some ridiculous sum, and every opportunity is riddled with fools trying to make a few dollars off of me. Life has changed to such an extent that people are not even living anymore, but rather just doing whatever they can to collect more and more money. Somebody please send me back.

Blog #4: Whenever I write about living alone in the woods, I try to be as Thoreau as possible.

Emerson bothers me. In my humble opinion, his writings often jumped from deep, insightful advice to self-centered arrogance. I do agree that before anything else, you have to look after yourself, but Emerson takes it to an extreme. The whole reason we live in civilizations as a community is because we care about others; we enjoy hearing from other people and responding to what they have to say, whether it is with empathy, sympathy, or just a good laugh. I didn't agree with Emerson on several points, but I probably disagree with this one the most:

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it...

You can't argue that there is no universally acceptable measure of good and evil. Yes, there are gray areas in some cases, but a lot of times it is black and white. I wonder if Emerson would be okay with a psychopath coming into his home and burning all of his works in progress, because in the psychopath's head it was the right thing to do. I wouldn't want to live in a world where nobody shared a common set of beliefs when it came to what is right and what is wrong. I also probably wouldn't want to be friends with somebody who was happy but only concerned about their own perceived concept of good and evil. What good is it being happy if everybody else thinks you're an asshole?

Enough about Emerson. Let's move on to Henry David Thoreau, or as I like to call him, HDT. One day this guy thought it was a good idea to go out into the woods and live in a one-room cabin owned by Emerson. Apparently HDT was sick of all the distractions of modern living in the middle of the 19th century, and rightfully so...I mean, just take a look at some of the inventions that occurred in the 1840s: the steam hammer, the typewriter, the saxophone, and artificial fertilizers. These were the big things of that time. Clearly he was sick of everybody complaining about how "in my day, we had to write our thoughts down with a PEN", constantly honking on brass tubes and smelling like shit all the time.

 "Lisa, I swear to God if you don't stop playing, I'm running away for a year."

HDT's time spent out in the woods is nothing new to me, though. It's probably not new to any of us; if you've ever went for a run to clear your mind, or just escaped to be alone and think about stuff for a while, you got a taste of what Thoreau was aiming for. I love having time to myself, when I can just forget about life for a while. I've actually even thought about disappearing for a long time with nothing, in true Thoreau fashion, but right now as a soon-to-be-graduated college student, I have more than enough responsibility to keep me living within the limits of civilization.

I really appreciated Thoreau's writing. I remember reading most of it in high school because my Literature teacher recommended it to me after reading a paper I wrote about my life which included angst-y rants similar to Thoreau, so it wasn't too much of a surprise when I read it here. He's not afraid to leave everything behind to get a better grip on this extremely limited existence we call life, which is very admirable in my eyes. Sometimes I worry that I'm not really "living", that I'm just running through the motions and missing out on opportunities that I should be taking advantage of. I wonder if I really am driving life into a corner, or if I'm just swinging in the dark and one day I'll end up cornering myself.

Could I really just give everything up and live in solitude despite all the technology we have today? Probably. I've spent a considerable amount of my spare time hiking, camping, and exploring strange woods during college, almost all of the time doing so with nothing but my driver's license as a form of ID (mostly because I usually randomly swim during hikes). It's nice to be separated from everything for a little bit. Eventually though, I think if I was alone and with nothing, there would be something else to throw me into a routine and it would get old and dull. This makes me wonder, is it simply human nature to get so used to something that the attraction wears down and you want to move on to something else? Maybe that's why technology is so appealing...it changes just fast enough to keep our interest.