From elsewhere (Double X, Slate’s recently launched online women’s magazine) comes a provoking article on Pakistani women who come to the US to give birth, just so their child can obtain American citizenship.

Scientific Research into Humour. Somewhat related is this article, which considers the scientific nature of blushing.

Remember that ludicrous Facebook Quiz “Are you a potato?”? Seems like Proctor & Gamble should have taken that quiz: Pringles Are Potato Chips.

Not so light-hearted, on the other hand, this report on illegal abortions and their consequences: The Deathly Toll of Abortions

Yes, Looks Do Matter: A social-scientific take on Susan Boyle. (If you missed all the brouhaha about Susan Boyle, check out this video.)

Twilight: The Hidden Market

I have been sort of avoiding Twilight, but this article raised a number of questions that touched nerve. Now, first of all a disclaimer: I have not read any of the Twilight books, nor do I intend to. I’m sure they would be  ’entertaining’ (i.e. keep me reading from first page to last), but the plot summaries I have read seem just a little bit too ridiculous for me (if I’m offending anyone here, I apologise). I did see the film, which had some gaps in the plot (so I thought) and though it was cutesy-romantic, I was primarily left with the feeling of “what a creep”. (Watching someone sleep without their knowledge? That’s stalking… and glorified in this story, and hence disturbing to me.)
Now, why is this article interesting? This “hidden market” is taken in by a story that has a very traditional relationship at its core. Yes, it is ‘romantic’, but it undeniably reinforces the most archaic gender stereotypes that there are: male power and female dependence – to the point of “I can’t live without you”. What I am wondering is how is it that we have – literally – millions of people (women!) endorsing this in the age of post-feminism? Were the feminists ‘wrong’? Or why this backlash, which seems like a contradiction in many ways? I mean, we are constantly denouncing the oppression of women, e.g. by the Taliban, clamouring for their freedom and independence, but escape into a story like this, which has the same kind of power structure at its core that we have been trying to deconstruct. Of course, Bella isn’t being deprived of her rights in the same way as Afghan women are, but does anyone else find the shared male-female symbolism embedded in this human/vampire relationship unsettling?

The Baby-Shaking Application on the iPhone

Here is another controversial topic – and I have to say I’m undecided about it. On the one hand, this baby shaking app is utterly appalling (for your information: shaking a baby is an extremely dangerous, often lethal thing to do), but on the other hand the “freedom of choice” argument strikes a chord with me. I would never purchase (or download for free) an application of this sort, yet Apple’s removal of the game could be construed as a form of censorship. I suppose this is a question of “Where do we draw the line?” and my personal line is right in front of the game, but my public line is right behind the game….

Beauty Pageants and Gay Marriage: The Miss California Controversy

I’ll keep posting on gay marriage, although sometimes I feel like I’m doing this too much (knowing that I am in a conservative country). However, I am strongly convinced that this one of the defining issues of our time, and that we should therefore pay attention to and talk about it. The above article discusses (yet another) “Miss” controversy, in this case the response of one of the contestants for the Miss USA title to a question on whether she was in favour of gay marriage. Again, I’m torn here. I support freedom of speech (which Miss California is exercising here) and, on a certain level, can find her honesty laudable, but I also strongly disagree with her opinion. That is not yet particularly problematic as we can easily ‘agree to disagree’, but what really has me pondering is the following observation by one of the ‘debators’:

No contestant would stand on that stage and argue for a ban on interracial marriage or come to the defense of a country clubs that banned Jewish members or condemn single mothers. All those positions were once considered thoroughly respectable, and people could argue for them on TV — pundits, candidates, beauty pageant contestants — without fear or repercussion. Not true today. It’s not that there are racial thought police, or anti-Semitic thought police, or single-mom thought police. It’s just that times and attitudes change.

Indeed – saying “I believe that a marriage should be between a white man and a white woman only” (or, for illustration’s sake, we could take something even more antiquated such as “I believe adult men should be able to marry a woman of their choice of any age, including children and infants” – since this was once a normal, respectable view also in the West) would likely be public suicide. I don’t think we are quite at this point yet with gay marriage, though we are clearly moving into that direction (as this controversy has revealed). So the question that arises for me is the following: When and how does something go from “freedom of opinion” to “unspeakable taboo”, that is, the point that social norms no longer permit any “freedom of opinion”? I have honestly never contemplated this issue before, but I do think it is true. We do reach, as a society, particular ethical agreements that become essentially undebatable. I would argue that this is positive and beneficial – and thus right – on a practical level (since many of these ethical positions generally provide more civil and human rights to people) but on an intellectual level I find this more open to question. Again, this doubt relates to the issue of ‘censorship’ and ‘deprivation of freedom of thought’ and the crux is this: by providing more freedom on one level, we reduce freedom on another. How do we know which freedom is ‘more righteous’? The contradiction is inevitable and cannot be resolved, but it is worth pondering. Your thoughts?

Have the Eyes Had It?: How reliable are eye-witness reports?

Since we have been talking about belief and superstition in relation to the “Darwin’s God” article, this piece on Elf Detection 101 struck me as rather intriguing.

I also came across “Tag, You’re It“, which reminded me of the G-Block presentation on “The Human Circus”.

And finally, a piece that is not for the faint-hearted, dealing with “The Castration of Sex Offenders”, but that is worth a read for those of you who can stomach it, simply because the article points to one of those immensely complex issues that are part of our human reality but that we would rather not think about.

The Stem Cell War

There is also The IVF Battlefield.

Still involving children (though not in their embryonic form) and somewhat less controversial, there is also the heated discussion on whether forward phasing strollers might impede a child’s language learning. Yes, I know, that’s one issue you probably had never thought about before!

In a Helpless Baby, the Roots to our Social Glue: Here’s an article for those of you who take IB Anthropology.
Ethics Quandary at Harvard Medical School: Should universities receive funding from pharmaceutical companies?

Slate asks Who should pay for in vitro fertilization?, a question that has arisen as part of the recent octuplets controversy. Also related to some of the presentation topics (e.g. “Synthetic Biology”) we have seen in class is another Slate article, which considers the the bad uses of good technology.

I would also like to recommend a film. As you may or may not know, I rather adore movies, particularly non-mainstream ones. I have seen most of those independent features available at my local video store, but the store manager pointed out one I had missed: Så som i Himmelen (As It Is in Heaven), a Swedish film from 2004. Why it is of interest to us? Although the film deals with a variety of noteworthy and complex issues (human relationships, moral responsibility of the individual in a community that has a long-established and unwritten agreement of ’silence’ and ‘looking away’), central to it is the power of music. Some of the most pivotal scenes in Så som i Himmelen communicate their message through this different form of language. As I watched the film, I was moved by the power of this – of a song that contained words, but, sung in Swedish, being only partially comprehensible to me (“Gabriellas sång”) as well as (SPOILER ALERT!) of the wordless sounds of the final scene. Of course, both these clips will make much more sense to you if you watch all of Så som i Himmelen!

You have also tried your own hand at blogging, which is now an unmissable tool for the media and the public. Just about all newspapers now offer multiple blog commentaries, ranging from current news to specialised areas of interest. The New York Times, for examples, features approximately 60 blogs (!) on a diverse range of topics, most of which are updated several times a week and many almost daily. The newspaper also provides a link entitled Blogs 101, which has many interesting links, including one that “looks at the effect of the Internet and new technology on the media”. On this latter website you can find sections on the Future of Media and Citizen Media, among others.

Citizen Media carries a short article on the trend-changing event I mentioned in class – the tweeting of the Nov. 26, 2008 Mumbai attacks. If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, a micro-blogging network, you may check it out here. Yes, I know, it looks like you have hit a wall, but this is your starting point for setting up your own account and tweeting about whatever you choose. If you need a  more concrete example of how Twitter works, connect to Twitter’s search function and type in some topic of interest (e.g. current issues). A tweet with numerous followers is that of Obama, where, as I am typing, you can see information on the US president’s first foreign visit (to Canada). The page updates itself automatically, so just spend a minute or two there to see how this tool actually works.

Beyond Twitter, we also must not forget Flickr, probably one of the largest photosharing websites on the net.

Meanwhile, Podcasts, also termed DiY Radio, are changing the soundscape of the audio world. You have listened to some podcasts in ToK and English (Hindu Swastika; epistolary novel), although these were produced professionally.

Now, let us backtrack in time…. to July 7, 2005 – the London attacks. As you can read in this BBC article and well as this one, this event and the Dec 2004 tsunami in Asia significantly transformed the media.

If we go even further back, we end up in what now seems like media-stone age and encounter the phenomenon of 2003: embedded journalists. The BBC has plenty of articles discussing this innovation, debating the Pros and Cons of Embedding, the dangers involved as well as a report on how such broadcasting provided a sanitised picture of the war. (Please note that this report is BBC specific, but that other, including US, networks also employed embedded journalists. Whether the same conclusions can be drawn on a wider level I cannot say.)

This is of course only an overview of developments in the media in the past ten years, many of which are so recent that we still cannot judge their true impact. What else the (media) future holds, we have yet to see, but my prediction is that citizen media – in whatever form- will become more and more powerful. This, of course, provides us with a more ‘raw’ form of media (with particular filters removed), but also all kinds of raises ethical (and other) questions.

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Fallen Soldiers, Coming Home in Public:…From our discussion in F-period today, a real-life example of a current discussion on how certain images – or the lack thereof – in media outlets can shape our views.

Plastic Surgery Confidential

Textual Misconduct: What to do about teens and their dumb naked photos of themselves

From the New York Times Blog “Motherlode”:
Update on the Octuplets (Do peruse the readers’ comments.)
From CNN:
Eight Times the Ethical Questions
Risks of Multiple Births

Some of the questions raised in the articles:
- Is it ethical to transplant that many embryos? (In the US, there are no regulations about this, only ‘guidelines’ which suggest no more than 2-3 embryos be transferred to the womb.)
- Is it ethical to ‘reduce’/'abort’ any embryos if all of them take?
- To what degree should doctors and/or the state intervene with this kind of situation? What kind of regulations should be established or is this an entirely personal issue? (Some doctors state that it is only their job to educate their clients about the risks of multiple births, whereas others contend that this is a case of malpractice. The question of to what extent the US taxpayer will have to carry the burden of these octuplets has also been raised.)
- What and who is IVF for? Is it for people who have trouble conceiving even a single child? Is it to screen out genetic diseases in severely affected families? Or should it be for anyone who wants a child and has the money required for the procedure? (Some of the discussions focus on the fact that the “money buys anything” dictum does not apply for adoption and foster care, which involve extensive – also psychological – screening, whereas IVF is largely unregulated.)

Presently, many details about this particular case are still not known and a proper discussion can really only be had when they are available. Nonetheless, I thought I should alert you to this case so you can follow its developments.

As a final thought, we might also ask does this case of IVF-conceived children compare to that of couples who have large families naturally? Are the answers to the relevant questions above necessarily the same?

And while we are debating if its ethical to have such a large number of children, we might also consider if it is ethical to have only one child? (or none at all?)

Creature Comforts – Service Animals
Motherhood at 70
Leave this Child Behind: Sports, Segregation and Environmental Eugencis

And since you probably weren´t paying much attention to such issues in your pre-ToK time, here are some more articles:

• First Face Transplant Carried Out in France (November 2005) – also check the links to articles on the top right
• Facing Up to Face Transplants: Ethical Questions and Concerns. Again, check articles on the side.
• Face Transplant in China…with accompanying pictures (WARNING: Includes somewhat graphic images that you may find disturbing).

The question is “Is it a crime or just politics?”. Of course, the issue is more than just a matter of language (in fact, that might be the more indirect question here). The “Where is the line drawn” is a of course a perfectly ToKish concern…