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.

So, peruse at your own leisure:
Mathematically Calculating Love: Yes, you have read correctly.
Gay Divorce Still Legal: Legal Messes….
Moving to Raze an Ancient City: Uighur Kashgar: I’m not sure what example there is in this – but it is an interesting, though saddening read. If nothing else, this article is to share with you some of our amazing human cultural heritage that, if you have the chance, you should go visit before it is destroyed.
Retouching Beauty: The Socio-cultural impact of photoshopping celebrities.
Human Language Gene Changes How Mice Squeak: Absolutely fascinating research into areas we know so little about…

More to come soon!
 

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?

(When did you first start using the net? Me: in 1998.)

And, going somewhat more into the future: Can Newspapers Survive?

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.

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

Over the past few days there was a rumour circulating on the web that the Republican Vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, apparently did not know that Africa was not a country. Today, The New York Times published an article entitled “A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence”, reminding us that we should always be putting on our thinking cap before trusting the media – or anyone. And yet, sometimes even huge corporations, such as MSNBC, The Los Angeles Times and The New Republic fail to do so…
Interestingly, a related hoax was played on the newspaper itself too, but uncovered pretty much immediately. The BBC has more details.

New York Times Spoof Edition (as posted at the BBC website)