3Days Off

It was great having the college website shut down for two days. And I slept all Friday afternoon. So, basically, I haven't worked for three days except for grading my TR Small group midterms. Tomorrow I'll write the midterm for the love class.

Love Sometimes Stinks

This ain't about love. It's about my Philosophy of Love and Sex class. This week they proved to me that most of them are not reading the assigned material. Sigh.

I could give them a pop quiz every Wednesday night. But what would be the point? This is class they don't have to take. I don't want to turn them off the material by making them actually read it, for goodness sake. Now, I wasn't all that surprised when I found out that only seven out of 43 admitted that they'd read the online chapters of La Vita Nuova by Dante. But when most of them had not read On Love by Andreas Capellanus (selections of which are in our textbook, The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love) well, that made me kinda sad. I want them to be interested so don't want to punish them. Nevertheless, it's hard to talk about the material or play with it if they haven't read it.

Last week we had a terrific time comparing sections of the New Testament, especially Mark 10 and Matthew 19, about Jesus' comments on divorce. We also looked at a few different translations of 1 Corinthians 7, from the King James to The Message. In that class we also looked at love and gameplaying, checking out bits of Ovid's Art of Love. I also read about Roman Empire marriage customs from Diane Ackerman's book, A Natural History of Love.

Well, next week is the midterm. Gotta write that today.

Failure with Resolve

Well, I thought I'd make it through January at least with my resolution to blog daily. Nope. Not only did I skip the MLK weekend while I was traveling, I also skipped all last week and weekend. This is kinda the story of my writing "career." I have very little personal discipline and if I can't see a clear reward at the end of a project (I mean something besides the very amorphous concept of "self expression") then I don't do the work. And it is work. And I'm not a graphomaniac.

I suppose I could say a few words about how Socrates thought writing problematic (see Plato's Phaedrus). Or show my self awareness by noting that almost no one (Hi, Stacey!) reads my rambling. But the truth is, to paraphrase Henry Clay, "I'd rather be president than write."

Posting for a Class in CMC

I'm taking an online course at Chemeketa C.C. called Computer Mediated Communication. Here's my "reflection" for this week. It will just need to do double duty. The teacher asks us to write privately on certain topics.


"How has technology affected your life and improved or detracted from your life? Are you a technophile or a technophobe? What are the benefits and liabilities of using technology in your life? List four or five benefits, i.e., connecting with family and friends and four or five liabilities, i.e., spending too much time on the computer, etc."

The spork is both a spoon and a fork. As a technological innovation it is both a stroke of genius and a joke. It does the work of two utensils but does that work inadequately. In my experience, all technology has some sporkiness about it.

Because this is a class focused on technologies of communication, I won't talk about my love/hate relationship with cars. Well, come to think of it, the automobile did have a huge impact on communication by giving people a private protected area outside the home in which to share intimacies. Cars also made it possible to spend time with distant (i.e., over 10 miles away) family and friends. So the car actually IS a communication technology. But not of the sort we're talking about in this class. The car is not "intended" as a channel of communication but as a mode of travel.

Technologies can often have unexpected consequences. The usage of technology can also have unexpected effects on the further development of same. Technology and society impact each other in complex ways, as our author notes when he quotes Rob Kling on "social realism" (p. 43) Social realism views the "relationship between technology, culture, and social interaction as more of a two-way street."

The same is true of my personal experience with technology. I act on it as it acts on me. I can use technology for unintended purposes (I can hang a spoon from my nose or use an old laptop as a target). Technologies encourage me to use them.

I am a bit of a social constructivist in that I tend to believe more that our social systems and groups impact how we manage technology. But I'm not strict about that.

There are many technologies that I love and value. I love email. It's a quick way of keeping a paper trail at work while communicating basic information or just socializing. If I relied on only oral communication I'd also have to keep a journal or notes so that I'd have a record of agreements. I love writing on a computer. That's the thing I love most: word processing programs. When I first started keyboarding, it was on manual typewriters. I remember in high school turning in papers that one teacher called "topographical" because they were covered with so much liquid paper.

I love researching in databases or on the web. And, wow, Boolean searching is the bomb. It is SOOO much simpler than card catalogs or going through indexes.

And my life has been made immeasurably richer by first microfilm and now digital copying of old newspapers. The New York Times is completely available! I did a radio show on our local low power fm station that was focused on the music and news of the WWII era: "Swingtime With Sylvia." It wouldn't have been possible without technological access to old recordings and the New York Times. The coolest CDs I have were a huge collection of music copies from "V-Discs," Victory Discs, records (wax singles) that were sent to military bases for free. I have these amazing recordings of Fats Waller, Woody Herman, Glen Miller, Artie Shaw...etc. All this amazing history, complete with comments to our boys oversees, made possible by both old and contemporary technology.

I also love being able to watch my niece push towards success as a model as she posts dozens of startlingly glamorous photographs.

Now for the downside. I am addicted to visual narratives. I watch way too much television, especially crime dramas and police procedurals. I assume that if I weren't watching I'd be reading, becoming more educated, being more creative, etc etc. I occasionally go on media "fasts" to try and cure this addiction but it always comes back. I also communicate too often with email when I could just walk down the hall and talk to someone. I sit too much. My body protests. I also don't read as much fiction as I used to and can barely get through a novel. My attention span is the size of a gnat. Was it ever any larger? Do I remember?

And there are times when I feel utterly overwhelmed by the amount of information trying to push its way into my brain. When I was young, I prided myself on being able to talk about the news. Now, even though I listen to NPR ever day, I really hate a lot of what I hear. I find that too much news makes me depressed. I feel like the fat kid in the Gary Larson cartoon: "May I be excused? My brain is full." http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci102/images/extbrainfull.htm

Also, I'm not a big fan of the death of privacy, but since it's a relatively recent invention, I'm trying not to sweat the loss too much.

Social Comparison

One of the ways that we create our self concept is "social comparison:" we compare ourselves to others to figure out who we are.A student in my evening class asked, "Of course you know Jim Hawes? And I said yes, and this student commented that we have a similar style in the classroom -- chillaxed. Hmmmm. I'm still processing that comment.

Getting into Groups

This morning the MW Small Group Communication class found their team members. The start of the team project is always interesting to watch. I encouraged them strongly to be aware of team member behaviors and take notes after class.

Last quarter so many folks had trouble with the Final Analysis that I'm trying to encourage everyone as strongly as possible to keep track of the behaviors of their colleagues. I also created a set of rubrics for the written and oral reports.

My ego was stroked today when my colleague Kathy McCabe, an ex-police officer and head of our criminal justice program, told me that her daughter thinks I'm terrific. (Why? She only saw me once and in a state of moderate inebriation. Maybe it's the hair.)

Skipped a day

Friday sucked so bad that I skipped yesterday. But here I am, back on the horse of language saying that I will be so glad when I'm no longer an administrator.

I haven't been writing much media analysis lately but I do want to point out something I thought last year about the Visa Aquarium commercial . This is sooo intended for boomers who took psychoactive drugs when they were young and now have children to bring up. Look at the fire breathing sea horses, the kaleidoscope imagery, the sea rays arranging themselves into an M.C. Escher drawing. And, of course, there is the soundtrack by the Moody Blues. "Tuesday Afternoon," a song about an afternoon in a flowering field has spaced out lyrics which have nothing to do with an Aquarium though the analogy between fish and flowers seems apt. The commercial startled me when I first saw it because, as someone who lived in the sixties, its imagery and music was sooo similar to that in the hippie bookstores and head shops of my youth -- the high color visions of those who took 'shrooms and acid. And now those people are taking kids to the Aquarium on a workday. The message, "Yes, I used to be a stoner, but now I'm a responsible parent. But, you know, there was a magic to those old days and maybe I can recapture it through the mind of my child."

I remember my dad taking me to a movie in the middle of the day when I was eight years old. He was working night shift at the time and I was at home from school for some reason. Maybe we were both playing a kind of hooky. He took me over to San Jose (10 miles) to see "Sail a Crooked Ship." I loved watching a silly, grown-up movie with my dad. I've seen the movie since and it's really, really bad. All I remember is that it starred Ernie Kovacs and had an embarrassing moment when a woman's bra was used as a slingshot. Now I wonder if Dad was drunk at the time. It was such a strange thing for us to do.

So one wonders about the little girl in the ad and what she'll remember of the day out with Dad.