Brainstorming for Families

So our project for Digital Culture is coming right along, except we cannot figure out what will be the best way to compile and introduce our information yet. So I'm just making a quick post to comment on some of the things we talked about last Thursday.

We know that we still have a lot of research ahead of us. If we are going to compile the best information to help parents with internet use we will need to continue to do our research. We also need to define our area of research. It's still a little broad. We need to look into the different sources of information and projects that have already been based on the same ideas as our own.

We were going to use a blog to post all of this information. But none of us are actually planning on updating the blog after our class. The point of a blog is to continue posting and keeping the information updated. It's like a newspaper or a magazine that requires weekly/monthly/quarterly/annually published information that keeps its audience captivated by the new stories and information.

We were going to create a wiki with the information we have archived and collected, but then, since in the digital age everything changes so quickly, the information would become outdated too quickly.

We wanted to create an online brochure with available links to websites and information databases for parents to access. But without gaining a large audience, how will we even get people to look at the brochure in the first place?

Maybe we can just compile a list of tips and stories that have worked for other families? We can advertise our brochure (with links and blurbs that explain why these links are useful) on a YouTube channel? We can post funny videos, or fit funny videos into our own videos that we create. In our Youtube channel we can link to our brochure.

Needless to say, we still have a lot of brainstorming to work on. Any thoughts?

My Family and Digital Media

Brainstorm for different ways my family benefits and stays connected through digital media:

1. Cell phones
1. Constant contact
2. Texting
3. Calls
4. Picture messages of funny things we see, special photos and hilarious cartoons my brother draws
2. Skype
1. Siblings live all over—New York, Florida, Nevada, and Utah
2. I could skype my family while I was in London on a Study Abroad
3. Facebook
1. Pictures
2. Posts and Comments
3. Links to articles and websites we want to share with each other
4. Extended family groups
5. On-going message with my five girlfriends from high school. We've had to create new messages since we've emailed so much that we reached the limit on Facebook messaging. We're spread all over the world now, but we're still close. They are a bit like family to me. I've know some of them since 3rd grade. We are currently in Boise, Idaho; Logan, UT; Provo, UT; Honduras; France; and soon to be New Zealand. And now we have an awesome history online of our lives through college. Detailed and personal—stuff you would only tell your closest friends.
4. Email
1. Event planning—reunions, parties, trips
2. Family history tips and stories
3. My dad sends out actual stories he has collected, even typed, and I can save them in a file on my computer
4. We often start long hilarious conversations by replying to all in response to reunion and trip plans—they can get pretty crazy
5. Share pictures—from trips together, presents we want
6. Gift lists
7. Spiritual messages—sharing our testimonies, articles
5. YouTube:
1. Nephews share funny videos with my family—we can connect with them on a higher level than usual—these two are ten and twelve
2. Dance parties in the kitchen
6. Private Blog
1. Titled: Close to You—play on words from a family inside joke
2. Funny moments—my sisters' kids are hilarious
3. Pictures—trips, kids, ceramics, Florida, New York, funny cartoons, Lake Tahoe...etc.
4. Examples:

• Elly's post 

 Today's Becca Story:

Brian and I watched a scary movie in our room last night and so I wouldn't let Becca climb in our bed. She cried herself to sleep.

But the thing with Becca is, she has a long memory.

When I went to give her a hug this morning, she made a very sad face and said, "Mom, I had a bad feeling last night because of you..." And her little lip quivered.

Poor baby.

So I gathered her in my arms and we watched Little Einsteins together and she forgave me. 

• Tori's post:
 As if you all aren't tired of the Facebook plethora of first day of school pics, right? 

I guess you could say ours is a little different because well, let's just say there are cute shots of Owen and Miles and then there are, well, ones like this...

Anyway, those are just a few ways my family uses digital media to bring us together. 

Upwardly Evolving

And now I've joined up with a group studying the positive effects of the digital age on families. We're so excited to start researching about ways families can use the internet in a positive and useful way for family connectivity and growth within the family.

I keep meaning to post about another quote from my novel that I read for this class and I keep forgetting. Here is the blog entry about the first quote I shared. And this is another quote from the Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This is a hypothetical conversation between the two brothers. After the older brother has tucked his younger brother in bed, the younger brother goes off about how their lives are just a caricature of real life, just a skeleton of experience. How their current life still involves a lot of the same things as their old life, and 'The New Model' is just a cover. Maybe even a cover to help deal with the shock of their situation.  (They sometimes act out real family scenes, where the older brother takes on the angry Dad caricature who yells at the younger brother, the son caricature, to make life feel a little more real.) Anyway, the younger brother says:

Well, you think you're so open about stuff now, you believe that you and me are the New Model, that because of our circumstances, you can toss away all the old rules, can make it up as we go along. But at the same time, so far you've been very priggish and controlling, and for all your bluster you end up maintaining most of their customs, the rules imposed by our parents. Especially the secrecy. For instance, you hardly ever let my friends come over, because you don't want them to see how messy the house is, how we live.

They say they are the new model and try to not fit themselves into the old rules and habits of the old life. But they do it anyway. The older brother is frustrated that he cannot break out of the mold, the old model.
This might be a stretch in comparing it to the new digital age. But I think a lot of the time we get so excited about the new model of life, but somehow the old trash still gets brought up in an even faster pace in the new current model. Or maybe we try to apply old rules on the new model that don't exactly fit right and end up becoming a caricature of a system (almost laughable and unrealistic). Anyway, I think it is important to acknowledge that our lives in the digital age are very different from the past. But that some of the old rules and habits can still exist in this new life. That we have the digital tools at our fingertips to change our lives in a good way. We can't upset the whole system, but we can blend the old and the new to improve our lives. As David Eggers says (a few pages later), we

have an opportunity to do everything better —to carry on those traditions that made sense and to jettison those that didn't —which is something every parent has the chance to do, of course, to show up one's own parents, do everything better, to upwardly evolve from them...

So I'm excited to start working on this project. Through making a blog or a digital informative brochure we will be able to help parents blend the old and the new, and help them better understand the digital age. We will teach parents, so they can teach their children. We hope to help parents find the positive in the digital age.

Zucchini Bread and Media Fasts

I must be a slave to my machines...I never actually started my media fast. This last weekend, my digital culture class all decided to try a media fast for 24 hours. We were each supposed to set up the personal parameters of our media fast—like if we needed cell phones for getting touch with someone for church or school, or if we had to use a certain website for school —we could use those devices. Anyway, I kept putting off the media fast, because I wanted a clean break. I wanted to not touch anything to do with media for a full 24 hours. I realized this was insane, because multiple things kept coming up where I needed my cell phone. Or I needed the internet.

I went to dinner up at my parent's house, and needed to keep in touch by cell phone to make sure my boyfriend and I got up there in time for the meal. My boyfriend went out of town for a night and I needed to keep in touch with him over the phone. To know if he got to his destination safely and when he would be back. I needed a recipe for zucchini bread from the internet. I needed to read my books, or my reading for classes online. I had to text a few people to cancel a social event later in the day. I had to watch church on TV....the list goes on.

But I disagree with the idea that I am a slave to my machines.

Growing up we weren't aloud to watch TV in my home. TV was a waste of time, and we only watched movies on the weekend during leisure time. During that leisure time, we never watched more than one movie in a row. We didn't have video games either. And my brother who asked my dad for computer games that were not 'educational' received a math game for that particular Christmas.

I've never felt addicted to my machines. I use them simply to communicate and try to use them as efficiently as possible. I don't sit in front of the TV for hours; I don't spend hours on the internet browsing useless information. No offense to those who find enjoyment in browsing the internet or watching TV...I just don't enjoy sitting for that long. I can't sit in front of a screen for too long before I have to jump up and do something active. I only sit at the computer for long amounts of time for school and work—and those things make me spend way too much time at the computer. I often find myself pacing back and forth after forcing myself to sit at the computer for too long. So...my media fast was not very successful. I did try to keep my media use to a bare minimum, but I feel like I do that most days. I guess at one point in my life I didn't need my phone and internet for those things that I needed it for this weekend...but society has changed and now we use media a lot more than we used to. But I don't feel like a slave to my machines...

Why Do You Mommy Blog?

I think I have a complex with sending incomplete thoughts out into the blogosphere. I need to work on that. 

Meanwhile I'm trying to think of ways to hone in on a topic for my research this semester. I'm in the process of reading my novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and still have a few posts that I need to add later for that. But, while thinking of ways to further incorporate the ideas I already have flowing from that book, I realized I should look into ways the internet has affected families. 

How do families interact with the internet? How has the internet affected the family, our basic unit of society? Of course families regularly communicate through regular forms of social media and communication through Facebook, twitter, and email...etc. One well-known piece of family interaction with the internet is the classic Mommy blog. I'm sure mommy blogging happens outside of the LDS culture, but it's really popular for Mormons.

This blog entry Why I can’t stop reading Mormon housewife blogs addresses a few reasons as to why so many Mormon Moms blog and why people outside the culture are so obsessed with reading those blogs. I cannot say that I agree with everything she says, but one point she brings up a few interesting points. She wonders how mormon women can be so happy and why their blogs portray their lives as so perfect. She says: 

The bloggers I read may be as happy with their lot as they seem. Or not. While some Mormon women prosper under the cultural norms for wife- and mother-dom, others chafe. Utah is, after all, the state with the highest rate of prescription antidepressant use, a statistic the president of the Utah Psychiatric Association attributes to the pressure among Mormon women to be ideal wives and mothers. The creator of Seriously So Blessed, an anonymous Mormon woman, addresses this pressure in an online archive of Mormon women interviews called the Mormon Women Project: “In any highly homogeneous culture we all feel pressure to be and look and think and act a certain way,” she says. “You start to think you need to be absolutely perfect in every area.”

I agree there is a lot of pressure to be 'absolutely perfect' in the Mormon culture. I see it in the girls that  walk past every day. These girls are aiming to be perfect. They have perfect hair, makeup, clothes, bodies, grades, jobs, social lives, spiritual lives, church callings, service, friends, family...etc. When you don't match up to your perfect ideal it is very damaging.

I wonder if constant Mommy blogging has become another requirement for reaching that ideal of perfection.

Do you think there is a culture that has developed that requires young moms to keep a Mommy blog? Do they keep these blogs to keep in touch with their family? Do they keep these blogs to make money?


Why do we perpetuate these old rules and ideals of perfection in a new social arena?

I plan on doing a little more research and asking people in my social network why they blog about their families.

The New Model

Today, I thought I would share the first passage that I want to refer to in my research project. I’m not sure how this is all going to work out, but this is the first passage that mentions the ‘new model’ in the novel. I understand that it might be difficult to compare this, but I think the next couple of passages that I share will help shed some light on what I’m trying to show.

In Dave Eggers’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he shares how he deals with losing his mother and father to cancer. He is raising his younger brother without them. In this passage he is sitting with the other kid’s moms watching his younger brother playing baseball. He relates:

            I watch, and the mothers watch. I do not know how to interact with the mothers. Am I them? They occasionally try to include me in conversation, but it’s clear they don’t know what to make of me. I look over and smile when one of them makes a joke that is laughed at by all. They laugh, I chuckle—not too much, I don’t want to seem overeager, but enough to say “I hear you. I laugh with you. I share in the moment.” But when the chuckling is over I am still apart, something else, and no one is sure what I am. They don’t want o invest their time in the brother sent to pick up Toph [Christopher, his younger brother,] while his mother cooks dinner or is stuck at work or in traffic. To them I’m a temp. A cousin maybe. The young boyfriend of a divorcee? They don’t care.

            […]I don’t want to be friends with these women, anyway. Why would I care? I am not them. They are the old model and we are the new.

While it may seem weird to compare the loss of a mother and father to the growth of the new Internet, I hope I eventually accurately present what I’m thinking. Most importantly, we have to realize that these two large changes make those who are influenced by them change a lot of things. The old model of the family and the old model of life has to change. But at the same time, we cannot throw out all of the old rules (which I will talk more about in another post with another passage). We have to adapt rules to make them work. 

Heading into Uncharted Territory

In many of the discussions in class, on google+, and even in the ebook from the class before, we have brought up the fact that we are still learning how to handle all of the changes brought on by the 'new' digital age. And now that technology has made it so easy to change everything so quickly, maybe that continual state of adjustment won't go away. And we all know, that continually learning and being challenged...is never a bad thing. We like being pushed out of comfort zones because that equals progress, the American dream.

Like the ebook's discussion of "literacy being radically redefined" suggests, we are often uncomfortable (or rather in a more positive tone, we are unsure what to do) about how many parts of our lives are being redefined. As the internet changes the way we interact, it radically redefines every part of our lives, even creating a new culture. We are continually trying to figure out how we should react. We try to place old rules on the many new elements introduced by the internet. We often try to input our old social rules into the new system, because obviously we don't know how to handle all of this new uncharted territory.

In Dave Eggers memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a seemingly unrelated novel, I came across an interesting stream of thought that relates to placing old rules over a new system. I'm not sure where this will go as of now, since I'm only half way through the book. But I'm getting excited about the stream of thought that I am finding throughout the book, so far.

I'm reading this book for my creative nonfiction class, which makes the story even more shocking because it is true. At least most of it should be true. The story starts of with Eggers parents both dying within a few weeks of each other. His mother dies of stomach cancer, and while she is in the process of dying (the doctors have gone so far as to remove her stomach to get rid of the cancer, she lives each day in a lot of pain) his father dies of--I'm guessing--lung cancer. He then spends the rest of the novel (at least up to the point where I am), telling his story about raising his little brother, who was eight when his parents passed away.

Anyway, in this new system in which they are living, Eggers tries to reject the old mold claiming "we are the new model" by making his own rules. He constantly reads to his brother to make him smart. They never clean their house, it's filthy. He cooks dinner with his brother, because he feels he still needs to maintain a system. The food sounds disgusting and bland. He glares at the soccer moms and grumbles to himself about not caring because he is the "new model." But, his younger brother later observes that Eggers still holds onto many of the pieces of the structure of their old life. And they have to learn how to handle this new change, while still using parts of the old system. There is a lot of beautiful language, that I will share later, that shares these experiences better than I have just done. I'm excited to see where this thread of thought goes.