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.

Wherever the Winds May Take Us...

And now for a proper opening blog entry.

I'm creating this blog for my Digital Culture English class at Brigham Young University. I don't have any specific thesis for this particular blog, as of now, but I hope to arrive at one before the end of the semester. At the moment, THE PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG IS to explore all interesting subjects in Digital Culture that I feel so inclined to write about. And hopefully make these subjects somewhat interesting to my classmates and the occasional wandering reader. And my teacher.

Although many used to argue that the internet provided for a disconnected existence that kept you stuck in your individual isolated world full of discrete and isolated experiences, I argue differently. Although my thoughts are currently scattered and unorganized (like the old view of the internet) they will someday reach a connected stream of thought that will build into a sophisticated and sculpted theme of brilliance. Or at least that is the end goal that we hope for.

The internet is so interconnected, and millions of people (with millions of ideas, all tracked and documented on the vast expanses of the internet) are sitting here at my fingertips as I write this blog post. Even though it seems like it would be easy to get lost in these many ideas, images, websites, videos, and more, I argue that we can find something meaningful from the internet. We can find connection. We can find connection better than we ever have before. We can pull ideas together, we can pull people together and build something great. Or rather we can continue to build something great. We touched on this in class in the last few days. Anyway hopefully my ideas will also eventually reach a point of connection. I'm not saying that I will have millions of ideas posted on this blog, or that they will all connect so easily. I'm just saying that eventually I will reach a thesis. Sometime. And maybe I already have something with this idea of using the internet as a form of connection and creation, rather than a form of separation and destruction.

Anyway, I'm excited to start sharing my digital culture exploration with you--my audience...of ZERO. Soon to be larger, I'm sure. I'm also warning you that I'm excited to start sharing my ideas in half-concocted thoughts that are spelled out in my everyday Facebook and blogging voice. Enjoy.

The Googlization of Everything

I'm finally posting on this blog. After many hours of debating over what my first post would be about, I've now come to the point where I've run out of time and my first post will have to be my short book review on The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Be Worried) by Siva Vaidhyanathan. 

I can hardly say I have any experience with computers, except for understanding a few simple computer programs and the ability to work my way through various social media websites. For my job at the Museum of Art, I have even learned a little of wiki html, but I cannot even begin to suggest that I have even a small understanding of the vast workings behind all of the computer programming of internet websites.

In Vaidhyanathan's book he suggests that Google has provided a (currently positive and helpful) search engine for the internet community. Google's algorithms have pushed the internet into a searchable and useable network, that before was untouchable to most internet users. He warns that their monopolization and control over the public's searches could have negative effects in the future. I had hard time believing his claims, but I'm not sure I understand the politics behind computer and internet use. He points  out the large control that google has over our lives:

“Google puts previously unimaginable resoursces at our fingertips—huge libraries, archives, warehouses of government records, troves of goods, the coming and going of whole swaths of humanity….Googlization affects three large areas of human concern and conduct: “us” (through Google’s effects on our personal information, habits, opinions, and judgements); “the world” (through the globalization of a strange kind of surveillance and what I’ll call infrastructural imperialism); and “knowledge” (thorugh its effects on the use of the great bodies of knowledge accumulated in books, online databases, and the Web).” (2)

Google has formatted the ever-growing internet to help in its use. Vaidhyanathan suggests that although google has helped the growth and use of the internet, the once simple search engine has claimed too much power on the internet. If we do not keep a close watch on the company's influence on the internet, something negative could happen in the future. I agree that the Google should be closely watched, as any other business, but the search engine has had a very positive influence in our lives so far. As long as we use it for good, we can continue to use Google for good. 

He suggests that we also might miss out on some other opportunities if we only use google on the internet. Vaidhyanathan explains, “We are not Google’s customers: we are its product. We—our fancies, fetishes, predilictions, and preferences—are what Google sells to advertisers.” He worries that google takes advantage of this and directs our searches to things that will not always be in our best interest but in the interest of the businesses that support Google. This makes sense, but I think most people realize this when using Google. There are many other ways we now obtain information on the internet. Although Google largely influences what we come in contact with on the internet and tracks our personal information, I have a hard believing that this will harm our future internet use.

The internet's vast expanse is made useable by Google. There are hundreds of other search engines, email servers and social media sites that are available. I use many of them, along with Google. I don't mind that Google uses my information to make my internet use more tailored to my interests.