Order out of randomness

A friend has recently been exploring spirituality as a way of making sense of the world. His main argument for his exploration is that the world is too ordered to be a happy accident.

My own preference is for the theories of emergence trickling out these days from biology and sociology, from people like Barabi and from Johnson.

Then through Arts & Letters Daily, I found this article that makes a very coherent statement for the idea of the randomness of order and the impacts of that on religiosity.

Hopefully he reads it so we can continue our intense and enjoyable exchange on this topic. If you want to join in through the comments below, please do!

Feminism, femininity and me

A few things from this week that have me pondering femininity, feminism and me.

The first has to do with sexuality. While sitting in an intro level life development psychology class the other day, the professor asked the students what age do girls get sexy and at what age are women no longer sexy. The class overwhelmingly decided that the age range for "sexiness" was 14 to 40.

40!

Based on that, then, I have only two years and a few months before I fall off the map of human sexuality.

Hmph.

Why is it that, despite the portrayals of sexier older women in movies and television, a large number of supposedly forward-thinking university students still cling to the outmoded idea that women lose their sexiness once they hit their prime years, whereas men only get sexier?

Then today, I was reading that part of the blame may lay in the failure of feminism to change people's private opinions on the 21st century female experience. The issue is apparently with women's choices, as this excellent Alternet article on Stay-at-home feminists discusses.

The issue, they say, is that much of feminism's attacks and efforts have gone into changing public policy and business practice. Little has been done, though, to change individual opinions and the individual female's idea of what it means to be a woman in this century. Hence the fact that many successful women still give up their careers to stay at home once they have children, and most men still see this choice as a given necessity.

I ponder this these days as I attempt to discover how deeply into exploring female voices I want to go in my own social research. Am I ready to adopt a feminist agenda, when for years I've scoffed at the idea and avoided the label as if it carried the plague?

My first tentative forays into the idea were done last week when I finished a paper that explored digital practice as a safe and empowering place for teenage girls, who are otherwise excluded from public physical space and protected (smothered?) by parents concerned for their bodily safety.

Now I'm contemplating doing a small-scale dual qual/quan research project that explores how national survey data from Canada, US and the UK marginalize and trivialize female digital practice by studying it and configuring it as use, rather than practice, regardless of the ages they study.

The idea would be to use feminist research methods which propose a holistic approach merging quantitative data analysis with qualitative exploration of female meaning through oral histories of a few women at various points in the life span of women. One teenager, one young adult, one career adult and one retiree.

Is this the beginning of a way to redress the wrongs pointed out in the Alternet article? Am I willing to start working on research that will immediately be labeled feminist? Am I prepared for the results, both in the research and in me?

Has feminism truly failed? Am I willing to do something to stop it?

Good questions. Don't know yet. But have to decide soon. My undergraduate studies are rapidly coming to an close, as this semester winds down and leaves me only one more to go. One more before I have to hit the ground running as an emerging scholar.

Am I willing to take this issue on and make it a big part of my future efforts? Am I willing to wear the feminist label and do what it takes to be sure the goals of feminism don't fail?

Stay tuned.

Geek gear

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Some snow on the ground, -8 degrees and the promotional emails advertising geek geer are coming into my Outlook all fast and furious.

Most make me yawn.. but this? Are you kidding? That is definitely geek gear. Exceedingly cool.

Homogenity of taste

20 years ago, had someone said to the Europeans that the American wine makers would threaten their business by changing the palates of the populace, the Euro vintners would have laughed at them.

Now, though, it seems like the US cultural juggernaut has managed just that. The sales of fruity, soft wines have gone up, prompting some European winemakers to start using US methods and apparently threatening ancient European traditions and techniques.

More proof of the globalizing homogeneity of taste?

Quiet calm of classic poems

With snow softly falling outside my window, muffling street sounds and blanketing the bare flowerbeds of my front yard, I find myself in a pensive and literary mindset.

On such days, I look to poetry to explain the thoughts and feelings drifting in and around me. So today, rather than pithy or deep thoughts of my own, I shall share a favourite poem.

Psalm of Life
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solenm main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait

Why some languages & not others

Found out about this book on why certain languages endured while others died out, despite the fact that both may have been used for trade.

An excellent review of it is available here.

Many of my friends and fellow scholars are interested in sociolinguistics, so I can see this book going under the tree for a few of them.

On my plate

I got asked today what I'm working on at the moment. Rather than repeating it to a few people, I thought I'd blog it.

My writing plate as of today:

• Paper - How digital fan fiction communities allow adolescent females to transcend the uncertainty and stigma of their changing female bodies while remaining firmly entrenched in their bedroom princessdoms. (For a Youth Culture course)
  
• Paper - How commodification of diamonds has led to the right hand diamond ring as part of a social system of identity presentation for successful, independent career women. (For a Material Culture course)
  
• Presentation - The social system of the right hand diamond ring. (For the material culture course)
  
• Paper - The acceleration of the use and destruction of time through the dominance of the mass culture system over high culture (For a Contemporary Social Theory course)
• 1 mid-term exam (Field Research) and two finals (Youth Culture; Womb to Tomb: Psychological Development through the Life Span)
• Five grad school applications, with their letters of intent or statements of purpose.
  
• Phase II of the GameCODE website.
  

I think I needed to see it presented this way, in a list. Now I can recognize that I have a lot to do in the next 30 days and perhaps I'll stop procrastinating?

yeah....right...sounds good though hmmm? Everyone needs goals!

A list of "isms"

Went looking in the Wikipedia for a definition of social determinism and then, in classic procrastination style, followed a sideways link to a master list of "isms" -- ideas, concepts or schools of thought that end in 'ism".

I knew there were quite a few, but had no idea of how many until I started scrolling that list.

Language evolution or devolution?

This book excerpt about the constant (insidious?) creeping of popular culture speak into the everyday vernacular was interesting, but more interesting perhaps is the comment one person makes about "hasn't it always been thus?"

Got me thinking. What words do I use from my own pop culture background that aren't so popular anymore?

"Whatever"

"Excellent"

"It's just a little thing"

"Talk to the hand".

Wow. More than I thought, and that was just based on a quick 30 second brainstorm.

Doe that make me more accessible or do I just sound dumb? Is this all a devolution of the English language or just another step forward in its constant mutation and evolution?

Digerati

While a bit trite in the way they have been labelled, many of the people on this list do fit my idea of who the digerati would be or are.

Scholar or Researcher?

As I work on my statements of intent for grad schools, I'm grappling with the idea of whether I want to be a scholar or a researcher. I was having trouble figuring out the finer distinction between the two when I got an email from the autoethnography mailing list that deals with exactly that.

Robert Scholes draws a distinction between research and scholarship. Research," he writes, "is progressive; it involves invention or discovery of something new. And it often leads to new techniques or products, for which it is highly rewarded. Scholarship, by contrast, is more about recovery than discovery. It is about understanding more clearly or more richly the meaning of texts or events from the past, including how we got to our present cultural situation. And this is true whether the past is ancient, as in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, or early modern, as in Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, or quite recent, as in Jane Gallop's Around 1981. The end product of this scholarship is not new commercial processes or products; it is a pedagogy enhanced by the best knowledge available. Scholarship is learning in the service of teaching.

I think this is a perfect synthesis of what I've been trying to express.

It also will give me a way to counter a professor I've been having a friendly argument with about the "proper" result of grad school and post-grad studies, because I now realize I was expressing a desire to be a researcher whereas he gets his satisfaction from being a scholar.

Avatars

Much of what is in this journal article about avatars in online space isn't surprising to me, but I'm pleased to see some truly scholarly research addressed to the concept outside of game studies.