Plagiarism and honesty

Being in academia, I am constantly exposed to the messages from faculty and the 'deme as to what would happen if I were to cheat or plagiarize. I don't know if I'd ever understood just how serious a problem it was, probably because in a rather odd but typical way, I assumed that since it has never entered my head to do so, it is over-reported as a phenomenon.

But according to various experts, including Susan J. Douglas, a feminist academic that I respect and whose work I've used, as high as 70% of undergraduates have cheated or plagiarized. That number is astonishing!

Douglas' most recent column in one of my favourite alternate current affairs magazine, In These Times, brings to light another form of plagiarism that is apparently just as practiced but is also made acceptable by corporate greed and message spin. It is done under the guise of journalism, reporting, news and platform promotion. The strident anti-Democrat and anti-progressive words of Ann Coulter are just one more example, Douglas says. Unlike for undergrads and others, it is acceptable for Coulter to directly plagiarize because she's big business for her publisher.

I was taught early that, while researching and writing, "when in doubt, cite". It is a rule I live by. I'd rather litter my work with references to their idea seeds from others than be a thief, liar and poseur. Sadly, too few others apparently share this belief and motivation, and corporate power is making acceptable to ignore it altogether, if it brings in money and fame.

My point here isn't to glorify or vilify plagiarism per se, but rather to show the double standard yet again at work in North America. And to point at another potential cause and effect relationship that is partly responsible for the continued disenfranchisement of youth and degradation of moral character in society in general.

Stuttering starts

As I was hefting 20 lb free weights at my new-to-me gym today, and having trouble with it, given the 2+ months hiatus I've had from regular workouts, it occurred to me that my life these days seems to be a series of stuttering starts. I was gung-ho to get into the gym this morning, having noticed that my "fat jeans" were starting to fit me snugly and my face was starting to pack on the baby fat. But once there, I was frustrated by my inability to find some of the things I needed and by the snickering chauvinism of some of the other male members at my desire to do decently weighted shoulder squats using a long bar and 30 pound weight plates.

The same is true of my emerging graduate student life. I arrived in Toronto all geared up to plunge into school, only to find that I didn't know what courses I'd be allowed to take and even once I did, that most of my classes for this week are cancelled. It seems as if the faculty are mainly all overseas attending conferences. So I hit a brick wall and find myself here, in the middle of September, with entirely more time on my hands than I had expected. Since I haven't yet been assigned to an RAship, I don't even have that to fall back on.

What have I done? Well, of course I've read. For my Techno Politics course, I've read much of Heidegger's illumination on Nietzsche's "Will to Power as Art". I don't get what the ruminations on art have to do with techno politics, but I guess I'll find out in class next week. I'm also halfway through Habermas' "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" for my Public Space and Political Culture course. But I've also read a new Nora Roberts book about vampires and a newish somewhat unsatisfying book on consciousness, AI and the nature of consciousness from one of my fave sci-fi writers, Robert J. Sawyer. I've read magazines and newspapers, and a few cookbooks too.

I've drank a lot of coffee, hung out a lot in one of my local Starbucks (oh the luxury of now having four within a five minute drive!). I've unpacked, decorated, redecorated, repacked, stored, unstored, restored all kinds of stuff. I've sold stuff too, through Craigslist, my new fave community site for such activities. I've bonded with my new housemates and argued with my new landlord. And still I've got time.

I really do feel as if I'm stuttering along here, jerkily carving out this new graduate student life in this city that I adore. It isn't working out as I'd hoped/dreamed (e.g. my pro seminar has over 60 students in it! 60! where I expected to find maybe a dozen or so). But I'm trying to keep an open mind and an optimistic heart and I keep reminding myself that, at worst, this stage of my own becoming will last a scant two years. I hope.

Beginning a new beginning

I just got back from The World's Biggest Bookstore, where I picked up yet another weighty tome of social philosophy, namely Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This one is for my Public Space and Political Culture course in the sociology department at York. I've got to read both this and Nietzsche's Will to Power as Art via Heidegger in the next week.

This is just the beginning of what will be a definite brain pretzling semester. But much has happened to me lately. Some snippets? ok..here goes...

I've fallen in love with Craigslist. I'd tried it while in Montreal and never had much success with it. Well, considering the fantastic success I've had with it here in Toronto, I must conclude that the Montreal problem was either linguistic (despite my posting in both languages) or cultural in general. Since moving here, I've found a house and two roommates (each separately from one another), and I've sold a couch, a bed set, a dog kennel and a few sundry books and decorative items. It's putting money in my pocket and I've met some super nice people too. Very cool.

I've had less of a love affair with York University to date. I won't go into details, lest one of my professors stumbles on my piece of the I-Space here. I'll just say that they're disorganized, somewhat lax and rather perplexingly uncaring of the idea that some MA students not only might *want* to finish their Masters' degrees in two years, they are fully *capable* of doing so! This latter comment stems from the fact that I was completely unable to register in any core, foundation or required courses this semester because, as a first year entering student, I'm at the bottom of the barrel in terms of course selection priority. Somehow it seems just fine that I work on my thesis and do electives prior to getting the strong grounding in my new discipline area.

So academically, it has been less than stellar so far (don't even get me going on the topic of how impossible it is for me to get my books from the bookstore!). But on the upside, the campus is gorgeous! It is a true campus, full of buildings scattered about in a relatively natural green setting. Though it is waaaaay up northwest of the city, making it a bit weird to get to, the cohesion that campus feeling gives to the school experience is very welcome to me, after spending five years in a few large office towers plunked down in the heart of Montreal.

Cha cha cha changes!

Summer is fast slipping away, to be replaced by the more golden amber hues and soft breezes and cool nights of Autumn. I sit here, in my former reading room, surrounded by moving boxes full of my stuff. Books and crystal and coffee cups and computer paraphanelia and clothes...all nestled into cardboard, awaiting the burly guys who'll put it all in a semi-truck and move it 5 hours south-westward down the 401, to my new home in Toronto.

I'm going to York, to do my MA in Communications and Culture. So I've rented a house in my old stomping grounds off the Danforth and tomorrow I drive myself and my dog Sandy back there to start the whirlwind leading-up-to-the-first-day-of-school activities. Meetings with advisers, course selection (feels so late compared to when you do it in the undergraduate years!), finding an RAship, settling into the new house, creating a new routine, that of a graduate student.

I'm hoping to get some publishable work out of my coursework this fall. I did present at the ASA meeting this past weekend and was once again mistaken for faculty and once again shocked them when they found out that I'm just starting my graduate study. But I need to start working towards journal articles, book chapters, editing a book, that sort of thing.

I'm not sure what to expect though. I've already learned that I can't base it on the rythym and demands of Concordia because it isn't a sociology program at York. Looks like the reading requirements will be lighter, despite the bump up in status.

And of course I've got to find a thesis topic. I have a few that I'm toying with, but I want to see what sort of facilities and people are in the program before I narrow it down too hard.

Annihilation of "being" through reason

I'm getting deeper into my prepatory background reading on Theodor Adorno's body of thought. I just finished reading the first of five chapters in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the book he co-wrote with Max Horkheimer. I've filled a dozen index cards with quotes and notations and I'm puzzling over the contempt he seems to hold for Enlightenment thought and approach, considering his own marked snobbery in The Culture Industry.

The quantification of nature through science and its major handmaiden, mathematics, have led to a need for individuals to understand their selves in reasonable and quantifiable terms, they argue. Certainly I see this tendency openly in all kinds of sociological research. The self-conscious apologetic striving for sociology to become a "science" has led to the preference in the field for quantitative over qualitative research. Numbers are more important than stories. As A&H point out, stories make up myth and myth is suspect because it is seen as uncontainable, as something that transgresses boundaries and blurs categories.

But what really struck me today in my reading is the way in which he and Horkheimer clearly point out the role rationalism (as entrenched in positivist determination) has had on being. Here I see their clearly outlined argument for how positivism, mathematics and the death of myth have led to the commoditization of humans and their transformation from beings to things. This transformation has also contributed to individuals' increased feelings of powerlessness and inability to control self, in a rational way, as dictated by modern collectivities. Reason and action are put paramount in power, over feeling and even over thought, they argue.

As I worked to extend this train of thinking out to digital space, I started to see ways in which digital self-presentation is the ultimate extension of this rationalization of being. Online self-presentation is inherently and absolutely rationalized. It is a conscious choosing of ways to self- present, stripped of the possibly defining clues that Goffman speaks of as being ways we can inadvertently discredit ourselves. It is absolutely reasoned, yet more deliberately presented than in non-digital social space. The digital world is made of words. Even those areas where one can self-present using the physicality stand-ins of avatars is still rationalized and commoditized. And the opaqueness of the digital world, the way its inner workings and happenings are seen as inscrutably opaque to the average netizen, this leads to another paradox of feeling empowered while being disempowered. The empowerment feeling comes from the apparent ability to freely choose one's self-presentation. But at the same time, given how little control or understanding of the environment one has in digital space (more so even than in traditional non-digitized space, I'd argue). There is an increased sense of powerlessness and impotence.

I find much of A&H's argument compelling, gloomy that it is. When they say, "human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are powerless", it seems to express this paradox. It seems to express an idea of annihilation of the power to be through the pre-eminence of the need to reason.

I'm not sure where I should go with this initial train of thought, though, as it applies in digital space.

Emotions influence physicality

According to work done in the labs at Queens, our overall emotional and intellectual state influences the way we hold ourselves and the way we walk. Researchers at the Biomotion Lab there have taken this seeming truism to the next level, by mapping out the walking gait of various individuals in various internal states.

They provide many demonstrations of how their work in cognitive psychology and kinetics influences the physical stance and motion of individuals. One that I like: an online modeling program where you can manipulate and test for yourself what happens to a person's body language as they feel stressed or relaxed, happy or sad.

I am paying attention to this type of thing these days, as I attempt to figure out how to create a research method that would allow me to map people's digitized physical cues (e.g. emoticons, avatar expressions, etc. ) to their unwired corporeal expressivity, as shown in their body language. I'm hoping to present a paper on this at the upcoming Trials & Tribulations symposium of digital research methods, co-managed by Kelly.

Bachelor of Arts

I'm still in shock. I'm sitting here staring down at my piece of parchment paper declaring that I'm a graduate of Concordia University, Arts and Sciences, Major in Sociology. I graduated "With Great Distinction", which is the same as "Summa Cum Laude", or straight A average.

So many years of dreaming of this day, of wanting it, of working towards it, sacrificing social life, material needs, free time. So much reading and thinking, researching and writing.

... and now here it is. In my hands. The day. The paper. The achievement.

Wow.

Cities' loss

The world lost a great lady yesterday. Urban theorist Jane Jacobs died at the age of 89.

I read her most famous book this past semester, Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her thesis is that the path to a vibrant city life can't be planned and developed in a sterile academic thinkers' context. Rather, in order to understand how a city should be, planners must pay attention to the everyday lived reality of everyday city-dwellers. She showed how and why a vibrant street life is more important than parks, why bars and restaurants that operate into the wee hours are vital to the health of a neighbourhood, and why large apartment buildings surrounded by green space do not work.

Her writing is down to earth and her style sparse, uncomplicated. And she loved Toronto just as much as I do.

RIP Jane.

Crossing the finish line

I wrote and finished my last exam at 10:49 this morning. So I’m done. And not done as in just finished this semester, but done as in finished this degree entirely.

Wow

Getting a degree was a dream for me, for as long as I can remember actually. I wanted to be the first person in my family to do this and it would seem I have. Never again can I be passed over for a promotion because I don’t have a uni degree, or told I can’t be hired/shouldn’t be hired just because I don’t have that piece of paper.

Of course when I started it, I had no idea it would consume me so, would become my new raison d’etre. Although, I suppose those who know me well aren’t that surprised, for it isn’t like me to settle for the easy stuff. Once I figured out that I was good at this whole academic thing and that
here was a place where I could make a living out of everything I’m good at – writing, presenting, mentoring/teaching, selling, thinking big thoughts, deconstructing social life, observing humans.

But as of today, April 24, 2006, my BA in Sociology at Concordia is finished. Completed. Done. Over in all but the formality of conferring the piece of paper on me at a ritual in June.

Wow.

Now what?

Marxist invasion

You know you're reading too much social theory and doing too much academic style thinking/writing when every time you open your mouth to speak, one of the following phrases or words pops out... :

That's just instrumental production.

It's all about alienation of your species being!

Yeah but the patterns of sociality don't lend themselves to that analysis.

Capitalist production within patriarchy says...

I think I need some brain down time....

Women and work

What is it about Lent and Easter that brings all the stories about women's lives out into the popular media?

Over breakfast this morning in the Montreal Gazette, I read that Canadian women are increasingly rejecting the workforce, despite a 30-year record low unemployment rate of 3.9% and strong demand for workers of all ages and stripes. Then Arts & Letters Daily tells me about this Economist article which states that women are the new power of the global economy. While the obvious tone of the Economist article seems positive and affirming, the underlying message is still that women bring their situation on themselves.

End of the real and the social

I got asked today what I'm working on right now (the person knew I had a bunch of stuff due in the next ten days). I'm researching theory for a paper for my senior contemporary social theory course (This would have been a required sociology course had I actually stayed around another year to do an honours degree so I took it because, well, I'm weird...nahhh just a self-professed theory geek).

The question:

Baudrillard talks about "the end of the real". What is the importance of this idea in for modern social theory?

As I delve into various Baudrillard writings and look at some of the analysis and critiques of his ideas, I find that the original notion I had on how to answer this question may hold up but there is another, more interesting way to approach it, albeit potentially more dangerous in terms of getting a good mark.

I know that the stock answer for this is that the death of the real is a standard postmodern position. The pomo view sees the real as Reality, an objective bit of fiction posited by the Enlightenment project. Along with the death of truth and subjectivity a la Foucault, the grounds on which the real was advanced were based in the desires and agenda of the E project: the need to establish a rational, liberal set of values that humans could strive to embody in their lives. Thus, along with Truth, Reality and Subjectivity comes Reason, Logic and the big one, Science. The latter work together to create and maintain the ultimate metadiscipline that wraps up all of these into a nice logical metapackage of thought and practice.

Postmodernism argues that the Holocaust is an example of how the modernity project never really got off the ground. The overt rationality and aims of science are illogical and irrational. In the strong pomo position, the argument is that the Real never was real; there is no objective reality, there is only situated and contingent subjectivity. Therefore, attempting to understand and describe that reality is simply an exercise in promotions of second, third and fourth order simulations and interpretations of simulations.

But! I see a more interesting explanation within Baudrillard for the question. Given that the question asks me to relate the death of the real to modern social theory, the more intriguing response would be to ground it in the illusion that there is a social around which one can theorize. Baudrillard argues that the social doesn't exist, never existed. Given this, the inferiority complex that the field of sociology suffers as it attempts in vain to scientize itself becomes understandable. Because not only is science not really scientific, but the social isn't really anything anyway. If there is no actual science around which to theorize, nor a society within which to situate analyses and arguments, then any attempts to create social theory as master narratives, as both environments and tools of scientific discourse, are deeply and profoundly deluded.

So the death of the real means not only the death of the social, but a complete negation of the social. If the real never was, then any theorizing about a society within it is useless posturing and dreaming. No society = no theory possible about it. It all becomes a collective and collaborative dream/nightmare.

Postmodern geek gear

While taking a break from understanding Baudrillard's concept of the "end of the real" for a cultural theory end-of-semester paper, I came across this laser keyboard. It is projected onto any flat surface, turning the surface into a keyboard.

How appropriate a piece of geek gear, given my topic!

Policing my style

Perhaps it is because I'm in the thick of writing a paper and I know that four more must follow this one. That might explain why any discussions of language, vocabulary, style and usage are interesting and relevant-feeling to me right now.
That might be why, then, that Howard Richler's Speaking of Language column in today's Montreal Gazette jumped out at me as a "must read" and then got me thinking about my real and perceived transgressions vis-a-vis the subject of the column.

The column is about the misuse of the phrase "Thanks to"... and Richler eloquently argues that it is a phrase that is getting overused. But worse -- it is being used wrongly.

Since you can't read the article without buying the paper itself (paper or digital), I'll reproduce the relevent part of it here.

(Usual copyright and disclaimers apply)

Ursula Chautems wrote: "I wince whenever I see the expression 'thanks to' in recent texts. Two examples from The Gazette are: 'Thanks to an increase in taxes, residents' disposable income has shrunk'; and 'Scientists say that the hurricanes may have redrawn the coastal map permanently, thanks partly to human attempts to control the forces of nature.' But I really flipped when I read in a major Canadian women's magazine, 'Thanks to a bout with breast cancer, she had to temporarily abandon her job.'

"I wrote to the editor-in-chief and asked her how such a thoughtless sentence could have been tolerated. She informed me that like other newspapers and magazines, they conformed to the style book which, as she told me, lists 'thanks to' as possible substitutes for 'due to' and 'because of.'

"I wrote back and told her that a style book had no brains and could not be expected to differentiate between emotionally charged expressions and that the people who followed its rules so blindly obviously did not have the necessary brains either to ask themselves the simple question: 'What is there to be thankful for?' before writing 'thanks to.' I mentioned as an example that I myself was a breast cancer survivor and that this ridiculous way of writing had really hit a nerve, when 'because of ... breast cancer' would have been the obvious alternative and would still have been sanctioned by their universal God, the style book.

I wonder whether editors and writers are grabbing the shortest expression they can find in the style book without examining its effect on their text. What exactly is that all-powerful 'style book' that appears to be the ne plus ultra of modern editors and writers?"

I'm self-conscious about this now. Makes me wonder...if I write here, "Thanks to Richler, I'll be paying closer attention to my use of the phrase from herein"...am I doing what he is disparaging? Or am I correct?

Oh! The things I think about when I am procrastinating from what I'm supposed to be thinking about...

Gestures (mis)interpreted?

As I attempt to extract myself from the apparently infinite amount of thought and theory written on the topic of modernization, industrialization and economic development in the Third World, so that I can actually get on with writing my term paper on the topic, I'm struck by the sheer quantity of it all. It would seem to me that no one person would ever be able to read everything good and pertinent to their areas of interest and expertise!

And it is here then, when my own in-built tendency towards collaboration clashes with the hierarchies built into academia. Upon discovering an article that a colleague would appreciate, my natural tendency would be to forward a copy of it or at least a link to it to the person, with a little note explaining why I think this might be useful to them. As a collaborative tactic, this always seemed appreciated in business, back when I was a working professional in the corporate world.

Yet, as I have discovered, there are a lot of academics, professors and students alike, who take this as an affront to their capacity to cope with the knowledge available to them. No matter how humbly and gently I write that little accompanying note, the responses I get back almost invariably demonstrate that my truly altruistic gesture has been taken as one of three types of apparently deliberate (on my part) insults:

1. Implication/insinuation that the person can't cope on their own without my help, and so outrage ensues.
   
2. Dismissal because they've already read it, of course, why wouldn't they have? (How little I know!)
   
3. Misunderstanding as to why this thing even applies to them, because their area of research isn't that at all (as I would apparently know if I'd paid any attention to them at all).

When this is compounded by my almost Pavlovian desire to share equally with people in all strata of academia, including my own professors in existing and past courses, the resulting state for me as I attempt to decide what to do is one of profound confusion, desire and care.

So as I sit here tonight, reading an amazingly rich and cogent account of modernization, development and aid history and concepts from a rather obscure little Human Geography journal Geografiska Annaler, I am struggling with my own compulsion to send the link to it to my professor and explain why I find it so powerful and necessary. What if he misinterprets my intent?

This, then, is politics of academia that I have to start learning to manage, even in such seemingly simple collegial gestures.

Grup is me

So here I am, heading into April, 2006, the last month of my undergraduate degree. I have ten or so more assignments and tests to do, then it's over. Done. Finished. Completed. One more checkmark on the list of accomplished dreams in my life.

Next up? Grad school. Okay yes my 38th birthday then grad school.

It got me to thinking - given my soon-to-be new age, school and city, do I equally have to present a new me? At the age I'm about to be, is it time to start looking it? I always said I'd never cut off my hair into one of those short haircuts women all over Canada do sometime around their 35th birthday. And I haven't.

But when I look into my wardrobe these days, one year post-retirement, I really have to laugh. What a difference a year makes. There is not a suit in sight. I don't know when I last wore pantyhose, and I think I may own one winter skirt, a short green corduroy thing that hasn't left my closet since the day I found it at Old Navy for $5 and brought it home and hung it up. My wardrobe is a consistent blending of a dozen pairs of jeans and corduroy jeans, along with a few dozen short and long-sleeved t-shirts in white, blue, green, brown and black. Throw in some sweatshirts, a bunch of yoga pants and workout wear, all the requisite socks and undies and bras... then peek on over at my collection of sneakers and flipflops in all the colours of the rainbow, and it quickly becomes clear to anyone that the closet belongs, not to a business professional, but rather... to a teenager?

See, that's the thing. I dress young. I feel young, so I dress young. And I'm told it works on me. But how much longer can it work? Being on campus every day, I am certainly influenced by what I see around me. And so I buy what I know. I'm comfortable being casual.

Again, does that need to change?

According to Adam Sternbergh, over at New Yorker magazine, the answer is a resounding "not necessarily". And it doesn't have to change because, apparently, there is a name for a person like me, in their late 30s, who's chucked over the corporate world to go out and find a better life for myself, that involves travelling and summers off and being passionate about one's work. Oh and a wardrobe full of jeans and tshirts.

There is a name and an entire socioeconomic class coming up. They're grups.

And Grup is me too. In a way. Probably. We'll see....

Internet "science"?

This looks like it might be an interesting journal in which to attempt to publish. One thing that made me chuckle is the title of the thing though - the "International Journal of Internet Science"? There is a science to the Internet? Oh the positivist/modernist leanings of the 'deme...

[found via DigitalConversations]

Am I too Canadian?

Okay so there may be no such thing to my fellow Canadians, but I wonder about it when I start getting responses back from US schools saying basically "thanks but no thanks" and yet all the Canadian schools so far are saying "please please come here!". I had thought that with my GPA, GRE scores, interesting professional background and all around scholarly potential (ahem!) that I would get some sort of a decent offer from one of the three US schools to which I applied.

Yes Georgetown accepted me, but not with funding and delving deeper into that program, I wonder now, in hindsight, if that is why they do all the flattering recruitment -- because they're hoping you'll pay the US$29K to attend. Emory was rude in their email followup (promising a refusal letter in the mail right away that hasn't arrived yet, three weeks later). Then today, the final rejection email -- UMass was polite but firmly refusing my potential for their program.

I'm so curious why I didn't make the US cut. I'll have to cultivate some US academic contacts, preferably on placement committees, so I can better understand what I did wrong in presenting myself to US schools. Given where I'm considering applying for my PhD in two years (yes I'm already looking to that), it would be good to get a game plan going on soon.

Amplifying our imaginations

Nice to find this article in Wired about videogames' positive effects on the human imagination. Written by the creator of The Sims, Will Wright, he suggests that the exploration, experiential learning and constant imagination stimulation provided by videogames fills a vital role in the lives of humans, especially children, in our world today. His point is that the daily lives of children are now so structured and controlled that they never have a chance to try out things and just play -- videogames offer that potential outlet. I find this a compelling statement, because it is a topic I've often brought up when talking about the everyday lived reality of today's youth.

While tangential to his overall argument, it was also nice to see someone echoing Kelly's dearly-held belief that watching someone play a videogame is never the same thing as playing one yourself. She's said to me more than a few times that the immersive aspects of gaming can only be felt and understood if you are participating fully yourself, firsthand, as a player. Wright seems to agree with this.

[Found via AL Daily ]

Must-attend lecture

I found out today that Sandra Harding will be giving a lecture at McGill on Tuesday, April 4 entitled "Women, Science and Modernity". I've read her stuff in methods and theory courses and she definitely seems to have an interesting mind. This might be an event that makes it worth missing an evening class.

Decision time

Just returned from a 6 day trip to Toronto, visiting friends and also doing the rounds of various students and faculty in the Communications and Culture joint programme at York/Ryerson. Met some amazing people there, who all seem to share at least some of my interests in digital culture, social theory, postmodernism and popular/consumer culture.

While everyone was super helpful, it was the city itself that is pushing me to make the decision in favour of Toronto. As I drove around, up and down the DVP on sunny spring days, and roaming throughout East York, the Annex, Leaside and Bathurst/St-Clair, I felt that ole tug at the heartstrings and flipflopping of my stomach. Oh yes, the love affair with that city is alive and well. Despite the changes I see everywhere, the increasingly rampant Americanization, it is still Toronto and still feels fundementally and viscerally like home.

The only thing holding me back is that York's offer is the smallest financially-speaking. Given how expensive Toronto is vis-a-vis accomodations, that does give me pause and makes Calgary and suburban Vancouver seem more attractive.

Tough choice. But it's decision time now.

What to do? What to do?

Digital qualitative methods

I attending an internal departmental seminar yesterday, in which the speaker, a post-doctoral fellow from the UK, presented "A sense of things". The point of his presentation was to use performativity and audio/visual methods to attempt to answer the questions:

• How do we become conscious of time (i.e. make time explicit)?
• How do we access the imagination?

In the Heideggerian sense, he suggested that the point of his research was not to arrive at an answer, but rather to find a new way to explore the original questions. I found his questions intriguing and I like the idea of using such methods to alter people's perceptions of their everyday mundane reality, by making their life "strange to them", in his words. I had issues though with the sparse way he fleshed it out for us and I question whether or not such performativity can actually allow any authentic access to the imagination in the sense of self.

His phenomenological bent aside, the idea of using visual methods to get beyond textual realities got me thinking of ways to do this when presenting digital experience. This seems to be a theme in my research these days -- I'm supposed to be doing a photographic assignment for my senior field research course.

Rather than only using photos of corporeal places, though, for this project, I think I might use screen snaps from a day in my life on the net and juxtapose them against past travel shots I've taken in Bermuda, Alaska, England and Norway to suggest the concept of travel as more than a corporeal activity. The underlying point, of course, is to show the net geist, the "there" that is there when on the net, the sense of place/space and environment that comes from being in the net 24/7. I expect this to juxtapose nicely with my other research project arguing against statistical data's notion and measurement of the Internet as a tool to be used.

And if I'm going to experiment with stuff like this, now is the time. I've only got four more weeks of undergrad study before I move on to the semi-big leagues...grad school, that is.....

Patriarchy and pregnancy

After having just finished writing a feminist theory in which I argue for the positive political ramifications for a woman to reject the patriarchal institution of motherhood and not be a mother, based on the writings of Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born, I read this article in Foreign Policy magainze. It posits a causal link between patriarchy (which it claims comes and goes in cycles) and declining birth rates in the Western World. The claim is that it is the enlightened liberals who are not procreating and so the conservatives are bearing up to the challenge of replicating the world's population.

Grading goes online - but is it more objective?

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today called A New Way to Grade that deals with the computerized grading system devised by a Texas Tech professor. As someone who is fairly good at writing and who also likes to play with mechanics of style and grammar in papers, in order to work through possibilities or provide jarring emphasis on certain points, I'm not sure what I think about this type of system.

I'm thinking of a recent paper I wrote for an urban sociology course. In it, in order to answer the question about modern urban culture using Georg Simmel and Sharon Zukin, I deliberately aped their style when dealing with the issues close to their writing. Only at the end of the paper did I "speak" in my own voice, when talking about comparisons and contradictions and my own ideas. In my actual course here, the professor knows me, has graded me before and respects me, so he liked my experimentation with style/voice and gave me an A. Though I noted, somewhat subtly, at the outset of the paper that I would do this, something he caught on to as he knows my style now, it is a line that may have been missed in a system such as this Texas Tech one and I might not have done nearly as well.

I'm also curious about whether this application will catch on, which would mean that at some point in the next few years, as a grad student, I'll be required to use it to do my own grading.

This system may seem more objective, but the postmodernist in me wonders if the state of being objective should always be the goal?

Only 19 more assignments, reports and exams to go before the end of it all.

In a blatent attempt to imagine life apres the BA, an email from Land's End announcing their new SPF30 clothing got me thinking about summertime and summer sunshine. I suspect that this time will arrive sooner than I think, though probably not feel soon enough, given what I have left to do and read.

Piercing racial dichotomoy

Alternet does it again - this article illustrates why Crash was the right choice for Best Picture at the recent Oscars. It shows how race and discrimination cut both ways.

Uneasy feminism

I've started reading feminist theory from what is known as the "third wave feminism". It starts with the anti-racist movement and then moves into post-modern and post-structuralist feminism.

What bothers me though about the turn in this wave is the notion of embracing difference, not just of race, class and sexuality but also of differences of tactics and approaches. I get the sense from these readings that they are reifying the notion of women's nurturing as intrinsically female and therefore completely alien to men. The suggestion seems to be that this nurturing, supporting, emotional femininity is better than an apparently male logical analytical nature.

I keep wanting to ask in my class - why can't we both both? Why can't I use my cool head as much as my hot heart?

This article says as much too, better than I have put it here. When reading Audre Lorde's introduction to her book "The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house", I kept asking myself what's wrong with using the Master's tools against him? Why can't I be subversive AND inventive AND compassionate?

Seeking and discovering

I went looking for theories that would work into my feminist theory paper and instead found Audre Lorde's poetry. This one in particular spoke to me tonight.

All in a day's procrastination - Ch. II

The end of my final semester as a BA student is imminent... but will it beat the end of the world? [ flash required ]

...This is what you think about and look for on the net at this point in the semester.

Advancing the art

Oh the things you can find on the net when you're practicting the fine art of procrastination, in order to avoid the actual work that you know is due but which you're choosing to pretend doesn't exist....thereby playing the ostrich...

Example: Came across the Urban Dictionary tonight while attempting to pretend that I do not, actually, have to prepare to lead my class in my feminist theory course on Tuesday.

Also found this site full of cool t-shirts, linked through the UD site.

I'm running a straight 4.0 on procrastination this weekend!

Sourcing books

I can't count the number of times I've found a citation for a book that I would like to check out, but can't find it in my university library. Depending on the cost of the book, I'm often likely to buy it outright.

My online resources for sourcing these books have always been fairly limited in scope, however. I'd do the rounds of Indigo, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca, Alibris and Powells. If they didn't have them, I'd maybe check eBay but I'd probably just give up.

Then today, while looking for a book on discourse analysis, I stumbled across FetchBook. It is an inventory comparison system for booksellers and has over 160 or so different sources in its crawling system. It will even allow you to put in your country and then will give you a complete price quote for each seller, including shipping, in the currency of your choice. Nice!

This one will be going into my "Frequently used sources" folder in Mozilla.

Finding answers

"Spring break" as it is euphemistically called here, has started officially for me today. One week with no classes. But it is no true break, because while there are no classes, there is a lot of work to be done.

Case in point: I'm currently working on paper that asks me to respond to this question:

Critical Reflection: Are you Modern or a Postmodern?

For this assignment you may take a side in the Foucault/Habermas debate as long as you can make a claim as to what you think the debate is about. When taking a position be careful, consider what has been written, stay aware of the context, and try to imagine limitations and problems with your position as well as that of your “opponent.” Be aware of contradictions and ambiguities (hint: this is not a two-sided debate; beware of simple dichotomies).

I recognized immediately that I was far more post-modern than modern, but I'm not sure I fully appreciated how modern I was until I had a discussion with Kelly, who challenged me on some of my personal assumptions of my self and allowed me to see more clearly the fuzzy delineations between the two realms of thought.

Sadly we are only allowed to use the ten theorists from our coursepack of readings. I would have liked to do some background work using Baudelaire and Voltaire. I have a feeling I'd have had a strong affinity to Voltaire, who, according to the Wikipedia, is known for saying:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities

...Meaning that if people believed in what is unreasonable, they will do what is unreasonable.

Considering world events of late, that remark seems to be still very much on the mark.

Credibility online

Reading this IHT story about endangered predators, I was struck not only by the old-fashioned and very un-weblike practice of laying out the story in four columns (a layout that almost guarantees people won't read it or like reading it online) but also the way in which the embedded auto-inserted paid advertising at the bottom undermines the credibility of the story itself.

It is rather grimly ironic that a story about the endangerment of marine predators like sharks, and that bemoans the catching and killing of sharks for trifles such as soup and jewellery, would feature advertisements below it for shark tooth pendants and necklaces.

Meeple is me

One of my professors claimed last night in class that you can tell the personality of someone by playing a few games of Risk with them. He argues that you'll quickly see if they're cowardly, collaborative, courageous or cut-throat. You'll know if you can trust them by whether or not they honour their bargains and allegiances and if they consistently win at the world domination variant, you'll have an idea of how ambitious and aggressive they are. He says that the best dating insurance, then, is to play a board game night with your potential beloved and pull out Risk. Play a few rounds. See how they play.

He was counselling this because he'd broken up with his girlfriend that morning and he argued that if he'd taken his own advice and played Risk with her, he might have known about all of her much earlier and saved himself quite a few months of effort.

This made me laugh rather hard...and then pause.

You see, I'm a boardgame geek. In fact, I'd have to confess they're a bit of an obsession for me. I blame it on my parents, who had an entire board game closet available to my brothers and I. Many an early Saturday morning was spent playing and fighting over Monopoly, Trouble, Battleship...you name it, we played it.

Since then, I've played literally hundreds of games. For those who know the 3D me, this is no surprise at all. And Risk counts among my favourite games of all time.

Parties and drinking be damned -- my favourite social evening involves a good dinner, a few nice beers and a half a dozen hours spent playing any of my current favourites like Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, Carcassone or any of the many silly but cutthroat versions of Munchkin. But I also like standard card games, including Wizard, Joker Rummy or Canasta

I even belong to a social club here in Montreal based on board games. We get together on Saturdays now and again and we play all kinds of games, though most tend to be the kinds of games you can only buy in stores like Montreal's Le Valet de Coeur or online. My biggest current obsession is Puerto Rico, and I'm finally grokking it. Though this past weekend, Kelly's 13 year old daughter trounced me rather badly. She's a very good player. Will have to schedule a few re-matches.

Apparently this obsession of mine means I'm a Meeple, an avid game player. And I now badly want this Meeple hoodie take on Settlers of Catan. *drool*

Oh! so..yeah..what kind of a Risk player am I? Put it this way...I'd rather play world domination Risk over mission Risk anyday. I've figured out how to win even without starting out in control of Australia or Africa. I've proven you can dwindle to a half dozen armies and still rally back to win the game. I honour my alliances but make them rarely. And I'm known for pursuing an ailing player hard to try to kill them off and grab their card sets.

It would be interesting to play Risk with my professor. Not sure I want him to see that side of me though. Cutthroat? That's me. Aggressive and enigmatic? Yes, check.

Think if I wupped him in Risk, he'd still give me an A+?

Questioning the Winter Olympics

I'll come clean here, as publicly as my tiny and marginal piece of the I-Space can be called public.

I am an Olympics junkie.

I admit it -- every year there has been an Olympics since I was old enough to understand what they were, I've plopped my butt in front of the TV and watched from beginning to end. From the parade of teams and flags to the extinguishing of the flame, I'm there, watching and cheering, not just for Canada but for any underdogs who attempt to compete with the powerhouses of the world.

And perhaps because of my childhood hometown of Winnipeg, colloquially often referred to as "Winterpeg", I've always been particularly partial to the Winter Olympics.

So it shouldn't be that surprising that I was all excited about the opening ceremonies today, for the Winter Olympics in Turin (Turino?) Italy.

Just as I was about to pack it up here at my laptop and move down to the TV, I read this article. And I paused.

And I questioned myself.

By watching, by participating in the spectacle and giving my eyes over to the commercials, am I contributing to the elitism of the Games?

Oh I'll probably go downstairs anyway now, but at the same time, now I'm wondering. Now I'm being self-critical.

Now I'm not so sure I should be fanning the flames.

Heroes and icons - possible or passé?

With the death of Betty Friedan and a few other iconic feminists in the last few weeks, this Alternet article asks what will happen now? Where are the future feminist icons?

That lament, along with this CFP for a book about superheroes, got me thinking about the whole nature of heroes and icons. Are they actually possible now? Given that most people understand that there is a small wizened cynical scared person behind the curtain of all the greater-than-life wizardry and wonder they see on screen, read about in the paper and consider buying in stores, can anyone emerge anymore with all the qualities expected of an icon or a superhero? Or are we destined to live in a world from herein where pop starlets and spoiled heiresses and jumping-on-couches movie stars act as second-rate substitutes?

I think through these things, too, in the context of my current Contemporary Cultural Theory course, which is setup as an ideological wrestling match between the great German moderns (Think Habermas, Luhmann, Adorno) and the great French post-moderns (think Foucault and Lyotard), all moderated and mediated by the Americans (Haraway and Jameson come to mind). It would seem to me that heroes and cultural icons belong to a world in which meta-narratives are alive and thrive and in which people are able to not only suspend disbelief, but to believe uncritically from the outset.

I don't see this world in existence around me today. Fractured consciousness, stunted attention spans and a deep cynicism for anything resembling Truth, Beauty and Freedom are what I see reigning instead. Short of the major prophets acting as heroes and icons in fundamentalist religious discourse, and the wanna-be hero that is US President George Bush, Western culture is no longer birthing great heroes.

In the feminist camp, young activist feminists are trying to nominate and raise up certain possible influential women to that status, through things like the Real Hot 100 list, but the sheer number of feminism-is-dying journal articles and newspaper pieces shows they have a long uphill battle ahead.

In a po-mo world, then, are heroes and icons possible or passé?

Women's double lives?

While I accept the possibility that social theory can affect a profoundly transformative effect on a person’s beliefs, ideas and preconceptions, it has been my experience that such theory is rare. Therefore, it was with no small amount of shock and awe that I found myself deeply moved by Adrienne Rich’s (1980) article, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence”*.

The premise of Rich’s theory is deceptively simple: All women exist on a continuum of female intimacy and bonding. This continuum of “woman-identified experience” (p.648) is normal and natural for women, but it becomes stunted and thwarted by patriarchal systems of socialization. These systems and structures isolate women from each other and push them towards hetronormativity in the service of male power, as evidenced in procreation, property and security. Women, however, are not conscious of the oppression inherent to their sexual choice, however, and therefore deny themselves the full potential richness of a female-centric life.

Given my own preoccupation with ideas of choice, agency and power, I suppose it should not surprise me that I had such a reaction to her work. Because she deals with the issue of women’s awareness (or lack thereof) of the knowledge of their potential for alternate ways of being, her argument strikes me as having a rather Foucaldian slant. Akin to his twinning of the concepts of power/knowledge, Rich seems to be saying that the lack of knowledge of choice itself is what disempowers women. I see a link, too, between knowledge and consciousness in her writing, or a lack thereof in the lives of women. I find this argument persuasive – In the distractions of modern life and the multiple demands to which a woman submits, there is often, sadly, little to help her to understand the nature of her own subjective oppression.

I find that Rich muddies her theoretical waters through her use of the term lesbian, however. At times, she seems to want to reclaim the term from its subordination to an implication of sexuality, in order that she may use it as a sign for a deep and apparent asexual universal bond between women. Yet, at other times, she links it very directly with woman-woman sexuality and buts it up against the term “erotic”. Juxtapose this ambiguity or contradiction with her argument about a pervasive socially-ingrained revulsion towards sexual lesbianism in many people, and I can now better understand my fellow classmates’ strong initial reactions and widespread rejection of her central thesis in our classroom discussion of Rich’s work. I see now how and why it centred around the term lesbian.

Also, as provocative as Rich’s argument seems, and despite her token discussions of particular ethnicities and their experiences of womanhood, her argument still seems overly universalistic. In her desire to generalize her argument out to include all women, she ignores the other determinants at work in “sex colonization” (p644). Finally, at times, her argument has the texture and tone of a manifesto, evident whether she is calling women to bestir themselves to action against hegemonic heterosexuality, pointing out what is wrong with existing feminist theory or simultaneously exalting and bemoaning the courage it takes to be a self-defined lesbian in a patriarchal world.

Despite these criticisms, I still find myself profoundly affected by her ideas and argument. The article led me face-to-face, as it were, with the unconscious blindness inherent in my own apparent heterosexuality. While I found many passages noteworthy in this article, the passage that stuck out for me in particular was Rich’s discussion of the imposition of a female “double life”:

Nor can it be assumed that women…who married, stayed married, yet dwelt in a profoundly female emotional and passional [sic] world, “preferred” or “chose” heterosexuality. Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of “abnormal” childhoods they wanted to feel “normal”, and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty and fulfilment (p.654)

I see much of myself in this passage. And so I am left questioning myself. Given my own troubled background, given my long history of struggle between wanting to stop the bullying and just be normal versus wanting to be able to walk my own self-defined life path and normality be damned, between wanting to rejoice in being female and not trusting my femininity to get me what I want out of life, have I been living the double life of which Rich speaks? I have always prided myself on my own ability to live a conscious life and be aware of the reasons and factors that have influenced my being. But how conscious have I been, really? Where am I on the continuum? Given my life choices to date, am I even on the continuum?

Rich’s theory has affected me. In doing so, she has perhaps fulfilled her ultimate intent behind the article: to sound a clarion call to women everywhere that jolts them into awareness of the extent of their unconscious duplicity in their own sexual submission. I hear that call. I am aware now. If social theory is truly about affecting social change in any degree, Rich’s theory is a compelling example of just how possible that can be.

*Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence.
Signs, 5(4), 631-660.

Sound and fury continued...

As I continue to follow the machinations and permutations of those involved in the Cartoon Wars (as they're now rather officially being called, it seems), I am occasionally coming across articles, like this one in the German publication "signandsight, that attempt to demonstrate to Western minds the absurdity of the entire affair, by firmly putting the shoe on the other foot to evaluate its fit. And frequently finding it fitting ridiculously.

Pay attention to the analogy in that article to the movie, Life of Brian, a longtime favourite of mine. It is an choice to prove the point that this is a lot of sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing. Don't believe me though...with this whole issue in mind, watch the trailer and see the similarities to this whole farcical affair.

Struggles for the future

If I had any doubts as to what is most important in the US, money or people, especially when it came to the Internet, this new hare-brained mega scheme on the part of the multi-billion dollar telecom companies would lay it to rest.

Money. Money trumps all, even the transformative open systems nature of the net.

Cartoon Wars

Every week, I sit in a contemporary cultural theory class, listening to the professor discuss and debate the supremacy of modernity versus post-modernity, all very abstract and tidy and nice and ultimately useless. Or is it?

That very battle is right now being played out on the streets and in the media vehicles, in the minds of everyday people, as a battle between respect for the supremacy of religion (aka meta-narrative par excellence) and the need for the supremacy of free speech (aka post-modernist splintered individual positioned rationalities).

What the heck am I talking about? Have you been following the Cartoon Wars here, here, here, here and here....? I have. Throughout this last week, I've read about what's been going on, with shock, disbelief, annoyance, anger and a certain mounting sense of bitter pessimism roiling within me.

I'm at the point where there are no words that come to me to express the totality of what I am feeling, of how disgusted I am with the world in general, the posturing, the prostituting of ideals, the threats, the capitulation to a culture of fear that is gradually spreading a black plague of ideological junk over this earth.

Since I can't seem to come up with any coherent sentence to describe my feelings, allow me instead to direct you to Ibn Warraq's column that presents one decidedly western and unapologetically passionate and yet critical view. Then go on over to the All Things Beautiful blog and wallow/flounder/submerse yourself in a dizzying series of clearinghouse-style snapshot views on what is happening, why its worth paying attention to and how serious it could end up being for this earth.

Oh woe is definitely us these days.

Pit bull hysteria

The excellent Malcolm Gladwell has written an article in the recent New Yorker about the pit bull profiling hysteria and he shows why pit bulls aren't the dangerous creatures some law makers would have people believe

Rape worse than death?

In my feminist theory course, we've had some discussions and debates about the role of women in the military. Framed within that debate in the class was the idea that women are nuts for wanting to be part of the military, considering if they are caught, they will be raped. My classmates couldn't believe that any women would lay herself open to that potentiality by choice.

I remember feeling uneasy about the whole debate and yet incredulous too -- why do so many women fear rape so much? And why, in debates about the military, is rape framed as the deciding reason why or why not to join up? It would seem to me that having to kill another human being would be far worse than rape, that it would be more damaging to the soul. And wouldn't your own death be worse than rape? If given a choice between rape and death, wouldn't you choose life? And be proactive about tactics to avoid rape, so long as you safe-guarded your health? Isn't avoiding rape all about maintaining your health and your life, after all?

Apparently not, according to this Alternet article. It lays bare details on the circumstances of the numbers of US female soldiers in Iraq who consciously chose to not drink water after 2 or 3pm, in order to not feel a need to urinate during the night. Apparently, the path to the latrines are unlit and this lays female soldiers open as potential victims to predatory males. And the males were their own platoon mates.

The confounding issue? The heat. It reached as high as 50C degrees. At that heat, frequent and plentiful hydration is necessary and going without water for extended periods of time can be lethal. Tragically, in the case of many of the female soldiers, it was lethal.

Yet still, despite knowing this, many female soldiers consciously chose to avoid water and liquids so as to avoid the risk of rape. And many of them paid for this choice with their death, expiring in the middle of the night from dehydration.

After learning about this, I'm left questioning my assumptions about rape and patriarchy and power and the military. The structural inbalances in this situation are huge and the path these women seemed to have needed to navigate was littered with obstacles against them. I can't pretend to begin to understand their complete situation, true, but at the same time, it would seem to me that there should have been ways around this.

Call me a pessimistic realist, but I had to laugh bitterly at the US Army's Sexual Assault Prevention motto, An Army of One, Caring for All and their own Human Resources Commander's pledge/call to action that soldiers "require us to provide the world-class human resource support they deserve". Despite the command's assertion that "the Army is committed to supporting and caring for victims of sexual assault and to ensuring that victims and offenders are treated according to Army policy", it would certainly as if Command is unable and indeed unwilling to back up those words.

Obviously, whistle-blowing and working within the Army system hasn't worked for the women serving. What I don't understand, then, is why they didn't find ways to take matters into their own hands? What about the buddy system? Or a pail under your bunk? Or carrying their guns when they had to go after dark? Aren't these women trained to kill? Weren't there ways for them to defend themselves? Wasn't there other ways to deal with the threat that wouldn't have resulted in so many perishing?

Don't get me wrong...I am not blaming these women for their victimization and for paying the ultimate price for attempting to avoid it. I am not exonerating the structural factors that legitimated the behaviour of the male servicemen and turned a blind eye to the very real problem and the tragic loss of life. But when the structure fails you, when the system turns a blind eye, as the resourceful, smart and capable woman you must be to be serving your country overseas, couldn't you find a way to ensure your own surivival? Isn't your own life worth that?

Was the situation so bad for those women soldiers that they saw their condition as hopeless and viewed rape as worse than death?

Reacting to the Feminine Mystique

The paper I started on Friday is done. Since it's brief, I figured, why not post it? So here it is:

The key argument in the opening chapter to Betty Friedan’s (1974) seminal liberal feminist book, The Feminine Mystique, is that women in the early to mid period of the 20th century were socialized to believe that biology was destiny (p.11). Inculcated into them was the idea that the pinnacle of fulfillment for a woman was to be a wife and mother (pp.11-13). Women threw themselves into their role, subsuming any personal individuality to the societal dictates of perfect womanhood (p.14). In women’s pursuit of the mystique of utter femininity, however, they found a vague, nameless, malaise that they could not speak of to others (p.14-15). Friedan named the problem (p.27), and later in her book suggested the solution was more education and greater choice. However, I argue that this combination has not yet brought about the ultimate goal of liberal feminism, which is the true freedom to achieve feminine self-fulfilment on our own terms.

Reading the book’s introduction, I was struck by the similarities between the behaviour, feelings and views of women of the 50s and 60s and of women today. The basic ideal of seeking self-fulfillment is still there, though now a plethora of seeming choice has been opened for women. But are they truly choices? While the ability to go to school and forge a career are now equally available as valid goals for women, there are still strong societal expectations that these will be pursued alongside the old goals. The techniques for achieving these goals of education, career, family and hearth are depressingly the same now as they were in Friedan’s time. Through family pressures, the media and the market, women are told to be smart and goal-oriented, yes, but also continue to be pretty and thin, busty and sexy. Go ahead and be successful in your career, certainly, but also remember that you have a moral duty to get married, keep a clean and attractive house and have a few well-adjusted, smart and active children.

As Friedan herself notes, the liberation women were supposed to have achieved as a result of the industrial revolution’s new inventions such as the electric washers and dryers is a myth (p.14-15) and women realized it, but internalized it as a “problem that has no name” (p.15) .

Today, partly as a result of Friedan’s book, we have a name for the problem – desire for self-fulfilment as women. Yet we are not necessarily any closer to being able to actualize that desire than women were in the time Friedan was writing. All that has happened is that we have more choices to make in how we live our lives and an apparent freedom to choose among them. The consumerist thrust of late modern life belies the freedom of such choices, however, reducing them to pseudo-choices of a stunted feminine agency. While women are certainly are no longer silenced and unable to talk about the problem, as evidenced by the proliferation of women’s magazines, daytime talk shows and self-help books, the problem itself is still there.

The old expectations of a specific housewife role for women, that almost mythical role which Friedan argues so eloquently was the stultifying straightjacket of perfect zombie femininity (p.24), has been merged into an additional role – that of a successful wage-earner. Thus, I posit that we have not moved beyond the ideal of the feminine mystique, but have rather merged it into a new ideal of femininity that incorporates most of the expectations and techniques of the old and has layered new ones on top of it.

In Friedan’s time, the “problem” was, as one woman put it, “always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself” (p.23). This has not changed. The roles of mother and wife persist as prescribed and desirable goals on the path to feminine self-fulfillment. Layered on top of them now is the goal of successful careerist, consummate consumer, ageless beauty and socially-conscious citizen. While that liberal feminist goal, the ability to choose, has seemingly been obtained, I am left questioning how much better off women are today than they were in Friedan’s time. Despite the advances and expansive roster of choices, women today still often feel as if they are frantically treading water, filling their time with activity and obligation, but never able to stop long enough to concentrate (p.25). In looking for herself, she continues to lose herself. The problem may be named, but it is not yet solved.

Critiquing an introduction

I sat down this morning and attempted to construct a reaction paper to the introduction to Betty Friedan's seminal liberal feminist book, The Feminine Mystique. But how can you critique/analyze an introduction to a larger work if you haven't read the larger work?

Friedan discusses how the mania over obtaining a husband and becoming a housewife so occupied women of the 50s and early 60s that they stopped going to college, obsessed over their weight (by consuming a chalk product called Metrecal) and appearance, pretended, at age 10, to have "bosoms", and generally subsumed any sense of individuality into their prescribed role.

This sounded interesting to me, because if you swap out the reason for this (i.e. getting a husband) for getting a lover (i.e. having sex), you still see the same end result behaviour today.

Plus ca change....?? Should that be my theme?

Memories of farming

I am potentially one of the last generation of Canadians who can claim to come from a traditional farming family. I can remember Easters and summers spent on my uncle's Saskatchewan wheat farm, with chickens and cows and horses, with a huge vegetable garden and mangy cats who caught the mice that otherwise nested in the hay bales. My uncles road the tractors and stalked the fields day in and day out. They talked about the weather and worried about tornadoes and rain, drought and bugs. They chewed tobacco, talked very little, and with their wrinkled careworn faces, they seemed much older and wiser than my own government engineer father. They seemed larger than the life, yet inextricably tied to it.

Because I lay claim to the idea of having been a half farm kid (the other half being the kind of suburban/rural kid you can only be when you grow up on the outskirts of a small and relatively unimportant Canadian prairie city) , stories of farming and farmers have always touched a chord. My uncles are part of that for me. Which is probably why I want to see the film "The Real Dirt on Farmer John". While it is American made and will no doubt have some of the US patriotic jingoism that goes with that, it is made by a man who grew up in a farming community, on a family farm and watched the changes wrought by weather, politics, economics and globalization. Alternet's overview has piqued my interest. I hope it shows in a theatre near me this summer.

Downsizing

As I begin to prepare for what will probably be smaller living quarters, starting this summer, I am trying to figure out how to handle all of those electronic components I've got that are rechargeable and whose mess of cables look rather untidy in a small place.

So I'm rather interested in the eNook, a wall mounted charging station that acts as a mini-desk. You plug all of your adapters and the like into a strip powerbar that the desk hides at the bottom, then you pull the cables up and pin them to various shelves.

In a bachelor apartment, this might make a lot of sense to hang in a hallway near the entry.

First conservatives, then what?

Given that the Conservatives won the election last night, I should be wearing black today. Especially given their promised assault on liberal and feminist values and laws.

Is the US scenario going to be the case in Canada now, if the abortion rights legislation is struck down?

Page out of the Odd

While doing other things on the web tonight, I stumbled across this eBay auction for a t-shirt.

Yeah, so what, you're saying. T-shirts are sold every second on eBay. Right?

Well, the story behind the t-shirt is what makes the auction interesting. The auction is being offered by the Swedish owners of PirateBay, one of the web's most popular piracy/warez sites.

This auction may not be JC in a piece of toast, but it is definitely a page from the odd files. I wonder if the buyer will actually pay up? And if they will actually make it to Sweden to see if it is true that polar bears really don't wander the streets there? And why, if they can afford a trip to Sweden and the purchasing of copious amounts of alcohol for probably a large-ish swedish man and his fellow pirates, why they wouldn't just buy their software and music to start with?

Would be cheaper wouldn't it?

Or is this proof that price/cost isn't everything?

Paradox of undergraduate education

Jotted in the margins of the reference page of one of my first undergraduate essays was the comment, "Excellent grasp of the theoretical material and original ideas of your own, but the whole paper could have been deeper if you had read and considered the entirety of the major works you use".

I remember that comment giving me pause. Deeper thought. It stuck with me and since that day, I've strived to do that in my academic works; be deeper, write deeper, display more nuance.
Yet, this afternoon, while reading the lyrical introduction to Marshall Berman's excellent and compelling book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, I came face to face with that concept again. This time, though, it was presented as an issue of 20th century modernity. The problem with this third phase of modernity, Berman argues, is that thought and analysis have flattened into dualisms and polarities. He seems to suggest we've lost the colour and nuance to our thinking and, in doing so, have become passive in our cultural participation. As a consequence, too few 20th century modern thinkers dare to think big thoughts, to create grand narratives, or to delve deeply into the messy contradictions of life.

While I could go on about how he develops this and show how much I agree with it, the point here is rather to talk about how the originating idea of modernity, the call from Kant to have the courage to think, has been so compartmentalized by the acceleration of time and thought that it becomes difficult to be original, to demonstrate a largesse of vision or an incisive depth of thought.

Case in point - my undergraduate education. As an emerging sociologist and cultural theorist, it is to be my job to contemplate the questions of human social life. I am expected to have read all the greats from all the tiers and to understand how they link to one another in a rich and strong web of understanding and argumentation on what it means to be human. The tacit expectation is that I will have read each of these great thinkers deeply, and that I will have a strong and almost didactic grasp of who said what about what and whom.

Sounds right? Of course.

Yet, the reality of my education falls far short of this expectation. Rather than take courses that deal with the entirely of thought that is a single thinker (e.g. Marx, Weber, Habermas, Foucault), all of my courses have been survey courses. They have been about tracing a large field of thought, be it classical social theory, theories of self and society or, as of now, contemporary cultural theory. In all cases, my exposure to various big-T theorists and thinkers has often consisted of a 20-30 page excerpt of their work.

So, when it comes time for me to sit down and write a 10 or 20 page paper on some aspect of someone's theory, I stumble in the gloaming of their work, the short brief evening of their thought to which I've been exposed that semester. As I do this, time and again, I'm reminded of how little of their overall body of work and argument I can claim to know.

The remedy for this may seem obvious -- read more. Take all the books for those theorists out of the library, sit down and read them. Doing so would allow me to answer Berman's call.

But the structure of my undergraduate education is not built for that. Often, I am given a set of essay topics and must produce a compelling and original paper within two week. Fourteen short days. And while working on that paper, let us not forget that I am juggling four to five other courses, each demanding a minimum of 40-60 pages of dense theoretical reading weekly.

A quick mathematical calculation tells me that I am reading somewhere in the vicinity of 250-300 pages a week. On top of attending 15-20 hours of class lectures. And, of course, commuting to school, staying in touch with my social circle, exercising, doing household chores and grocery shopping and, by necessity, eating and sleeping and bathing.

Add onto that the assignments that pile up each week in each class, the seminars I have to lead, the papers and critiques and replies I have to create, exams I have to study for and things I have to just plain know and the overall picture of a sociology undergraduate falls far short of the ideal to which Berman would have me aspire.

How can I have broad knowledge of theory, have read anyone extensively and deeply enough to be able to redress the issue noted in that first of my undergraduate essays, given the realities of my undergraduate life? When all of the enormity of a theory or theorist is instructed in confetti-like bits and drags and drops, what one is left with is a murky Andy Warhol-meets-Jackson Pollock-like collage of an understanding, rather than a cohesive, all-dots-connected flowing knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can lead to wisdom.

Like today. I would dearly love to rush out to the library or bookstore, buy Berman's book, whose introduction I enjoyed thoroughly, and sit down with a few cups of tea and read it, cover to cover, spending the weekend wallowing in it and engaging with Berman's take on modernity. But, if I do that, I will not be able to read the Baumann reading for this week for that class, nor will I read chapters 3 through 5 in my Cities and Urban Life textbook (all 100 pages) for my Urban Regions course. Nor would I get to reading Friedan, Trebilcot and Jones for my Feminist Theory course, rending me unable to participate as expected in Tuesday's seminar. Nor would I read the four chapters for my Comm course, or the two chapters for my development course or do the literature review for my field research course...along with the reading for the week in that textbook too.

And so it goes. Be thorough, be broad, be deep, dig and sift and think, think, think. Yet each of the readings for each of my classes jumps me around each week from topic to topic, from writer to theorist, never pausing anywhere long enough to get more than a glossed-over white bread understanding of an incomplete microcosm of some important person or thought or book. Demands of each course being what they are, where am I supposed to get the time to read broadly and deeply enough of any single theorist to be able to make any knowledge claims about their work? Let alone be able to think deep thoughts about any one topic, or write deep and nuanced analytical paragraphs into a coherence of brilliance that will show that I've heeded those comments on that first paper.

Do as we say, not as we demand of you. This is the message I'm taking away from my undergraduate education. This, it seems, is the paradox of my undergraduate education.

New addition to my family

After a looooong day on campus in three intense three-hour-per class classes, I gingerly made my way back to my car, chipped it free of ice, drove carefully home in yet another Montreal ice storm and wearily dropped all my stuff at the front door. I was looking forward to just making a cup of tea and settling into my bed to watch some TV on my laptop.

But there it was.

The box, sitting all innocently on my table. The return address? Somewhere in Alabama. Was it...?

My heart started to race.

I force myself to calmly walk to the gadget drawer in the kitchen, find a paring knife, slit open the packing tape. Pop open the top. Rummage through the peanuts.

Allelujah! Yesss!!

My new 30GB iPod has arrived. The new addition to my family of tech toys is here!

I got it from eBay at a good price for a Canadian (hence the Alabama return address). As I therefore didn't get a colour choice, I ended up getting it in white. I don't mind.

Only odd thing is that it doesn't come with a way to power it independently of the computer. Luckily I have gadgets and cables for it that are universal and can be appropriated from my mini, which I'm now selling.

I can actually fit my entire iTunes library on this baby. Wow!

Is it dorky to be so in love with a probably-over-hyped piece of technology?

Call me guilty, then.

Book about film and myth

Through ALDaily, I stumbled across this book that treats how film has changed our view of the myths of modern society. Wonder if it would illuminate anything in game studies?

CFP risk

Okay so I'm probably dreaming in technicolour, but I just finished putting together and submitting a paper submission to the American Sociological Association's 2006 conference, Great Divide. I sent in a paper called "Rapping Adorno" that uses German-Turkish youth rappers to gainsay the seeming stifling totality of Adorno's negative stance towards mass culture and popular culture.

It felt odd though to see no institution after my name on my submission. As of May, I'll be in a rather liminal state academically. I'll no longer be a student at Concordia but will not yet be a student at whatever grad school accepts me and me them.

I know that I probably haven't a hope in Hades of getting accepted -- I've heard it said that the rejection rate for this conference is somewhere around 80%?!? But I couldn't resist - the conference will be in Montreal, after all. Funnily enough, though, I may not be by then - I hope to be in Toronto, Burnaby, Amherst (MA), or Atlanta.

If it doesn't (when it doesn't?) get accepted, I'll start working on submitting it to a few journals, though at this point, I have no ideas which ones.

Gendering online activity

As I begin my own small-scale qualitative research project on female adolescents' online activity, which compares the richness of their interactions in digital space against the sterile and stereotyped "use" captured in Canadian statistical data, I stumbled upon this Alternet article that makes a cogent argument against the gendering of online activity.

Urge to converge

An article in today's Montreal Gazette gave an overview of a new Nissan concept car to be shown at the upcoming Montreal car show. Called the Urge, it is designed to appeal to the so-called Echo generation, the teenage children of boomers.

Based on online survey data from the target group, the car is built to appeal to video game and gadget geeks, which Nissan claims exemplifies the large majority of that demographic. The car is unusual in that it takes the idea of being a toy to a new level. Instead of marketing it by talking about how fast and powerful the car is, instead, the marketing is centered around how fast and powerful the game system is that is in the trunk. In this case, the Microsoft Xbox 360.

Yes, that's right. This car has a built-in Xbox in the trunk, with a flipdown screen in the dashboard. The controller is the steering wheel and pedals and the sound is channeled into the car's existing audio system.

No, it can't be played while driving (thankfully!). It is strictly a stationary only thing. Interestingly enough, it comes with a customized special edition version of Project Gotham Racing and was developed as a joint venture with, yes, Microsoft.

Oh and there is no key to speak of -- the car starts using a cellphone as a "smart key". And yes it has an integrated iPod docking station.

Politics of the art prize

Since writing a paper last semester on Theodor Adorno's views of high/low culture divisions and the culture industry's commodification of culture, I've been interested in how art prizes play into the economics and interests of this. While writing that paper, I came across an excellent article on this in one of my favourite journals, Media Culture & Society.

Then today, AL Daily pointed me to this New Yorker article that provides an overview of this topic from the perspective mainly of author and English professor, James F. English, who has written a book on the topic. As the New Yorker article points out about English's book, his central idea is that the need for authors to have the power to create economic value (cultural capital?) increases, so too do the number of prizes created and given out each year. The intent behind these prizes is to create value where it otherwise didn't exist, but that value is intended to be economic only. Thing is, how many consumers pay attention to such prizes? And since when did consumerism become so important to the art and vocation of writing?

Of course, this very topic is one that Adorno deals with extensively and at least in the case of literature, many of his concerns are valid. But I am reminded of Hannah Arendt's views on the culture division between high and low and I think they play into this too. Perhaps even moreso.

As I believe I blogged here last month, Arendt is quite critical of the notion that an author's work reflects the author themselves. Rather, she notes that the work instead reflects the author's ability to author and to play the role of author -- there is little, if any, within any artistic work that can lead us to the true inner-ness of the artist. Their artistic output can give us hints of what the artist is, but not who they are.

I believe this distinction is important to consider when looking at the role of art prizes such as the Booker, Giller, Pulitzer, and yes even the Nobel.

Google PC?

Friends have been joking with me over the last year about what the next big innovation to come out of the Googlesphere would be. They were putting their money on an operating system.

Seems they weren't wrong -- Google is expected to announce this week at the keynote for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that they are bringing out a low-cost Google PC.

My friends were more prescient than they realized.

Science without proof

Last year, John Brockman sent out a call to the global scientific and digerati community to answer the question "What ideas do you believe to be true, but cannot prove?"and 120 eminent thinkers answered. The result created a book, What we Believe but Cannot Prove.

This year, the big question being sent out is, "What is your most dangerous idea?". Now this is one that really interests me.

If I had to think of my own and narrow it down? None of them are new, though they aren't very popular. For me, it would be the disservice both science and religion have done to mankind. Probably also the idea that life isn't supposed to have innate meaning - humans aren't here to create, the world doesn't have to have a purpose. It just is.

Like I said, not new. But perhaps something from one of the more complicated and erudite minds out there may spur something for me. I'll look forward to the book.