To return to the top of the page, click on the ^ next to each title.Finding the “Third Place” at Porter’s by Lauren Rundberg On a crisp Saturday morning in September, the steady beat of blues music, randomly broken up by the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen, pours out of 614 W. Garland Street. The corner shop is home to Porter’s, a local Spokane barbershop with a retro feel. Atop the shop sits run-down apartments with mangled mini blinds and sun-bleached paint that slowly flecks from mismatched shingles sloppily adorning the exterior. Next door, “Eat at Joes” is splattered on the storefront window with what looks to be leftover poster paint.
Porter’s is run by three guys, two named Chris, and one named Blaine, the owner, who describes his motley crew as “three ordinary Spokane guys not looking to strike it rich, but just to make a living and develop a local following.”
After opening its doors last February, Porter’s has become a third place.
A home away from home, Porter’s fosters a sense of place for its customers and offers its community a more creative type of personal interaction. The all-male staff describes this interaction as “guy time,” and Porter’s is a “guy’s place” to get away and talk about “guy stuff” away from home and work.
The men of Porter’s think of their refurbished shop as something like the bar on the “Cheers” TV show—a place where “everybody knows your name.” They greet all their clients by their first names, exchange handshakes and pats on the back. They share stories and updates on their families. One customer tells of the recent success of his wife’s LASIK eye surgery: “It’s amazing—she says she can see like when she was 15.”
Even a guy who stumbles into Porter’s without an appointment is treated like one of the gang. Names are casually traded and he’s told to grab a seat in one of the six jet-black faux leather chairs that line the back wall where magazines such as Esquire, GQ, Popular Science and Rolling Stone are on hand.
Porter’s see a variety of men walk through their doors. Preppy, alternative and gray-haired men all frequent the shop. Haircuts typically last thirty minutes, as Porter’s offers a full-service treatment for nearly half the price of upper-end barbershops. Customers are offered a beverage from a mini-fridge stocked with cans of Coke—no diet, though—and bottles of Aquafina water. They are then treated to a lathering shampoo and scalp massage, while a hot towel rests on their face, oozing away stress as fast as snippets of hair fall to the barbershop floor. A neck shave is complimentary at Porters, and for an additional $12, the guys tidy up any facial stubble as well. Blaine says that at Porter’s they don’t cut “rock star hair,” just “real hair,” something practical for everyday work.
Like in an old-fashioned barbershop, the waiting area faces the barber’s chairs, allowing shop-wide conversation and creating a sense of community. The shop is one large, open room, divided into three work stations; not by partitions, but by the personalities of the barbers. Each man displays tokens of his life in the vicinity of his chair. One Chris stores all his tools and products in a garage sized black steel Craftsman toolbox covered in stickers that read “Caution Bumps Ahead,” “Ron Jon Surf Shop” and “Slippery When Wet,” the last illustrated with a girl straddling the lettering. Pictures of family decorate Blaine’s mirror. One in particular attracts a lot of attention; customers regularly ask about the young girl in the photo. Embarrassed by the questions at age 37, the barbershop owner considers taking down the black-and-white photo of his 13-year-old daughter after the sixth client asks if she’s his girlfriend. Blaine finds it humorous, though, saying, “Age is all in the mind. I plan to get old when I’m dead.”
The three barbers are all products of the same generation and its well-known trends, as their arms are clad in tattoos of unidentifiable and random designs done in bursts of brilliant color. Two wear glasses with thick frames, which succeed both in making a fashion statement and satisfying an optical necessity. All are bald or sport buzz cuts; it’s ironic perhaps for a team of barbers to have so little collective hair, yet each does have a carefully crafted goatee.
Their uniforms are as casual as their beer-and-chips staff meetings. Despite the chill of the autumn morning, cargo shorts and jeans are the uniform of the day for barbers and customers, giving an ambiance of laidback flair and casual commonality between employees and clients. The three all sport black short-sleeve tees with the Porter’s logo of a skull and scissors stenciled on the back. Their Converse and Asics tennis shoes thump on the hardwood floor that is covered in a fresh layer of hair every twenty minutes.
Smooth stucco coats three walls, painted in shades of brown; the fourth is the color of a blue BiC pen cap. A massive fire-engine red Porter’s logo made of tin is attached to one wall with bolts that look big enough to hold the Golden Gate Bridge together. Lining the inside perimeter of the shop is shiny metal paneling, approximately 3 feet tall, communicating a sharp, retro-urban feel.
A small canvas painting of a man ironing a shirt hangs in a corner, dwarfed by the storefront window. Sun floods the barbershop, supplementing the ceiling-mounted lighting, as shadows of the trees lining Garland Avenue dance on the floor. Just outside the shop, pear-yellow leaves fall to the sidewalk as the American flag hanging in the doorway sways gently in the autumn breeze.
The mood inside the shop changes according to personalities of the occupants of the three chairs. Conversations shift from a wife’s forced weekend wedding plans to conspiracy theories, like the one that men have never walked on the moon. “You should research that,” Blaine says. “I bet they’ve never been up there.” He speculates that one day everyone will all have microchips secretly embedded in their skin. “For all you know, you have one now,” he shoots toward Chris.
Blaine lounges in a barber chair waiting for his next appointment, munching on Goldfish crackers and gulping a Coke. Interjecting a story about people selling their souls on eBay, he suggests a weekly newspaper column on topics discussed in barbershops. “We talk about a lot of weird stuff,” he says. Reconsidering, he decides that a daily column would be more appropriate. The guys collectively chuckle at the notion and the Chrises agree; it would be an entertaining read.The Waking of the American Dream by Peter Halloran Every morning he goes to school at 12 a.m., long before most college students brush their teeth or scrub off their makeup to go to bed. He spends the next eight to ten hours in classrooms, professor’s offices and even in study labs and libraries. His work in the classroom is not scholastic. It’s sanitary. Enes is a member of the custodial staff at Gonzaga University.
When he gets back to his room, his wife is leaving for the hospital where she works as a nurse. Enes then drives his son to his parent’s house before falling asleep until dinner, when he picks up his son and greets his wife on her return from work.
“You look hung over,” Enes tells me as I stumble in to work. It’s more of a statement than a question, but I suppose it’s his right to know, being that he is my supervisor. It’s summer now and the work shifts are a little more humane––still 12 to 8:30, but p.m. this time, rather than a.m. I stayed at school this summer to avoid minimum wage and life with my parents back home. I figure carrying desks and drawers isn’t the worst way to make $10 an hour.
I tell him I’m not hung over, but don’t argue the point, knowing full well that he has been cleaning up puke at this school longer than I’ve been reading Plato––a full year more. He offers me a cigarette and a sip of his Red Bull, his cure-all for everything, and I decline.
“I’d be more impressed if you were hung over,” he chastises me. “The only disease you Americans have is laziness, and apparently you’re even too lazy to get drunk.”
Enes is 24 and from Bosnia. He came to America during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia between the Serbs and the Muslims in the early 1990s. “Conflict” was a word the U.N. used to describe a decade of heinous rape and genocide, of which Bosnian Muslims were the main victims. In April of 1992, Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia. It was primarily a state of Muslim Bosnians, who were consistently persecuted for their beliefs by Christian Croats. The new nation had a minority population of Serbs, who were upset with the deal and appealed to the Serb nationalist leader Slobodan Miloševic. Miloševic took matters into his own hands and attacked Bosnia in the name of nationalism.
Before the war, Enes’ family lived in a small farming town only 30 miles from the Serbian border. His father owned a small business and 16 acres of land that he intended his children to inherit. Enes was nine when the war broke out, a mere boy in a man’s war. Serbian leaders did not see him as a boy, but as a potential killer (the same could be said for anyone who was old enough to carry a gun). Considering the rate at which women and children were getting killed, Enes’ father decided to take the potentially fatal risk of escaping the country. As if the scenario weren’t grim enough, earlier that week close to 100 of his relatives and fellow townspeople made a run for the border. They were discovered. The trucks that came to patrol were already full of prisoners so Serbian soldiers lined them up and shot them all. Enes recalls the story of a father who had made a shield of his body only to have the bullet go through his shoulder and into his own son’s head. The story reached Enes’ ears just days before his own father was shot and wounded.
The message was clear: staying was suicide, but leaving could be even worse.
Enes’ family escaped in the middle of a cold night in late February. His father sent the family ahead of him, saying he would meet them the next day. He didn’t. A sniper shot cut his father’s escape attempt short. Down one member, the family trudged through the forest until they reached the house of a relative at the last place in the world they wanted to be––Serbia. It was the worst night of his life: 40-plus relatives and strangers packed like sardines, knowing that at any time discovery potentially lurked in every slightest sound. From Serbia the family escaped to Germany to avoid the war, not knowing if their father was alive, dead or living in a camp so miserable he wished he were dead. His father joined them in Germany 15 months later when the war ended, after a heart-wrenching stint in a prison camp. Enes lived in Germany until the age of 15 when his family moved to Spokane, Washington, arriving on a rainy day in early May of 1998. A distant relative who had settled in Eastern Washington initially gave them the idea of coming to America. Moving back to Bosnia was not a possibility because the end of the war brought communist rule, something Enes’ father deplored.
Enes’ arrival in America was rather unceremonious––no Ellis Island, no Statue of Liberty to take him into her bosom––just a Bosnian arriving on political asylum from a war that no one cared about.
Over lunch Enes mocks my sandwich. I have two sandwiches, to be specific, but neither of them have more than two ingredients.
“That looks disgusting,” he tells me, with his mouth full of falafel, homemade bread and roasted potatoes in a delicious-smelling beef sauce. His wife made him the spread, and I inquire as to whether she would be interested in making a double portion tomorrow. He says that his wife is a nice woman but not that nice. They have been married for almost two years. They met when Enes was finishing up high school at the age of 19 and got married two years later. His wife, Yenna, came to America for the same reason Enes did, for she was an immigrant on political asylum herself. Last year they gave birth to a son, whose name is tattooed on the inner forearm of Enes’ left arm.
Enes explains the significance of the tattoo. It’s meaning is simple: he loves his son. Its location, however, is a much more complicated story. Enes’ father no longer has skin on his forearm, just a stretched scar that looks as if it may break at any point. During his imprisonment years before, the guards noticed the traditional Muslim symbol of a moon and star on his right forearm. A guard instructed him that he had 24 hours to remove the tattoo or his arm would be cut off just below the elbow. He tried everything to make it go away, including heating metal surfaces and burning his arm, but that only made the mark fade, as well as making him pass out. When his captors found him the next day still bearing the mark of his faith, they took him away to cut off his arm, but couldn’t find anything to do it with. Instead, they gave him a dull knife and told him to shave off the skin himself in their presence. With no anesthetic and no bandaging he almost died of blood loss.
During the tumult in Croatia in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Serbs systematically killed those who professed the Muslim religion and were of Bosnian blood. Before peace was reached in 1995, more than 200,000 Bosnians were murdered, and more than 2,000,000 became refugees, many of whom would never return––such as Enes. This is why former assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke called this particular episode of ethnic cleansing “the greatest failure of the West since the 1930s.”
Nothing sets the stage for success like failure, and in this case, the failure of the West to intervene in the war ironically led to an opportunity for it to prove its worth. America gave Enes a place to settle down, not just for himself, but for his entire family. His homestead may not be the 16 acres his father had, but there’s room enough for his son to run around in the yard.
Is it utopia? Hardly. At the very mention of the American dream, Enes scoffs. The American dream is not what Enes found. Enes found Spokane, Washington. He found a life of culture shock, language difficulties and dirty dorm bathrooms.
Enes doesn’t go to college in the traditional sense, but he works full time at the college supporting his family by cleaning vomit off toilets and picking up pizza boxes in the dorms.
Is he bitter? Far from it. Enes sees no reason why his son can’t one day attend the college he works crazy hours at. Maybe his boy will be a star Gonzaga basketball player, if he’s lucky enough to inherit his father’s six-foot-four-inch frame. Enes insists that going back to school couldn’t happen for him––he’s simply not smart enough, nor does he know the language well enough. But his boy? He’ll learn English without a hitch.
If Americans look into their family’s histories, many find that first-generation immigrants didn’t have the American dream. They did, however, pass it on. “For 80 percent of Americans, if you want it, you can get,” he tells me. “You just have to work your ass off for it.” And he does.
Enes sees his life in America as a work in progress.
Enes is one of more than 37 million immigrants in the United States. While politicians on Capitol Hill argue over who should be allowed to live on American soil, Enes laughs at the talking heads. He finds it ironic that those who pay immigrants to watch the children and clean the house express indignation at American dollars landing in the pockets of those not born here.
We clean the restroom of an all-male freshman dorm. Rubber gloves stretch up to his elbows. He speaks of the transition from communism in Bosnia to the culture shock of the materialism and precision of Germany, to America, where people refuse to have any fun.
Back in Bosnia, if you walk down the street of a town late at night, he insists, people will be sitting out in front, enjoying a drink and talking to one another, greeting people as they walk by––and all of this on a weekday. His voice drips with nostalgia for his mother country. He has nothing but the utmost gratitude to America, but some things just aren’t the same. America is, well, different. He doesn’t live in Vegas, and he doesn’t drive a Cadillac, but he says he has no right to complain about the American way.
“I feel bad for people like you, staying up until three in the morning studying for tests,” he says. “In a matter of years, you’ll be working as hard as I am.”
He points out that my life isn’t all that different from his. I have the same miserable job he has, and we both know this isn’t our final career destination. What about his salary, I wonder. He can’t be making much more than I do. He tells me he has one. His wife also works, but they have a home, two cars, and their child is never watched by a non-family member, something in which Enes takes great pride.
As a first-generation college student, I was warned by my parents of the evils of education. A liberal arts education would most likely make me a damn liberal and an unhappy one at that. How did they know? It probably shouldn’t be attributed to a college education, but when my parents and grandparents speak of the “good ol’ days,” I wax cynical. When I look around and see poverty, hunger and injustice all across the states, I question the American dream. Living in a country that starts unnecessary wars and provides weapons to corrupt world governments makes me think that America’s days as a world force of good, like we were in World War II, are long gone.
The American dream? Perhaps it is just a dream. A bad dream for some, and a mirage for others.
Maybe...
On the other hand, maybe I need Enes as much or more than Enes needs America. There is no guarantee that the American lifestyle is here to stay, and it could flee if those living here, such as myself, lose sight of it. It’s a shame that it takes a story like Enes’ to realize that although America may have its shortcomings, and although all of it’s policies may not be perfect, the American dream is still something that you don’t have to wake up from.Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: A Playful Defense of Poetry to the Facebook Generation by Mary Elder “Poetry is high-quality information.”
––Gary Snyder
Don’t worry. I’m not going to attempt to define poetry in this essay, or discern its purpose. What I am interested in is how people of my age group, 18 to 24, experience poetry and how they get information from it. Although it’s old hat to say that we live in a “sound-bite” age, this fact is also relevant to understanding how someone who has Sparknoted her personality on Facebook and Sparknoted Moby Dick on Sparknotes and who can have entire conversations via 11-word text messages could also enjoy “Howl.” I want to argue that poetry is the perfect medium for my generation precisely because it is the most efficient, most succinct, most pleasurable form of information available to us. Take that, MySpace!
But wait, you say, maybe a red wheelbarrow and all that depends upon it is succinct, but “Four Quartets” sure isn’t. There’s four of them. As for pleasurable, no matter what genre of poetry a professor is trying to share, there are always going to be some people who look like they want to stab Sylvia Plath in the eye, and that isn’t even getting into pre-modern poetry. Allow me to explain. Knowing nothing about chemistry, I nonetheless feel confident in comparing poetry to a chemical reaction, because T. S. Eliot did. The chemist has many tools and many substances. When combined, they are no longer individual parts, but a new, and sometimes explosive, whole. The job of a poet is to do this with language, culture and feeling. A poem is irreducible. A poem says exactly what it feels, not what it means, although meaning is a good way in.
On this note, I must bring up an oft-heard question, asked by lumpen and irritating individuals: “Why can’t Shakespeare just say what he means? Why does he have to get all complicated about it? Isn’t ‘I love you and wish you wouldn’t cheat on me’ enough?” The lit geeks reading this chuckle knowingly and feel superior, but I’m guessing a few of you have had this thought, however fleetingly, perhaps when staring at “Ode to the West Wind.” Poetry succeeds in conveying emotion and information. More people write poems about being in love than write essays on it. (“Were one to compare a person to a summer’s day, the effects would be social, political and economic…”)
This is even more true of complex poetry. I don’t know exactly what The Waste Land means, but I do have a specific set of emotional responses that form a kind of landscape in my mind. I can name some of these: sadness, amusement, frustration, nostalgia for places it reminds me of, et cetera, but these feelings taken as a whole and in combination are only connected to The Waste Land. It is not just the most efficient, but also the only way I can experience those responses. Why would I want to feel that? Because the greater a person’s emotional range the more equipped that person is to handle life. When we read poetry, we are given direct access to the emotional states of other people living in different situations. This seems like useful information to me.
As for pleasurable, how often does the informer take time to make information palatable to the informed? How many textbooks contain treatises consciously designed to appeal to the senses? We like fun, people my age do. The difference between “I love you and wish you wouldn’t cheat on me” and a Shakespearean sonnet is the difference between canned food and a gourmet meal, a gourmet meal in which you come to a fuller understanding of yourself. Sensory enjoyment is at the core of poetry. Donald Hall compares the build up and release of tension in a poem to sexual gratification, and I couldn’t agree more. There is intellectual pleasure as the mind tries to comprehend what “and when the stars threw down their spears” means, and physical pleasure as the lips move over the rhythm and the sound of the words. Delicious. Would that more forms of communication rested on the desire to please!
In short, the goal of poetry is the same goal I have when I update my online profiles, the same goal political candidates have when they invent catch phrases and slogans, the same goal television producers have when they market a show: information efficiently conveyed, which is also fun. So go ahead, try a poem. All the cool kids are doing it. You’ll like it.
Wikipediphobia by Allie McCullough It was a cool December evening. As I strolled through the dorm, weaving in and out of frantically gathered study groups, I watched faces turn from red to pale to blue. Fingers flipped wildly through inch-thick tomes and treatises: Hobbes, Freud, Einstein and Twain. Madly they tried to find themes in Austen and Homer, to analyze Aristotle and Hume. I passed by slowly, and the anxious voices of midnight studiers dulled softly as I approached my room. Opening the door, I collapsed onto my bed, tucked my hands behind my head and drifted off into a deep and peaceful sleep.
Some of us were not stressed at all before finals. Some of us were confident about the next day. But how? Why, we were supposed to read five different books––each in a different language, and none in our own! We had to decipher lectures with no binding thread, just spurts of information that came to our professors’ minds in the moment! Such a task is difficult; surely one could not pass a class without nearly anthologizing all the information!
It is quite possible, in fact, because of one of the greatest creations of this decade: Wikipedia. The name strikes fear in the hearts of academics, who associate it with lies and misinformation, plagiarism and the worst of the “information age.” Even worse than the site itself is that students––at prestigious universities around the country––use Wikipedia as an information source. Using the site, they write papers and study for tests. What an irresponsible assumption they make, supposing the information from such a corrupt source is worthy of academic writing!
I must first inform readers who may not be familiar with the word “Wikipedia” of its definition, since I have already presented its connotations. Wikipedia is “a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia,” according to the website’s entry for its own name. In other words, it is an online “encyclopedia” with various entries, and each entry can be created, edited and updated by Wikipedia accountholders. Shivers run down the spines of peer-reviewing academics everywhere.
Picture this situation: You have been assigned a three-page philosophy paper comparing and contrasting the philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. You have read the Apology, The Republic, and Metaphysics. You have heard over seven lectures on the topic. You sit down to write your paper, and you have no idea what you are going to do. One of the main problems with university education is the style in which we learn. We spend hours trying to decipher hundred-word sentences only to discover that Descartes has brought us right back to where we started. Unfortunately, sometimes lectures seem no different. We know what Plato said about shadow reality, but to weave that into a coherent essay comparing his philosophy to others’ is quite difficult without a “big picture” overview. Academic performance and overall understanding of material would significantly increase if students were given a “For Dummies” pamphlet overview of the course before beginning any material. We would understand the connections between two lectures, the connections between Socrates’ lectures. We would be able to see the big picture, and we would know the point of the course.
Enter Wikipedia, the messiah of the confused, the savior of the student drunk with information. In seven minutes I have re-read Socrates, Plato and Aristotle––almost all of their works––and seen practically an overview of the last four weeks of reading and lectures. If there is one undergraduate who can tell me this is not at least the beginning of a relief from confusion, I would be amazed and, frankly, in disbelief.
Why do so many students use Wikipedia? Some, of course, use it more than others. Many use it for a review or an overview of learned information; others substitute it completely for buying $500 worth of textbooks. In any case, students are using it, and academics are going crazy. Wikipediphobia, however, is irrational. The conversion may be slow, but it is well worth it.
The primary reason why Wikipedia is criticized is the ability for almost any person to add and change information on the site. The website concedes, “In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months.” Apparently, the political journalist had some defamatory comments written about him on the site, and few of his supporters frequented his site enough to notice the information. However, for the same reason people mistrust Wikipedia, it can be considered somewhat reliable, at least in subjects and entries that are frequented by people knowledgeable in those fields. For instance, the particularly long article “Plato” is viewed an average of 4,983 times per day. Although I may have little proof––or perhaps I am naïve––it seems to me that most people who view articles about great philosophers are somewhat interested in the subject and are not simply looking for the easiest hole in which to slip false information. Edited twenty-two times between January and February 2008, the article has not been marked for false content since April 10, 2007 and has seen millions of viewers since then. The problem on April 10 was that the article referred to “God” where it was supposed to say “the gods.” There was a mistake by one user, and it was quickly rectified by a hundred others.
Not only can one flag an article as being incorrect, but he can report contributors whose submissions are less than satisfactory. These notices are the first thing that readers see when they open a new article, and they can be used to express a variety of objections: biased, incomplete, misleading, lacking citations, too lengthy, needing expansion and irrelevant.
Wikipedia may not be a flawless source of information; in fact, even as a daily user I compare what I read with common sense. However, that is not to say that it is not a great place to start. Having an overview of information––or simply a review of things you already know to be true––is invaluable when trying to study or write a paper that requires information from several weeks past. I would go so far as to say that it is even a legitimate source for citations in certain papers. While professors often hold their academic noses in the air at this, it is not the most unreliable source there is. Quite the contrary, frequently viewed and edited articles on Wikipedia seem to be better sources than others which are acceptable by many professors: fellow academics’ websites, one-hundred-reader magazines and journals, etc. I have yet to write a paper marked by a professor as having incorrect information since my discovery of Wikipedia in early high school. I have never written a wrong answer on a test because of studying incorrect information on Wikipedia. I do not doubt that there are articles on the website of questionable reliability, but I find that its usefulness in condensing and overviewing information far exceeds the possibility of receiving false information.
Wikipediphobia is an irrational fear that can only be relieved through the realization that Wikipedia is a reviewed source of information that aids people’s understanding of certain subjects. Wikipedia is one of the most used sites of its kind, so one can find articles on millions of subjects. Commonly viewed entries are subject to more scrutiny simply for being representative of the site, not to mention because they are being seen by a higher number of critical eyes. As with any source, Wikipedia information must be taken with a grain of salt, but rather than criticizing the site and writing it off as unreliable, academics should at least try to embrace the phenomenon. As for me, when it comes to finals, I will be with the wise students who condense the information and condense study time, leaving more time for relaxation and even more learning.A Hard Habit to Break: Addicted to Information by Andrea Crow In “The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive?” Matt Richtel discusses his perception that many people have developed a dependency on receiving new information.1 He believes that people with access to technology such as the Internet, which connects them to frequently updated data, develop a form of Attention Deficit Disorder, where they quickly become bored and antsy if they are removed from these information sources. He calls this condition “pseudo-attention deficit disorder” and explains
its sufferers do not have actual A.D.D., but, influenced by technology and the pace of modern life, have developed shorter attention spans. They become frustrated with long-term projects, thrive on the stress of constant fixes of information, and physically crave the bursts of stimulation from checking e-mail or voice mail or answering the phone.
While Richtel here may sound like an extremist, I feel there are few people, especially among young adults, who could deny that there is truth behind his allegations.
I know that I personally find it very difficult to do one thing at a time. Right now, for example, I am listening to music, making tea, talking with my housemate, downloading a movie and writing an essay all at once. There are six windows open on my laptop screen—my iTunes, my calendar, my instant messenger, my dictionary, an Internet window and this document. If I try to do just one thing at a time, I do find myself getting antsy for more stimuli. When working on long papers, I find myself stopping every hour or so to check my e-mail, facebook, LiveJournal, and my favorite blogs. I know that I’m not in the minority with this behavior either. In fact, compared to most people I know, my Internet habits are fairly mild, probably because I tend to be on the computer-illiterate side. This craving for stimuli does not only concern my interaction with computers, either. When I’m walking to class, I turn on my iPod or check the voice-mail on my cell phone. Other people I know whip out their Sidekick every fifteen minutes or so to check news updates, sports stats and messages from friends. I especially identify with the quote Richtel cites regarding these information sources: “I use it when I’m in a waiting situation—if I’m standing in line, waiting to be served for lunch, or getting takeout coffee at Starbucks. And, my God, at the airport it’s disastrous to have to wait there.” I understand this sentiment completely—I feel like I’ll go crazy if I have to stand around doing nothing.
When I look back at how people entertained themselves throughout history, I cannot imagine how they survived. Like in Jane Austen novels, where everyone sits around having stiff and awkward conversation in the drawing room, or listens as someone reads aloud from a book, or cross-stitches in silence. Try putting modern young adults in the same situation and we would all go mad. I don’t know if this development can be termed as good or bad, though. Maybe we have less patience and less time for reflection, but we also have more opportunity to engage actively and extensively in society. We may not speak as carefully or as well but we have more knowledge within our reach and more opportunities to communicate it. We may not be able to sit still without stimuli, but we rarely are forced into situations where we would have to do so because we constantly have opportunities for activity. If data is indeed addictive, the change it causes in society may be just that—simply a change that is neither ultimately good nor bad.
End Notes
1. Richtel, Matt. “The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive?” New York Times, 6 July 2003.
Too Much Information by Chris Heinrich It is said that today we of the Western World live in the Information Age. I tend to agree. Information has become as powerful a resource as lumber or coal, and at no time before has access to every sort and manner of information been so widespread. Mere Internet access has transformed physical libraries into anachronisms as the World Wide Web provides simple and effective means of searching for even the most esoteric topics in the most obscure academic journals. The Oxford English Dictionary and Encyclopædia Brittanica, titanic references which were formerly unavailable to most because of their physical heft and equally sizable prices, are freely available online. Paper newspapers may soon be obsolete when they only report on the events of yesterday while news which is literally updated by the minute can be found online.
Have we, however, paused to consider the beginning of the Internet’s implications? Information alone is without value, positive or negative, and to call this “the Information Age” is a descriptive action. Information has become a powerful resource of its own. Is that good or bad? I answer that it is not necessarily either. Were it inherently good, people would celebrate evenings spent on Wikipedia, and were information bad, Ken Jennings1 may very well be one of the most dastardly villains humanity has ever known. But the opportunity to do good in the present age must be taken with respect to that which makes it so, and if we want this to become a Golden Age as well, we must be aware of what our proper relationship with information must be and what information is.
Consider TMI, an acronym for “too much information.” Most commonly, it is used a response, be it written or verbal, to those who too eagerly and fully share more details of an event than necessary, to the point of embarrassing those reading or listening.
This term is useful in many situations. By the fourth minute of the mechanic’s awkward explanation as to why a lack of fluid caused your car’s transmission to fail, you will likely have achieved a state of detachment from the physical environment so complete that a Zen Buddhist would envy it. Before that point arrives, however, you may find yourself holding back from grabbing her by the shirt and yelling, “I don’t care!” only because of common courtesy.
Then there are those somber situations in which TMI, with all of its implied flippancy and casualness, is the last of all possible responses. In just the past few months, Kenya exploded in violence following a disputed election. The deaths that directly followed it are currently totaled between 1,000 and 1,500. Many times that number were displaced and forced to become refugees. For those who keep pace with international affairs, it likely did not take more than a week before headlines like “Kenya’s Kikuyu’s are now targets of rival tribes” and “Protesters and police clash in Kenya” did not warrant a second look. Like Stalin said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
At some point, we become cold to the information before us. We have heard or read enough and have formed a conclusion. We grow weary of detail, especially of things that do not pertain to us, and in the most dangerous circumstances, we lose our empathy and even become cynical when faced with information regarding the most extreme cases, ones which test our very imagination and comprehension.
In the face of these examples, we must properly recognize information as a tool. It serves to guide action. Rather than pursue information for its own sake, we must be prepared to recognize when we know enough and then act from there. Why stop paying attention to the mechanic? Because what she has to say means nothing to us. It is likely that the next time this problem crops up, we will once again take it to a mechanic, perhaps a less chatty one. And I believe it is the hopelessness of hearing of terror across the oceans, the inability to act and relieve it, that causes us to become so cold to reports from troubled nations.
We must be ready to say, “Enough” and move on. Our brother is in a hot and heavy relationship? Let us make sure he is prepared for it. The mechanic just said the third word you have never heard before? Thank her and get the car. Another Third World nation has erupted in flames? As counter-intuitive as it may seem, let us remove our attention from it and onto those things we are ready and able to act upon.
We know enough to make our decisions. Now we must act.
End Notes
1. Considering his winning streak on Jeopardy! in 2004, we must assume that, in the case that information were inherently evil, Jennings would be a villain because he has so much. The Issue with Ubiquitous Information by Chris Sullins Welcome to the modern world. It’s big. It’s scary. At its center is the Internet, a tool of such massive utility that everyone tries to use it. Thus it overflows with an inconceivable vastness of information…and is rendered useless. Thus we have the paradox of the Internet: the more valuable it becomes, the harder it is to use. This paradox emerges from what is called signal-to-noise ratio. It may sound unfamiliar to some, but it is far from foreign to our lives. When a phone conversation is drowned out by static, the noise has overpowered the signal. When you can’t hear your friend’s joke in a crowded restaurant, this ratio is coming into play. Signal is the desired message. Noise is anything that interferes with that message.
Take spam, for instance. Spam is noise in an e-mail inbox. A large percentage of the world’s daily e-mail volume is composed of junk mail. I personally get about 13 spam messages every day, which sadly outweighs the number of legitimate messages I receive. Since it would be unacceptable to manually sort hundreds of messages weekly, the spam filter was invented. A typical spam filter checks each message for spam keywords such as “Viagra” or “stocks”; it checks the e-mail address against a list of known spam senders; it checks the number of links; and it performs various other tests. A message with a low enough score is thrown into the spam folder. A competent filter will let through only one or two messages every day—well within the bounds of what can be handled manually. Spam filters reside at the simplest level of noise reduction. A message is either spam or not, and it is bound by the necessity of carrying its spam content, which makes it relatively easy to sort out from legitimate messages. There are more interesting signal-to-noise problems, however.
Take, for example, the search engine. Like spam filters, it is rule driven. In the case of an Internet search, however, it isn’t so easy to determine what to include and what not to include. Undesirable sites are not necessarily malicious; they just don’t happen to fulfill the needs of the searcher. To make it even more interesting, order becomes important. Search engines strive to put the desired result on the first page, because they have found that few people actually look at subsequent results. Ultimately, though, these problems are solved in a way that is similar to the spam filter. Various factors award points to a result. These factors may include the number of times the search terms appear, whether they appear in the title or simply in a paragraph and the popularity of that particular page. The results are sorted based on their overall score.
Our third case is the comments section of a weblog (or any online forum, really). Here, there are no search terms. Spam comes into play, but so does inanity. Who wants to read ten comments that say the same thing or comments that don’t add anything to the conversation? To increase the signal-to-noise ratio, comments must be filtered by quality. How can this be done? After all, if there is one thing that computers are bad at, it’s understanding language. Language is far too haphazard and anarchistic. Then there is the abundance of synonyms and equivalent phrasings, metaphors and idioms. Computers just don’t understand things—they process binary code. Perhaps the biggest problem in developing artificial intelligence is the difficulties in mimicking the understanding of concepts. The capability does not yet exist. Even simple measurements like comment length are useless here; the deepest insight can be expressed by a single word, whereas twelve rambling paragraphs might say nothing. It is a well-established fact that neither refined vocabulary nor a knack for eloquence can ensure worthy discourse. Very little that a computer can easily measure is of use.
This means that it’s hopeless, right? Of course not! What is the Internet but a network of external devices that have a knack for language processing? By “external devices” I mean “people.” You. Me. Aunt Mabel. We are all vastly superior to computers at categorization, understanding language and playing Go.1 Okay, I’m not actually any good at Go, but some people are. In the past few years we have seen the dominance of the collaborative reference site Wikipedia. It is one of the most important sites on the Web. There are approximately 2.3 million articles in the English Wikipedia alone, driven entirely by user-submitted content and editing. It covers everything from popular new bands to esoteric mathematical theorems, and it operates at a surprisingly high level of quality.2 How is this possible?
The power of the masses is always a bit startling. Give enough people a social incentive to do something that they find interesting, and many of them will do it. Wikipedia relies on devoted contributors who manage small areas of interest and expertise. These contributors provide the necessary quality control over the raw power of collaborative content. This raw power is already being used to filter information. Look at Slashdot, a popular geek news site. The comment threads can be filtered by ratings given by a host of moderators. It has proven remarkably effective at pushing the best comments to people’s attention and removing the worst ones from the discussion entirely. The signal-to-noise ratio remains high. Another example of the power of groups is the social bookmarking site Digg. A user of Digg will post a link to, say, a picture of Niagara Falls. If another person on Digg likes the picture, they may give it a point. Eventually these points add up, and the picture ends up on the front page.
Collaborative content and filtering are good solutions for the here and now, but the big frontier for information is artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is an ambiguous concept. In science fiction, it means a non-biological intelligence that could rival or surpass our own. Practically, though, it means something very different: the science of mimicking our own intelligence. This is important. It’s a lot easier to get a computer to act like it understands language than to get it to actually comprehend the symbols of which language is composed. It is sufficient for our purposes to design an artificial intelligence that can judge whether or not a comment is of high quality. It doesn’t also need to appreciate Rachmaninoff or be confused by Tsara. Even the narrowest, most primitive problems may prove extremely difficult. Think about everything that is involved in deciding whether a book is worth reading or whether a song is catchy. A human evaluation requires experience with what is good and what is not; it requires an aesthetic sense; and it requires a response. How could a computer even mimic these things? Answer that, and you will find yourself plagued with job offers. The closer we get to mimicking the relevant aspects of ourselves, the more useful artificial intelligence becomes. We’re not there yet, needless to say.
To conclude, let’s take a step back from the land of dreams and into the real world. A sad transition, I know. But important, if this is going to be of any use besides as science fiction.3 The most practical improvements we can currently make are improvements in the way we perform the following basic steps: Use algorithms to filter out spam; Use limited AI to perform preliminary content sorting; Use the power of the masses to refine the content sorting; Find ways to move good but obscure content to prominence; Move outdated but prominent content to archives.
If we can do these things well, we will ensure that the net remains usable until AI moves into its heyday.
End Notes
1. Go is a Chinese board game that is well known in AI circles for its computational difficulty. While chess programs can beat grand masters, Go programs have only achieved amateur level.
2. A brief study by Nature asked experts to examine selected articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica. They revealed only 4 major factual errors in each; minor ambiguities and misleading statements were in Britannica’s favor with a 3:4 ratio. See http://www.news.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
3. If you want science fiction AI, look up the concept of the technological singularity. That should keep you Wikipedia-happy for hours, if you’re sufficiently nerdy.
Identity, Relationships and the Internet by Stephanie Scarff In the past couple of decades Internet use has skyrocketed. This relatively new medium combines some of the benefits of older technologies, such as bridging distances and reaching a mass audience, with its own innovative features. One of the unique features is the anonymity afforded to its users and the range of activities they can perform through the use of this medium. The Internet is interactive as well as a source of information. The three main uses of the Internet are for information, entertainment and communication.1 In fact, the primary use of the Internet is the use of e-mail to keep in touch with people and maintain relationships.2 While many people use e-mail to stay in contact with friends, other people use the Internet as a primary means of communication with people they do not know face-to-face. This leads to the question of the quality of online relationships versus those in the real world. The anonymity of the Internet’s users provides an innovative environment in which the real identities of users may never be known. This has important implications for the identities that people present online. Some people may present an accurate representation of themselves, others may experiment with different characters and still others may feel free to disclose aspects of their personalities online that are unknown to people with whom they are in face-to-face contact. The technology of the Internet has brought many new opportunities to people, but it also has important consequences on identity and relationships. Contrary to criticism that the Internet fosters identity confusion and takes time away from relationships in real life, it has been shown that the Internet is of value in helping individuals express and determine their identity while at the same time providing an opportunity for relationships that might not have otherwise come about.
The possible anonymity of social interactions over the Internet brings up important questions about the effects this has on the identity that people present. The variety of social venues on the Internet and the relative anonymity of its users allows for people to experiment with the presentation of different aspects of their identity. It is important at this point to define what is meant by the self and by identity. The self is made up of the collection of beliefs we hold about ourselves. This collection of beliefs is referred to as self-concept.3 We can consciously alter the way that we present ourselves, and this is particularly easy to do under the anonymous conditions of the Internet because people don’t experience the same costs or risks of identity presentation that exist in direct social relations. Once someone has an established identity within his or her social group, it is costly to alter it for fear of rejection or disapproval. In this way the Internet serves as a safety zone where people can experiment with self-presentations since they don’t have so much to lose. There have been many reasons proposed to explain how and why people present different aspects of their identity at different times and in various situations. This is, in effect, the study of self-presentation, which can be defined as, “deliberate efforts to act in ways that create a particular impression of the self.”4
There are many different theories in psychology that assume people possess multiple senses of the self. There is the idea of “possible selves” which are the different selves people feel they have the potential to become. There is also the idea of ideal, ought and actual selves, which illustrates that there is a difference in a person’s sense of ideal self, who they think they should be, and the person they actually are. The differences in these selves lead to different self-presentations depending upon whom the person interacts with and what the situation involves. Carl Jung believed that people possessed a “persona,” which is the version of the self that is presented publicly. Perhaps most important in the consideration of the effects of Internet interaction on identity is Carl Jung’s differentiation between the “true self” and the “actual self.” Rogers believed that people possess a “true self” which encompasses the person’s inner perceptions of their identity and also an “actual self” which encompasses only the aspects of the true self that are expressed in social life.5 The importance of this distinction lies in the fact that people often feel that only a small part of their true identity is expressed in social interactions. This can lead to identity fragmentation and frustration if a person feels he or she is not able to express aspects of himself to others that he considers particularly important to his identity.
A study performed by Bargh, etal in 2002 illustrates the differences in initial interactions that occur face-to-face and online.6 The results of the study show that an individual’s true-self concept is more readily available during interactions with a new acquaintance over the Internet and that an individual’s actual-self concept is more readily available during face-to-face interactions with a new acquaintance. This means that people are better able to express aspects of their true self in online interactions. The result is that the partner with whom they are interacting forms an impression of the person that is closer to the way that person actually sees him or herself. It is often difficult to express some aspects of our identities during face-to-face interactions with others, and the Internet seems to ease these difficulties: “The greater anonymity of Internet communication encompasses the fact that people lack information about each other that is usually highly influential on first impressions and liking, such as physical attractiveness, dress, and mannerisms.”7 This helps to fulfill the vital need we have for others to see us as we see ourselves. In this way our identity can be recognized and validated by others.
Another important way in which Internet communication helps people to express and enhance their identities is the free range of experimentation that comes along with the anonymity of the Internet This has been found to be especially important in younger age groups since these people have a less clear concept of their own identity. The results of research by Matsuba show the importance of self-concept clarity in how the Internet affects identity formation. Self-concept clarity refers to people’s confidence in their ideas about themselves and clarity in how they have defined the self. This clarity and confidence is recognized as stable over time. Young people who do not have a clear and stable image of the identity spend more time on the Internet: “Internet use was negatively correlated with self-concept clarity, and associated with moratorium identity status. These results suggest that the Internet may be an important aid for young adults as they searched for an adult identity.”8 Considering the fact that most of the time people spend on the Internet is used for communication, it can be inferred that these young people are spending their time online experimenting with different presentations of themselves through communication with others by way of chat rooms, instant messaging, e-mail and social networking sites. Self-concept clarity was negatively associated with interacting with strangers online, instant messaging and having a secret screen name or e-mail address: “In terms of Internet use, the self, and identity, our results suggest that people who lack self-clarity and who are searching for an adult identity may use the Internet to explore different facets of the self.”9 In short, people who already feel they know who they are spend less time on the Internet engaging in activities through which others can affirm and recognize their identity because this feedback about their identity is no longer necessary.
In another study of Internet use and identity formation, Maczewski communicated with youths online and asked questions about their Internet habits. He ascertained that online networking and chat sites provide young people with a place to explore their identity while communicating with other similar people. It is common for young people today to view identity as fluid and changing rather than a single concrete entity that they can discover. Another important finding of the study was that actual and virtual worlds seem complimentary rather than competitive, interconnected rather than fragmented. It can be seen that the Internet provides a valuable medium for identity experimentation especially for younger people who don’t have a clear or stable self-concept.10
The effect of the Internet on relationships has begun to receive more attention in recent years as the use of the Internet for personal communication continues to grow. Relationships online are obviously different from worldly relationships in many important ways. Taylor, et al maintain that all close relationships share three primary characteristics.11 These relationships involve frequent and long-term interaction, include many different activities and events and consist of a strong influence between people. The only characteristic of close relationships that an online relationship might fail to meet is that of varied activities and events. Most online relationships are limited to chatting or other forms of interpersonal communication. Though online relationships meet two of the three main requirements, they fall short in the actual communication itself. An important aspect is missing from communication over the Internet––nonverbal communications. Nonverbal communications effectively relate feelings and emotions where words aren’t always adequate. People’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice and frequency of eye contact are important cues in worldly interactions to how the other person is feeling. Without these nonverbal cues, it is harder to interpret the other person’s words and derive their whole meaning. However, the absence of these characteristics can also create relationships that are based on shared values and beliefs rather than more superficial characteristics present in face-to-face interactions.
Matsuba found that face-to-face close friendships were higher in nurturance, intimacy, satisfaction and conflict than online close friendships.12 There are greater extremes, both good and bad, in real-world close friendships than in close friendships online. It was also found that lonely individuals were more likely to use the Internet for communication. At least in some cases, the people who lack fulfilling relationships in the real world try to find what they are missing by logging on to the Internet However, friendships developed online do not seem to be as rich and diverse as those developed in real-life. Cummings, et al, found through surveys of Internet users that the Internet is perceived as less valuable for building and maintaining close relationships. They also found that psychological closeness is perceived as stronger for face-to-face interactions.13 Though Cummings and his colleagues found that the Internet is less effective than other means of forming and sustaining strong social relationships, it can be used to supplement real-life relationships with the unique ones that the Internet can foster. As long as social relations on the Internet do not serve as a replacement for real-life relationships, they can be a healthy part of one’s social life and sense of identity.
Though friendships developed online differ in important ways from those developed in real life, this does not imply that online friendships are less valuable or that one’s time would be better spent developing relationships in the real world. On the contrary, online relationships have valuable characteristics which relationships in the real world lack. Because the Internet provides relative anonymity (as seen in the ability to present different identities), social interaction is based entirely on the words that are exchanged. One study assessed interactions between new acquaintances both online and face-to-face: “The greater anonymity of Internet communication encompasses the fact that people lack information about each other that is usually highly influential on first impressions and liking, such as physical attractiveness, dress, and mannerisms.”14 It was found that the acquaintances liked each other better if they communicated over the Internet The explanation posed for this phenomenon is that in the absence of visual and other nonverbal cues of the partner, people are free to project their own idealized qualities onto the other. Acquaintances who interacted online filled in this missing information with attributes they desired in a close relationship. This did not happen in the face-to-face interaction because there was more information available to each acquaintance and therefore less of an opportunity to fill in the missing details of the other person with one’s own ideal characteristics of the other person. For this reason, greater liking occurred between strangers who met online rather than face-to-face.15
It has been proposed that the anonymity of the Internet can have a deindividuating effect, reducing inhibitions and allowing people to disclose information at a higher level than usual in face-to-face conversations. While this is important in presenting an identity that is deeply reflective of who one feels he is, there are also some negative consequences. When people present identities to be accepted and recognized by others, the other person often adjusts the identity they themselves present. This leads to a cycle of trying to be who the other person is expecting. This could serve to minimize differences (increasing conformity of identity) and lead people to downplay important and unique aspects of themselves. In these cases, group-level social identities become more important than individual identities and conformity among group members increases whether the members are very similar or not. Though this is a potential risk, the benefits of presenting a deeply reflective identity to others over the Internet outweigh the risks. By sharing aspects of one’s self that are hard to convey in real life, a person has the chance to be accepted for who he is on some of the deepest levels. This identity recognition is important to self-esteem and overall life satisfaction. The relationships that this level of self-disclosure can foster have the potential to be deep, lasting and fulfilling, though possibly less rich overall than relationships in real life.
Some concerns have been raised over the value of online relationships as opposed to those in real life. There have been arguments that increased time spent socializing online decreases time spent socializing in real life. Because people spend hours interacting socially online, it has been assumed that they spend less time socializing in real life. There is continuing debate over whether time spent online is related to loneliness, isolation and impoverished social exchange, or whether it is related to increased and enhanced social connectivity. Bargh and McKenna cited a study that found that increased time in Internet use was accounted for by decreased time watching television and reading the newspaper rather than decreased time interacting with family and friends. These results show that Internet users don’t spend less time in face-to-face interaction, but rather create extended social networks that serve purposes that face-to-face relationships can’t fulfill alone.16
Another way in which the Internet serves to benefit people in terms of identity and relationships occurs in the convergence of the two. Online support groups provide both recognition of identity and also foster important supportive relationships that are often unattainable in the real world due to geography or limitedness of the condition. The Internet provides a place where individuals with stigmatized identities can communicate with each other and provide support for one another. They encounter recognition in online relationships that they wouldn’t be able to find in real life. In this way the Internet provides an important new medium for these individuals to come together as a group. Membership and participation in Internet groups can have profound effects on the self and identity.
The majority of these studies and surveys have shown that the Internet provides a useful medium in which people can experiment with and form their identity and at the same time start meaningful relationships with others. The Internet is a unique technology in this respect because it helps people to learn more about themselves while also allowing them to relate relatively anonymously with others. Lonely people may be motivated to go online in order to communicate with other lonely people. A person recently diagnosed with a rare disease may log on to find others who have suffered from the same rare condition. A gay person may feel more comfortable “coming out” online and receiving acceptance and support before telling his real life relations. In all these situations, it is obvious that people can benefit immensely from the use of the Internet for social communication. Because the Internet provides so much freedom, people can use it to suit their purposes. If someone is unsure of who they are, they are free to test out different identities online. If someone seeks companionship, they can find similar people through the Internet As long as everyone realizes the limited abilities of communication over the Internet (absence of nonverbal cues and direct contact) and don’t rely on the Internet to replace real world social interactions, its use is a benefit to individuals and society. Rather than fragmenting a person’s identity, experimentation on the Internet can lead to identity affirmation that in turn leads to higher self-esteem and life satisfaction. Rather than taking valuable time away from relationships in the real world, the Internet can serve to foster relationships that were never before possible but are valuable none-the-less.
The technology of the Internet and the possibilities it provides for relatively anonymous communication allows people to experiment with different presentations of their personality and also to form unique and constructive relationships that hadn’t been previously available to them. Rather than fragmenting identity and replacing important relationships in the real world, this technology allows for identity formation and enriches social relationships. Bargh, et al may have stated the consequences of the new technology of the Internet best in asserting, “[it] will change almost every aspect of our lives—private, social, cultural, economic and political because [they] deal with the very essence of human society: communication between people.”17 It is this communication between people that makes the technology of the Internet so valuable. Throughout this essay I have tried to provide support of the conclusion of their research:
overall, then, the evidence suggests that rather than being an isolating, personally and socially maladaptive activity, communicating with others over the Internet not only helps to maintain close ties with one’s family and friends, but also, if the individual is so inclined, facilitates the formation of close and meaningful new relationships within a relatively safe environment.18
End Notes
1. Matsuba, K.M. (2006). Searching for self and relationships online. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 9, 275-284.
2. Cummings, J.N., Butler, B., & Kraut, R. (2002). The quality of online social relationships. Communications of the ACM, 45, 103-108.
3. Taylor, S.E., Peplau, L.A., & Sears, D.O. (2006). Social psychology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
4. Ibid.
5. Bargh, J.A., McKenna, K.Y., & Fitzsimons, G.M. (2002). Can you see the real me? Activation and expression of the “true self” on the Internet Journal of Social Issues, 58, 33-48.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Matsuba.
9. Ibid.
10. Maczewski, M. (2002). Exploring identities through the Internet: Youth experiences online. Child and Youth Care Forum, 31, 111-129.
11. Taylor, et al.
12. Matsuba.
13. Cummings, et al.
14. Bargh, et al., 2002.
15. Ibid.
16. Bargh, J.A., & McKenna, K.Y. (2004). The Internet and social life. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 573-590.
17. Bargh et al.
18. Bargh, et al, 2002. Narrative in the Postmodern Age by Kaitlin Vadla It is widely accepted that narrative is a fundamental aspect of the human experience. Stories shape our perceptions and inform our realities. Because of the pervasiveness of narrative in our world and because our grasp of narrative is so intrinsic, we find it hard to question the purpose of narrative or to explain its effects. In the last several decades many critics such as Jean François Lyotard have looked carefully at the question of how people use narrative to make sense of their lives. They have wrestled with it and brought it into a new light.1 The root of the postmodern struggle with narrative is well illustrated by the following quote from Sam Keen:
We are the first generation bombarded with so many stories from so many authorities, none of which are our own. The parable of the postmodern mind is the person surrounded by a media center: three television screens in front of them giving three sets of stories; fax machines bringing in other stories; newspapers providing still more stories. In a sense, we are saturated with stories; we’re saturated with points of view. But the effect of being bombarded with all of these points of view is that we don’t have a point of view and we don’t have a story. We lose the continuity of our experiences; we become people who are written on from the outside.
Jean François Lyotard, author of the paradigm defining The Postmodern Condition, focuses a great deal on how technology affects human lives, and points out the centrality of narrative in modern consciousness. Before postmodernism, identity was structured through narrative; postmodernists rejected that notion, and thereby problematized the absolution of narrative in establishing identity. Lyotard even implies that technological advances threaten the continuation and existence of narrative as a medium of expression. Is this hypothesis valid? In order to answer these questions, we must first investigate the meaning of narrative itself.
The word “narrative,” is derived from “narrate,” meaning to relate or recount events, experiences, etc., in speech or writing. Etymologically, “narrate” comes from the Latin narrare, to relate, tell, or say; furthermore, narrare builds from gnarus, knowing. The word “story,” has similar etymological patterns with roots from the Latin and Greek historía, learning or knowing by inquiry, and is ultimately derived from hístor, one who knows or sees. Dissecting the words reveals that narrative and storytelling are deeply rooted in observation and inquiry.
A narrative is more than just a sequence of events; it is the telling (whether written or oral) of a story and is done so in a way to make meaning of a sequence of events.
Because narrative is associated with storytelling, it is often assumed that narrative lies within the literary realm. Yet the significance of narrative is more far reaching. In fact, David Herman’s Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory points out that “it was the legacy of French structuralism, more particularly of Roland Barthes and Claude Bremond, to have emancipated narrative from literature and from fiction, and to have recognised it as a semiotic phenomenon that transcends disciplines and media.”2 Herman goes on to say that Lyotard’s concept of “grand narratives,” as he outlined it in The Postmodern Condition, had a decisive influence on the current uses of narrative. “Grand narratives” or “metanarratives” are the stories we tell ourselves about our destiny as members of a nation, race, class or species; these grand narratives define the community and legitimate its enterprises.3 Lyotard acknowledges the power and usefulness of narrative several times: first in his example of Plato’s Republic, then in his acknowledgment of the connection between narrative and identity and finally in his discussion of retrievability versus face-to-face oral interaction.
Another of Lyotard’s ideas that points to the significance of narrative is his concept of a “paralogic” of multiple rationalities, or “islands of order in a radically contingent world.”4 This idea is based on anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s shared theory that “meaning emerges from a system of differences.”5 Contemporary narrative theory—which follows the anti-existentialist reactions of Lyotard, Strauss and Saussure—postulates that narrative meaning is created by establishing how events are related or connected to other events. Therefore, the meaning of each event in a narrative depends on the part it plays in the whole system or story. Because of this, narrative is a solid example of the idea that meaning is socially constructed. Narrative puts the lives of individuals in perspective with the groups, communities and societies to which they belong. This concept of narrative finds commonality in Strauss’ comment, “What is meaning according to me? A specific flavour perceived by a consciousness when it tastes a combination of elements none of which taken by itself would offer a comparable flavour?”6 Perhaps it is because it seems to deny autonomy, but the theory that meaning is created from a system of differences is as revolting as it is pragmatic.
Lyotard explains two ways to manage this system of differences. One is through “narrative knowledge,” the cultural repository of societies in which tradition is transmitted through storytelling; the other is through “denotative knowledge,” the scientific body of facts that are verified by proofs and formal claims.7 In the former, truth is legitimated by the status of the storyteller within the community. Contemporary science scoffs at such a system; but ironically, since scientific discourse rejects authority, it is unable to guarantee its own validity and must rely on narrative. In her article “Cyberage Narratology: Computers, Metaphor and Narrative,” author Marie-Laure Ryan reaffirms the legitimating function of narrative, “in narratology, as in other disciplines of the physical and social sciences, analogical thinking is the force that reveals new perspectives and moves knowledge forward.”8
Though Lyotard still associates identity with narrative, he is concerned that technological advances will exacerbate a crisis in narrative.9 Because the evolution of scientific knowledge discredits legitimation by performativity (i.e. narrative), and also because Lyotard believes narrative is no longer a legitimating force in society, Lyotard proposes a postmodern alternative to narrative legitimation that he calls “paralogic legitimation”—legitimation through originality, innovation and difference.10 This leads us to a challenging question. How does technology affect narrative autobiography and the assimilation of memory into one’s life-story? Narrative autobiography refers to the idea that living one’s life and reflecting upon it is like writing one’s life story. Continually “authoring” one’s life story is the ultimate act of affirming one’s self-identity. It appears that Lyotard’s “paralogic legitimation” is simply another form of narrative legitimation—one in which an individual uses narratives of adaptivity, originality and change to modify their life stories.
In the end, I disagree with Lyotard and the postmodernists who disavow the centrality of narrative. Though they are correct to claim that technology impacts human reality, they are wrong to assume that technology threatens to topple narrative or destroy reality. If, however, I am totally wrong and reality is eroding in the face of modern technology, then I posit that narrative is the most capable guardian of the “fragility of the real.”11 Narrative is more than fiction; it is how we interpret the world and make meaning of our lives. Evolving technologies will continue to expand our world and give us new mediums for expressing our narratives, but instead of threatening the survival of narrative, these technological changes reaffirm the importance of maintaining the narrative tradition.
End Notes
1. Sam Keen, quoted in Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory, 124.
2. Herman, David. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Routledge, 1 ed: 2005. ISBN-10: 0415282594. Retrieved online <http://lamar.colostate.edu/~pwryan/narrentry.htm>
3. Feenberg, 126.
4. Ibid., 126.
5. Ibid., 124.
6. Ibid., 125.
7. Ibid., 126-7,
8. From the book Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 113-141.
9. Feenberg 134.
10. Ibid., 130-1.
11. Ibid., 140. The Logic of Kabbalistic Mysticism: Defining the Code by Emmett Tribolet Sometime during the period from the third century to the sixth century A.C.E., the anonymous author of the Sefer Yetsirah wrote,1 “Twenty-two elemental letters. God engraved them, carved them, weighed them, permuted them, and transposed them, forming with them everything formed and everything destined to be formed.”2 This elevation of the letters of the Jewish alphabet to be the foundation of the universe is typical of the thought of the Kabbalist movement, a form of mystical Judaism, of which the Sefer Yetshira, or Book of Creation, is the greatest and most influential work. From the statement above it is obvious that Kabbalism places a great amount of religious value on the letters that make up language. It particularly has in mind the way that these letters are combined to make language, knowledge and, most importantly, the universe at large. But does its methods have any validity when it comes to the meaning of words?
Most people probably don’t think about the way letters are combined to make up words and sentences. Even for most modern philosophers of language, the letters themselves are not of primary importance. In linguistics, the grapheme, the smallest unit in written language is of less importance than the phoneme, the smallest spoken unit; and since the single sound “th” is made up of two letters, they’re quite distinct concepts. Again, though, most linguists move on fairly quickly from the simplest units of language to the morpheme, the simplest unit of meaning. By this time, the analysis of language has become fairly complex. Take the word “uncountable,” for example. It is made up of three morphemes: the prefix “un-”, the root “count” and the suffix “able.” Getting this far, though, has utilized four phonemes and eleven graphemes. For those concerned with language, meaning––that is, how we can actually get information across––is the question of note. The letter is just not that important.
For the Kabbalists, however, the letter has a different relevance. Later on in the Sefer Yetsirah, we have a description of how God formed the universe with letters:
Twenty-two elemental letters. God set them in a wheel with 231 gates, turning forward and backward. How did God permute them? Alef with them all, all of them with alef; bet with them all… and so on with all the letters, turning round and round, within 231 gates. Thus all that is formed, all that is spoken emerges from one name.3
The most prominent part of the passage is the insistence, even to repetition, of 231 gates. Where does that number come from? As a matter of fact it says immediately afterwards. Combine Alef with them all, all of them with alef, and so on. There happen to be 231 two-letter combinations using the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In fact, much of the groundwork for combinatorial mathematics was laid by mathematicians who had discovered Kabbalistic work of a similar nature and drew upon it. However, it is not very likely that the Kabbalists working at the time of the Sefer Yetsirah knew the formula we have today to figure out how many two-letter combinations there could possibly be: it would have involved them taking the factorial product of 22, which happens to have 22 digits and was likely out of their range of calculation. It would have been much easier to simply write out all of the possible two-letter combinations, but even that would have been very time consuming and, seemingly, largely pointless: all it would generate would be the whole possible set of combinations of two letters. Nevertheless, that is what must have happened. Why were the ancient Kabbalists so interested in the way that letters could be arranged?
By the thirteenth century, Kabbalism grew and had spread into multiple schools of thought. Some Kabbalists were mostly interested in ethics and outlining the theosophy as illustrated by the famous ten sefirot. Others, however, took Kabbalism to be a method for individual spiritual growth. They developed meditative techniques surrounding some of its teachings. The most prolific of these “ecstatic” Kabbalists was Abraham Abulaifa. Born in Moorish Spain in the mid-13th century, he traveled extensively and developed a system of thought that drew on a wide variety of sources. Unfortunately, he had an ego to match his brilliance and began to see himself as a messianic figure. He had a close brush with death after he tried to meet Pope Nicholas III to discuss theology; the result of his attempt for an audience was his prompt condemnation to death as a heretic. Fortunately for him the aged pope died soon after condemning him, and Abulaifa was released from prison after only a short stay.
Abulaifa’s method of meditation draws on the combinations of letters that have been given such prominence in earlier Kabbalistic thought. “Be totally alone,” he says, “if it is night, light many candles, until your eyes shine brightly.”
Then take hold of ink, pen, and tablet. Realize that you are about to serve your God in joy. Begin to combine letters, a few or many, permuting and revolving them rapidly... Delight in how they move and in what you generate by revolving them. When you feel within that your mind is very, very warm from combining the letters, and that through the combinations you understand new things that you have not attained by human tradition… then you are ready to receive the abundant flow.4
For Abulaifa, the combinations were not themselves particularly important. He would not find it interesting to study each particular combination to discover what it revealed about combinations in general. He would see such a scientific mode of discovering as being beside the point, or perhaps merely superfluous. The true meaning of the combinations comes when we try to think beyond the merely formal existence of the symbols, to connect them with the divine and also to connect ourselves with the divine using the foundational units of the universe. It is not the combinations so much as the act of combining that seems to allow hidden truths to be revealed to the mind of the meditative student of Kabbala.
This should seem unusual. As noted above, most work going into the meaning of language does not correspond to the particular letters of language, but focuses more upon the ways that they are arranged and their structure as a system. The system outlined by Abulaifa using the two-digit combinations does not seem to fit. Surely it is still trying to do the same thing as natural language; that is, unlock information from a set of given signs, but there are deep problems involved in this concept. Simply put, most of the two-letter combinations of Hebrew held to be so important by the Sefer Yetshira are meaningless in Hebrew. We can show as a statistical exercise the same thing holds true in English. Consider all the two-letter combinations that start with the letter “a”. Already I’m biasing the experiment against my position because there are far more ways to meaningfully combine letters to a vowel than to a consonant. What do we get? Ab, ad, Al, am, an, as, at, and ax. That gives us eight out of 26. Possibly we could also throw in ‘ai’, ‘ak’ and ‘aw’ as interjections. That gives us eleven, which moves the ratio close to two fifths. So three fifths of the combinations are meaningless, even presupposing a very common letter. Imagine how many more combinations become meaningless when we begin with the letters “x” or “q”!
For most people, that is, people uninitiated into the Kabbalistic method, meaning stems from certain kinds of combinations that are based on rules. We unlock the information in a sentence spoken to us by interpreting the meaning of certain specific sounds. In a written sentence, the letters also have to conform to certain patterns, and these patterns can usually be detected right from the start. The traditional medieval example of a meaningless word was “Blibbiri,” but since this “word” starts with a possible syllable (“bli…” could be the start of “blight” or “blink” or a host of others) there are better examples we could use. If I see something written that starts with “wz…” or “qb…” then I know that it’s not going to be meaningful, no matter what comes after. Random combinations of letters do not go far in providing meaning.
The Kabbalist then, if her method has any merit at all, must look at language in a different way than the more common version. This would not be a unique perspective. Poetry, for example, is also based on the principle that meaning can come from outside the literal aspect of the words involved. Other contextual aspects can also have an effect. Many people find themselves moved by opera, even when the literal import of the words is banal. Or consider song covers: A Perfect Circle’s haunting, heavy and very minor version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” is very different from the ephemeral original. As such, it comes across as meaning something distinctly different. How much different is of course a matter of debate, but there does seem to be a disparity of meaning between them.
This may be part of the reason why meditating upon random permutations of letters as Abulaifa suggests can have such a mysterious effect. If it is like reading poetry or listening to music, then any meaning involved is inherently ineffable. There cannot be a single, literal explanation for what is understood, because the meaning is not on the literal level of sole denotations of words. As such, the emotional or spiritual knowledge gained from such an experience would be unique. Attempts to describe it to other people would come off like poetry criticism or musical analysis: no matter how clear and comprehensive, there is always some debate over interpretation––in this case, not interpretation from one natural language to another, but from a different system of signification to another. Language that disassembles quickly becomes a spiritual device. Moreover, in the case of Kabbalistic teaching, each meditation would be different––unique and unrepeatable. There could be no fixed, written extension of the meditative content. It would be all on the level of artistic performance, whether poetry reading or musical production. As such the significance felt would be immediate, and no matter how accurate the theoretical approaches they never would quite seem to fit what could be experienced live. Whether this is what Abulaifa meant when he wrote that meditating upon lines of letters would allow adherents to “understand things… not attained from human tradition” is debatable, but it seems like a reasonable interpretation.
On the other hand, while this might give some credence to Kabbalistic practice, it also can show that the Kabbalists do not necessarily have the one unique and all-encompassing method of looking at and interpreting language in a different mode other than the literal. Even if we discount poetry, the system is appropriate only for a certain kind of language. Languages without alphabets would be utterly lost in such a practice. Could God have created the universe using the several thousand characters of Chinese script? Possibly, but such a mythological explanation wouldn’t make sense. Each Chinese ideogram cannot pretend to be genetically unique; each one holds within itself its history as a grapheme and to some extent its etymology. That system has predefined combinations, and also differs from alphabetic languages in that each character might make up a full meaning or even several meanings in its own virtue. While the Kabbalists might have thought they were reaching God by taking out any context or rules behind language, what they wound up doing was merely switching one system for another.
End Notes
1. Daniel C. Matt’s The Essential Kabbalah, HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.
2. Ibid., 102.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 103.
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