Consistent Tones or Constant Drones?

"Cosette, I don't know what to say."
"Then make no sound."
 ~ Les Miserables

Ursula Franklin, the first female professor of metallurgy and materials science at the University of Toronto, wrote an article called "Silence and the Notion of the Commons," talking about the changes technology has brought about to society (if you had to look up the word "metallurgy," no judgement- I did too).

To put it simply, she believes that background noise prevents great experiences from taking place. Franklin clarifies that to be silent allows unforeseen, unforeseeable, and unprogrammed things to happen (Franklin 643). This is why church has moments of silence, she points out. The congregation needs it to hear the voice of God.

I don't doubt any of these things. In fact, I agree with them. Being still, being by ourselves, completely uninhibited of others' thoughts of us... these are things that should be treasured and enjoyed. I feel so free when I'm by myself, just reading or sitting still, because silence can provide an overwhelming sense of peace.

But I don't think that background noise is a terrible thing. I like it. In grocery stores, or when I'm shopping, I enjoy listening to the music playing in the background. In movies, background music add to the story, particularly in a little gem called Almost Famous. There's a great scene in it where William Miller runs through the street to find Penny Lane- and "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" is playing in the background. That song completely sums up the scene, and breaks my heart every single time. It's so sorrowful, and very truthful, which makes it all the harder and more important to hear. If the movie had been made without music,  it would have definitely suffered.

I'm not saying that I don't have moments where I wish the music could be off (after hearing "Witchy Woman" several times in a row at a restaurant, my family and I are in agreement of that). As I've said, silence is good for us. It puts things in perspective. It takes its time. There's a reason 70% of communication is nonverbal- silence says everything for us.

Referring back to my quote at the beginning, I think Cosette had it right. Sometimes all we need is a little silence to clear our thoughts and get us where we need to go.

Let's not give up the background entirely, though.

You never know when you'll need Elton John to narrate your life experiences through song.

Birds and those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines

Loreen Eisley, author of "The Bird and The Machines," represents the opinion that life is more important than machines. Real people, with real lives and real experiences, are doing great things, and we should not disregard that for some "machine," even if it can do things faster. Even people are machines to some degree- full of pulleys and joints. What's the difference?

Eisley points out that power can be found in anything, and their place in society is dependent upon the amount of power and worth we as humans give it. Since we have given digital technology a high position, it has that position- we all should recognize the human's potential as a sort of "judge."

This makes sense to me, particularly with one of his points: "I learned...that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm" (Eisley 603). In other words, we have created the cosmopolitan ideal of "hurrying" to catch a plane, to meet up with friends, or to get to a recital on time. Andy the Squirrel didn't say, "You have to have deadlines, because otherwise nothing will get done."

That's on us.

And we have to understand that a machine cannot take responsibility for something. It doesn't have ideas, or dreams, or even knowledge.

The designer of that machine has dreams.

As soon as we start to forget that, we forget who we are, and what we were meant to do.

And once that's gone, we're living a meaningless existence.

Pictures: No Words Necessary

The other day, I watched a video on the website ted.com. Chris Jordan, a researcher, showcased his art based on several statistics, including a particularly striking image of piles and piles of orange prison uniforms stacked on top of one another, symbolizing the number of Americans imprisoned in America (I loved it so much I decided I had to put it up on my rarely-visited blog).

I think above all, his message was that math can be beautiful, and tell us all of the things we need to hear. This was especially hard for me to grasp, particularly since I've struggled with math for as long as I can remember. But seeing those stats personalized was a sobering experience, similar to the room in the Holocaust Museum full of glasses, or the Vietnam Memorial with all of those names engraved in marble.
Because they aren't just names, or numbers, or even prison uniforms.

Those are people.

The 1,100 people that die every day of smoking cigarettes are sisters, brothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers. My grandfather's among them- he died of lung cancer from cigarettes. It hit me hard to know he wasn't going to be around anymore, and I imagine that their families were equally devastated.

Those Americans in prison may have children that they never get to see. They could have left families and friends behind, back when their lives were ordinary. The prisoner on death row and I may have equal hopes, dreams, and desires. But societally, we're nowhere close together.

That's what I think Jordan's work changes. It unites the nun and the unwed mother. It bonds the drug-free teenager with the drug addict.

Let's see these connections- and keep remembering that when we look at statistics, we're not just seeing numbers.

We're seeing the story of a person similar to you.

The Movies, or There and Back Again

I love everything about the movies- using the touch-screen device to buy tickets, all of the snacks, the display of “coming attractions,” and that exciting feeling you have when the lights go down. You grab a shovel-sized handful of popcorn in anticipation. The movie’s starting!

I can’t forget my very first movie. I was seven, and my biggest desire, even more than world peace, a Barbie stereo, and the latest Britney Spears CD, was to see Lilo and Stitch. My mom agreed to take me and my sisters to the matinee.

I loved the movie. It was sweet, funny, and it introduced the new idea of suspense to me. According to a favorite family story, when Lilo tentatively opens the door in one scene, I shouted, “Don’t go through the door!” to the amusement of all of the other members of the audience.

This experience forever changed me. It taught me manners (don’t kick someone else’s chair or shout suggestions out to the characters on the screen- it stops being cute at seven-and-a-half), basic math (if Katie has two dollars, and popcorn and a drink costs sixteen dollars, how long will she have to wait until dinner?), and of course, how to locate the nearest exits in the event of an emergency. I’ve also found that when movies bring people closer together. When times are tough, nothing sounds better than a family’s laughter.

That’s what makes movies great. Life is hard and boring and tragically fresh out of musical numbers. When students are eating in the cafeteria, they generally don’t begin a dance choreographed by Kenny Ortega. We don’t keep aliens that crash landed in Hawaii. We don’t see dead people. We don’t fly. Wardrobes don’t have awesome places with talking animals and Turkish Delight on the other side- just boring coats and that scarf your aunt made that no one will buy from you.

But it sure would be cool if we did, wouldn’t it? And that’s what movies are about- giving us an escape from our daily lives. The directors, producers, and cinematographers invite us into a world full of people with big dreams, challenges to overcome, and perfect hair days.

Movies invest themselves in us. We end up rooting for the football team who, at the beginning of the movie, couldn’t hold the ball correctly. We’re heartbroken when the main character gets engaged to James Marsden, instead of her one true love, Ryan Gosling. We cheer when Inigo Montoya’s father’s death is avenged, and the a cappella group wins the championship, despite one girl who’d rather be doing anything else, one serial barfer, and one closet mermaid dancer.

I give movies the same rule I give people:

Every movie has potential. It’s what movies do with that potential that determines where they go from there.

When I say that, I don’t necessarily mean “award-winning material.” Sometimes movies win awards, and people are sitting watching the Oscars who didn’t like them at all. Even more often, movies don’t win those awards, even though they should, because it was heart-wrenching and inspiring and featured Vikings, cool accents, and the training of dragons.

But awards aren’t the only recognition movies receive. It’s the viewer’s vote that truly counts. To be perfectly honest, when my mom and I are watching one of our favorite movies, we’re not really concerned with the fact that Amanda Seyfried didn’t win an award for predicting that there was a thirty percent chance that it was already raining. We aren’t outraged that no one gave Whoopi Goldberg a Golden Globe in her classic 1992 film, though she completely transformed a cloister of pitchy nuns from an inner-city church into a flawless worldwide phenomenon. We don’t call the Academy and tell them that they forgot to include Reese Witherspoon as a nominee, every time we see her try to get into Harvard Law School.

That’s a perfect example of how people can disagree over movies. We’re all different, and entitled to our own opinions. A saga telling the story of a moody girl falling in love with a sparkly blood sucker unwilling to wash his hair could truly fascinate me, but it could crush my friend Ashley’s soul. Ashley’s soul could feel instantly revived through an animated film about a fish traveling across the ocean to find his son, but I could feel personally offended that someone would create a film where fish can talk. Despite the fact that we will never see eye to eye on this topic, we will hopefully respect one another’s opinion and agree to disagree (that is, except for Ashley and me- I know I’m right on this one).

I don’t believe that all movies are filled with mindless violence or the misogynistic treatment of women or boys eating worms in order to avoid people stuffing them in their pants. Movies can be works of art that help us think about things in new ways. They can show us great examples of strength, bravery, and honor, when we don’t have those in our lives. When we don’t know what our college major will be, or what to do after parents get divorced, or how to recover from heartbreak, movies can inspire us to keep going, and pursue the right path.

Going to movies doesn’t solve our problems. But it does give us a few things we’ll need to solve them- time to get away from them for a little while, time to laugh and cry and smile, and time with people who love and care about you.

And let’s not forget a great musical number.

P.S. See if you can guess the number of movie references in this blog entry (directly mentioning Lilo and Stitch doesn’t count). Write down your guesses in the comment section below (shout out to Anne Hartman, who always reads this blog).

Technopoly

In his book Technopoly, Postman invites people (both users and nonusers of technology) to understand the "burdens and blessings" of technology. Technology has made lives easier and created capitalism, the foundation of our economic government. It has also created what he calls "collisions" between the ideals demonstrated in Prensky's Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (technology is useful, technology is too difficult for someone to pick up). It helps kids with different learning situations, like ADD or dyslexia, learn the same things in a more unique way. "In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred-year-old truce between the gregariousness and the openness fostered by orality and the introspection" (Postman 17). It develops ideas and imaginations of the highest order, and betters the experiences of everyone around it.
I don't have any questions for this blog, but I do think I'll leave you with this: Maybe we shouldn't blame the inventions themselves for external defects.
That might have been an operator error.

iBabies

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. What you see in front of you is not the future, but the present. This is a world full of digital technology and children are finding their place in it through the latest gizmos and gadgets.
I can't say it's a total surprise, but it isn't what I anticipated. Hanna Rosin's article "The Touch Screen Generation" takes the topic and goes into more detail.
More and more babies and toddlers know how to use electronics- and enjoy using it. In California on a warm summer day, Rosin attends Dust or Magic, a conference where developers for children's apps get a chance to see how their "customers" (small children, accompanied by their parents) will enjoy them. As support of this, many developers mainly followed Maria Montessori's line of thought, claiming that "hands are the instruments of man's intelligence."
Rosin polls several parents on what she calls "screen time," or time with electronic devices. Some don't provide any- a boundary, for her, seems a little harsh. Others set limits to only on airplanes or long car trips, and others about 30 minutes each day. Through even more research, she finds both positive and negative consequences of children spending time with them.
Eventually, she concludes that like almost everything, those involved with the "touch screen generation" (from the development of the games to the parents of the gamers) have good intentions. When excess enters the equation, that's when things don't add up to four.
I'm seeing Rosin's point- and I wholeheartedly agree. Whether or not a child is permitted to use electronics is entirely up to the parents of that child.
But what does this mean for education? Should we change classes to be more interactive, or as one researcher put it, "less isolated [from the other students and the teacher]?" Should we make school less like an opera aria?
Food for thought.

A Followup on Google and the Lack of Intelligence Thereof

In my last post, I discussed Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" As a response to this article, an informed scholar from the Ethics and Policy Center, James Bowman, penned the cleverly titled "Is Stupid Making Us Google?" He agreed that the Internet has changed our ways of thinking, but maybe it's not entirely to blame- something else is going on here. How do we get to be this way? Someone had to have taught us that reading long books is boring (the answer is not Bart Simpson- though I particularly enjoy this picture).
Bowman believes that teachers are at fault here. They aren't creative enough. They don't present the material in a way that applies to the students- and that's what matters, after all. Education isn't a opera aria. It's more like a concert- the lead singer sings a line, then invites the audience to sing along.
Both of these articles regarding Google and stupidity remind me of an article called "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants." The author urges educators of all kinds to start speaking the "language" and get involved with technology in some form. There is no excuse. Teachers must rise to the occasion. If it's broken, pick up a 22 ounce Antivibe framing hammer and fix it.
I ended my last post with a question, and I think I'll do the same here:
Bowman mentions that educators need to "throw off the yoke of the past." Is the past really burdensome?