Culture: August 2007 Archive Page

Rachel Buchanan:

It has all happened so fast. In the 20th century, media evolved through a series of technological landmarks that seem stately in comparison: first radio waves across the Atlantic in 1901; television invented, 1926; television transmission begins in Australia, 1956; CNN begins, 1980. From there, change is compressed. In 1992 the Mosaic browser made the internet easier to use. By 1998, Matt Drudge's online news and gossip website, the Drudge Report, had broken the story of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, an event that is widely cited by journalism academics as the birth of online news. Google, MySpace, YouTube, wikis and blogs all belong to this century.

Stuart Allan, author of Online News (2006), begins his history of the form with the Drudge Report. Other key events are the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, in which "amateur news reporters" used weblogs to create their own "decentralised media" and the war in Iraq, which resulted in the rise of first-person, raw accounts of life inside Iraq in the warblogs of Salam Pax and Riverbend. Participatory or citizen journalism began, in this account, with the launch of Indymedia (motto "be the media") in 2000 in Seattle during anti-globalisation protests. South Korea's OhmyNews, in which citizens write the stories (and readers tip writers they like best) and citizen "reporting" on the London bombings, Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami are other examples of what Allan says are "the ways in which the very users of online news are rewriting the rules which have traditionally governed journalism as a profession".

Ordinary people, Allan argues, are now pursuing their own news agendas, sidestepping "corresponding notions of 'authority', 'credibility' and 'prestige'." (The Age)

Roy F. Baumeister

One can imagine an ancient battle in which the enemy was driven off and the city saved, and the returning soldiers are showered with gold coins. An early feminist might protest that hey, all those men are getting gold coins, half of those coins should go to women. In principle, I agree. But remember, while the men you see are getting gold coins, there are other men you don't see, who are still bleeding to death on the battlefield from spear wounds.

That's an important first clue to how culture uses men. Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don't give them the big rewards. I'm not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren't moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups.

[...]

There are more males than females with really low IQs. Indeed, the pattern with mental retardation is the same as with genius, namely that as you go from mild to medium to extreme, the preponderance of males gets bigger.

All those retarded boys are not the handiwork of patriarchy. Men are not conspiring together to make each other's sons mentally retarded.

Almost certainly, it is something biological and genetic. And my guess is that the greater proportion of men at both extremes of the IQ distribution is part of the same pattern. Nature rolls the dice with men more than women. Men go to extremes more than women. It's true not just with IQ but also with other things, even height: The male distribution of height is flatter, with more really tall and really short men.

[...]

Want to think men are better than women? Then look at the top, the heroes, the inventors, the philanthropists, and so on. Want to think women are better than men? Then look at the bottom, the criminals, the junkies, the losers.

In an important sense, men really are better AND worse than women.

This is daring stuff. Consider this:

In the 19^th century in America, middle-class girls and women played piano far more than men. Yet all that piano playing failed to result in any creative output. There were no great women composers, no new directions in style of music or how to play, or anything like that. All those female pianists entertained their families and their dinner guests but did not seem motivated to create anything new. Meanwhile, at about the same time, black men in America created blues and then jazz, both of which changed the way the world experiences music. By any measure, those black men, mostly just emerging from slavery, were far more disadvantaged than the middle-class white women. Even getting their hands on a musical instrument must have been considerably harder. And remember, I'm saying that the creative abilities are probably about equal. But somehow the men were driven to create something new, more than the women.

One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven. --AP

1. What Berlin wall?
35. Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
43. Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.
53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
55. MTV has never featured music videos.
66. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born. --Beloit College

Which ones struck you the most? #66 really blew me away -- though CERN didn't actually open up the WWW to the general public as a free service until 1993. (I was taking a non-credit humanities computing class that summer, and one week the guest lecturer gave a demo of this new piece of software -- a "web browser" called Mosaic.)

Today we drove to the Thunder Mountain Lenape powwow, which was full of color and music. There were two drums — that is, groups of singers who sat around the same drum, chanting in rhythm.
Dancers mostly moved around the circle. The younger the dancer, the fancier the footwork and the more the likelihood of spins and twirls.

The two elders in the lead pretty much just walked, stepping in time. But look at the stage presence of the woman -- she was impressively regal. (I heard someone say she was the clan mother.)

Truthfully, I expected my new department would be grateful that I wasn't having kids. But the unofficial motto here seems to be "We do babies!" And indeed we do..... I couldn't believe that I was struggling to meet anyone who could go out for a drink. --Carol Peace --An Unexpecting Minority (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Who would have thought that academics with young children wouldn't have as much time to socialize as their child-free colleagues do?

I admire Peace for writing such a candid essay, and I note that she explicitly states her awareness of its self-pitying tone. She also points out that, from one perspective, it's a good thing that so many women in her department feel comfortable balancing work and family in this manner. Nevertheless, I have conflicted responses to this essay.

One colleague in my department has written several essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education about balancing her professional life with motherhood. She used to live too far away for us to get together, but she has recently moved very close, and we have already had playdates at the amusement park, a local museum (where the kids spent most of their time cutting up paper in the art room), and rodent-themed kiddie restaurant.

My response to Peace is that her colleagues with young children are probably very tired; they have less time for socializing of any kind; and they are probably worried about about taxing her patience.

If you spend a lot of time around smokers, or pet owners, or yodelers, you develop a tolerance for smoke, slobber, and yodeling, and you feel more relaxed around people who have a similarly high tolerance; consequently, you feel a bit uneasy when you're socializing with someone who doesn't share your interest in smoke, slobber, and yodeling, and you're never quite sure whether the person who says "Oh, I don't mind the smoke|slobber|yodeling one bit" is really about to scream but is instead trying to be polite -- and all the while planning to complain behind your back about how you thoughtlessly exposed them to an unreasonable amount of smoke|slobber|yodeling.

That sounds paranoid, but I am a social introvert (despite having an extroverted teaching persona), and social interactions don't always come naturally to me. Maybe Peace's colleagues simply aren't confident about what her reaction will be.

The cardinal rule of making friends is that you show an interest in what the other person likes to do. So, if Peace wants a quiet evening with the parents of young children, she might arrange for a teenage friend of the family to play with the kids in the backyard while the adults can have a quiet dinner.

I know I can be so completely wrapped up in parenting -- interrupting an adult conversation to ask a child sotto voce where she left her sippy cup and then trying to slip immediately back into the conversation. Like most parents, I've developed the ability to tune out kid disruptions that don't cross a certain line, and I'd like to think that I'm capable of adjusting that line depending on the circumstances.

I remember several times at my previous job when my wife and I accepted an invitation to bring our child to the house of a childless colleague. We made it clear that baby Peter was in the "cruising" phase, where he couldn't quite stand by himself and so was likely to lean or pull on the furniture in order to get around.

All evening, one of us had to follow Peter around so that he wouldn't yank down a tablecloth or grab a statue off of a coffee table or crawl into the kitty litter box or tumble down the stairs. Our hosts kept inviting us both to sit down at the same time, but even if they were telling the truth and it wouldn't have bothered them if we hadn't stopped that lamp from toppling over, we didn't it want it falling on our son's head. If our son had spit up on the imported carpet or scratched the flatscreen TV, we would have felt obligated to pay for it. At the time, we were eating off of a folding card table and our living room couch was the same futon we had used as grad students, and all the items of value (my laptop, precious books, etc.) were sequestered behind a baby gate in the study. It was very stressful for us to watch our son as he tried to finger unprotected wall outlets (can a baby really get a shocking by poking a finger in one of those? I don't want to find out) and reached for knicknacks on the bottom shelves (where we always deliberately left toys for him to grab).

Two female colleagues a few doors away from my office had young children around the same age as my son. My wife's decision to be a full-time parent automatically put me in a different category; they were working moms who had to make hard decisions about how to balance their home and professional lives. No matter how equitably my wife and I divided up the chores -- when I came home, my wife would often hand me a poopy baby and then retreat to the bedroom for the rest of the evening, while I made dinner, gave the baths and read the bedtime stories -- when I was at work, I was always a man whose career was riding on my wife's back.

One day we encountered a faculty couple walking together alone in the mall; classes weren't in session, but they still dropped their child off at daycare. I don't mean to say their decision was wrong, but it wasn't a decision that either of us would have made. My wife and I even babysat this couple's child once so that they could do something together, though they never offered to return the favor.

My point is not to criticize or gripe, but rather to point out that even though a child does give colleagues one more thing in common, all child-having couples are not automatically members of the same social group.

My kids are thumping on the floor above my study crying out to be fed, so I've got to end this blog entry now. If there are any rough spots, so be it -- I've got macaroni noodles to cook.

How can we fathom the values and preoccupations of the American people (no matter what their race, gender, or class) without paying attention to the nation's literature, painting, architecture, music, theater, and movies? If culture plays as significant a role as social, political, or economic issues in helping us make sense of the American past, why then do American historians expend so much effort analyzing the plight of women and workers, or the policies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and almost no time at all interpreting the paintings of Edward Hopper, the cartoons of Walt Disney, the lyrics of Cole Porter, the choreography of Jerome Robbins, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, or the films of Elia Kazan? --Richard Pells --History Descending a Staircase: American Historians and American Culture (Chronicle of Higher Education)