Last Revision

I'll be revising essay four, my porno Essay.  I think, convoluted as it is, it's still far superior to my third essay.  One thing I'm going to have to do, though, is some serious free writing.  When I wrote my first draft to essay 4, my thoughts weren't completely together, and it really shows.

Things I'm going to have to do:

- Continue to "think" about what my point is, and what kind of message I want to get across.  I think I'm almost there for this one.

-Re-evaluate whether the anecdotes and details I've included actually get that message across, and, if not, substitute them for new ones.  So far, I think I'm about 50/50 on this.

-Add a first person narrative.  It's tough, but it's necessary.

That's about all I can think of right now.  What does everyone else think?

Bored

The internet is for porn.

It’s 1995. An electrical engineer at Carnegie Melon, Martin Rimm, does a study and comes to the conclusion that almost 85% of what’s being shared on the internet is pornographic.  This is before most people are online.  Fifteen years later, though porn sites will make up only an estimated one percent of what’s become an infinitely vast, immeasurable internet, porn-- next to music, travel, and e-bay-- will remain the most frequently searched topic on the net.

At the turn of the millennia, the word pornography enters the vocabulary of a twelve year old boy.  He’s sitting at a lunch table with someone who say’s they’ve found their dad’s collection of porn on VHS, and to his surprise he’s the only person who hasn’t heard the word before.  His first year in public school has been an enlightening one: he’s learned a lot of things that the Catholic school 6^th graders didn’t tell him about.  What’s more frightening is the kid with the porn wants to invite everyone at the table over one weekend to watch in what sounds like a terrifying male-bonding experience. 

He tells his mom about it.  His mom’s baffled, and scared.  What parents in their right mind could raised a child that assumes pornography viewing is appropriate for a social gathering?  Pornography, by it’s very nature, is for privacy.  All that exists in the world of the modern porn movie is the female model(s), the muscular torso of the male, and the observer who takes the identity of the usually faceless male.  

By high school, his family and the families of his friends have bought computers and gotten online. Porn is no longer a mystery, but something regularly viewed and regularly discussed by almost everyone he knows.  Christina Aguilera, oiled and wearing a bikini top with leather chaps, surrounded by dozens of sweating, shirtless muscular guys, has made a daily ritual of singing “Dirrty” on MTV’s video countdown.  Back in Catholic school, girls bleach their hair blonde, wear thick mascara, and push the limits of the allotted skirt length.  No one is complaining.

Christina’s “Dirrty” is an onslaught of sexual stimulation and pushes the limits of what’s allowed on television, and what being a role model to young woman can mean.  But Christina is following the trend.  She’s not especially beautiful compared to the woman in the other videos.  Neither is her song unique compared to the rest of the top-40 crowd which feature radio-mandated hooks occurring before the first 30 seconds.  She receives mixed critical reception.

She’s the “average,” not much different than what the girlsstrive for.  Fake tan, heavy eyeliner and mascara, fake blonde hair with lots of spray, perfect and shining white teeth.  They get in trouble for dancing like Christina and all the other pop divas at homecoming and prom and the 8^th grade dance. The now 16 year Catholic school student makes a general observation: these near perfect goddesses are decidedly average.

The internet, for a Millennial teen, is a tool of discovery.  Knowledge about everything: news, the opposite sex, music, all is available on the internet.  He listens to music on a portable CD player.  Meanwhile, some classmates have already begun carrying around ipods and other slick MP3 players.  Technology moves faster, and becomes outdated faster than anyone can afford.  The dial-up connection that once served as a gateway to a world full of epiphanies is now a cumbersome fossil that takes 30 minutes for downloading a single song.

No one likes outdated, unattractive technology or unattractive anything-- cell phones are a good example.  We all get new phones every two years but try and convince our parents to buy us new ones before that time.  Most of them cave.

Teens who, being teenagers, feel the need to stand-out from the group do so in a way that’s paradoxically reactionary towards MTV self-worship.  Together, in a rejection to the individual pursuit of perfection, they mutilate themselves and wear uniformly unattractive dark clothing.  They pierce themselves and listen to music without hooks or melody.    They reject pop music and it’s petty sentiments.

There’s a loudness war occurring on the radio that gets increasingly worse.  Metallica, long time sell-outs, release a tragedy of album production that is Death Magnetic.    Everyone wants their album to sound good on ipods and loud on the radio, so corporate producers are raising all the instruments to Spinal Tap like volumes and killing what audiophiles call “dynamic range.”

Music, regardless of genre, goes like this if it’s going to popular and make it on the radio:  It’s loud, even when it’s soft.  There’s a chorus or a hook that occurs either right in the beginning or before 30 seconds have passed which is repeated ad nauseum.  Consumers have the option to buy the song for 99 cents instead of the whole album, which can be listened to on a personal music player like an ipod or CD player. 

Dei Market has brought Free Music and Free Pornography to the masses.  Anyone and everyone is capable of fire sharing.  New ways to do it crop up as the old ways disappear.  Porn versions of Youtube which feature entire films are available en masse, highspeed connections are fast enough to watch more than one at once, at home, on the laptop, or on the cellphone.

For the college-bound millennial, hook based music is as regular and standardized as streaming pornography.  Regularly downloaded, regularly viewed- a regular part of life. 

Corporate record labels are pulling their hair out because no one wants to pay for the low-quality music that is freely and easily obtained via the internet.  Women are pulling their hair out after contrived attractiveness becomes increasingly less powerful in the face of men who are both exhausted and apathetic.  Bored married couples divorce after being married for a year.

2009- People aren’t showing up to concerts.  Despite falling prices, Live Nation, an organization that makes its money by buying up tickets and selling them back to consumers with a service charge attached, report that attendance is down 22 percent.  Fans of acts big and small complain that their favorite bands are “falling off” but in reality, Y generation simply isn’t into concerts.  The stimuli of pure, real “live” performers can’t compare to their perfected electronic avatars.

My Focus on Essay the 19th

The focus of my essay is going to be pornography, technology, and the consumer-based market system in relation to middle-class interpersonal relationships and social institutions.  What kind of enabling powers has technology had on the middle class?  What about individualizing powers?  What kinds of relationships are important in free market systems? And what kind of things go swept under the rug in them- and, how does the pornography industry epitomize these things. 


My essay is going to be sectioned, with certain sections dealing specifically with the history of pornography, especially since its spread to the internet and especially focused on the role pornography plays in prostitution, human trafficking, and all-around degrading of sexual & romantic relationships.


I'm going to do a similar thing with the PC and where the its history coincides with that of pornography, but most likely these to timelines will converge with the registering of the first porn domain name.


How is pornography different than the rampant infidelity that was common before- when, like in the Victorian era, husbands were pretty much expected to pick up prostitutes and have mistresses. Is there even a difference? Is one way- strong institutionalized marriages with expected infidelity vs. weak "based on love" marriages with that collapse at the first sign of such- better than the other?


Finally, what kind of meaningful and healthy sexual relationships do (or can) exist in our hyper-individualized world? 




I need all the feedback I can get.  I need an anecdote.  I'm not sure if I should or can add a first person angle to weave between the two "historical" segments.  Does anyone have an idea how I could tie all these things together- and what kinds personal experience I should try and draw from?

Blog 18: A Weekend on Campus

Hammerhead's Inn is located just outside the parking lot of the University.  My freshman year, before I was old enough to drink, the Campus Bar was just a little hole in the wall.  Then, the owner decided to renovate the place, move in some flat screen TV's, and add the "Hammerhead's" moniker to the sign.

Hammerhead's can be live or dead at any given night, and any given time.  Sometimes, on weekend nights and game nights, it's packed with students and bar-hoppers to whom Hammerhead's is just a stop on the way somewhere else.  Other nights, it's dead and  me and my friends get the place to ourselves. Tonight, though, is a game night and a weekend night.  Hammerhead's is packed.

Domestic pints are $3.  Shots and mixed drinks are $4.  Top-shelf is $5.  Sharky's is cheaper than anywhere, except Long Island Ice Tea is $12.  The weeknight bartender thinks the owner is nuts- Applebees down the street sell LIT for $4 after 10.  The owner doesn't listen to this.  No one comes to Hammerhead's for LIT.

Tonight, I'm not paying.  My wealthy friend points to the top shelf, and says we'll do shots of whatever I like.  I look up there- there's several varieties of Patron, Black & Red Label, Hennessey, Cristal, and several other drinks.  Tonight, we drink shots of Patron.  A bottle of Patron Silver costs about $40, but tonight we pay half of that for the four of us.

Jaeger Bombs and Irish Car Bombs are $8.  We do a couple of those.  Jaeger's in the fridge and "bottom shelf," by the way.  It tastes like black liquorice and costs the same amount as Jack, Captain, Jameson, Jose, Schnapps, and so on.

2 pitichers of beer, drinks and shots for everyone has already put our tab up to nearly a hundred dollars.  By last call that's nearly doubled, but no-one is falling over.  Somewhere behind us, another group of friends- older friends- are talking about where they'll go next.  They start naming off the different clubs around.  They've drank as much as us, but their night is still young.

We debate the club but even my wealthy friend is spread thin on cash now, and I hate clubs.  Before we leave, one of our girlfriends talks the bartender into a round of shots.  This one is on him.

We hop in the car and pop into a diner.  Gyros for everyone is on me.  The next morning, I'll see the hole in my wallet and be disappointed.

Nearly 3:30 a.m. we're back on campus, relieved there's no random DUI check.  Campus police are busy, crashing a real party that's happening in one of the residence halls.  "They're idiots," my wealthy friend says as we're walking back.  "They borrow so much money just so they can live there and party, just so they can get kicked out later."

Market Obfuscation and Worshipping Dei Tech (Blog 17)

1.

I’ve been really interested in smartphones lately.  My Verizon contract is expiring soon, and I’m thrilled that I’ll have the option to upgrade to phones like the new droid, the blackberry and the iPhone.  For the past four years, I’ve been stuck with these tiny, cheaply made cell-phones that can’t do anything except call people.   Now, I’m finally going to get my next chance at purchasing something legit.

I’m the polar opposite of a technophobe. Though I’m admittedly bad at figuring out computers, and though I can’t really afford most of the electronics I wish I could be sporting, I love technology.  As I browse Verizon’s webpage and see the various upgrades available to me, I’m practically in heaven.  I can’t help but start thinking about what the next big thing could be. The iPhone, for example, is a digital camera, MP3 player, and internet device all in one. When I rode the bus into school in highschool, I used to carry a CD player with two or three CDs, my cellphone, and a couple of books. With the iPhone or any of the other smart phones, I could have the phone, my entire CD collection and my library of sci-fi and fantasy with me in the palm of my hand.

Seriously. The iPhone and most of these other phones weigh less than five ounces. How can you do better than that?

To be honest, though, all of this stuff is still kind of new to me. Though the iPhone and the Zune have been out for several years, I still have yet to purchase either. The Amazon Kindle is on my wish list, too, but that’s something else that I’m probably not going to be purchasing. What’s the point of having a Kindle, anyway, or an IPod, when the smartphone does it all in one?  In all honesty, the iPhone is far from perfect, according to what lots of people have told me.  It’s less of an MP3 player than the iPod, but it’s still a pretty good one.  It’s less of a reading device than the Kindle, but it’s still pretty good.  The internet isn’t comparable to the kind of internet you get on notebooks, but, again, it’s still pretty good.  So, obviously, there’s still some room for improvement.  Why buy now when there’s always something a little bit better on the way?

2.

One of my best friends from highschool, John, considers himself to be what’s called a Transhumanist. The World Transhumanist Association, now called Humanity+, is an organization that wants people to be able to be, for lack of a more apt description, better than well.  Though I’d like to avoid caricaturing the beliefs of people like my friend John, I’d say that Humanity+ is the kind of organization that wants to ensure that when the stars are right, your government has granted you the liberty to graft your iPhone into the back of your head and communicate telepathically with others who have opted to do the same thing.

John and I started being friends in high school because we were both kind of interested in dorkier things.  Though, initially, our interests ranged widely from science, science fiction and literature to anime and video-game inspired philosophies, John graduated and went into the sciences while I stuck with the humanities-- more due to a perceived lack of mathematical skill than anything else.

John and I still see each other relatively often, though, and on any given day he might mention something that’s called the G.R.I.N. technologies- Genetics, Robotics, Informaton, and Nanotech.  These fairly recent technologies make a plethora of promises. Genetics can one day eliminate disease.  Robotics can ensure cheap manufacturing and put an end to unfair labor practices, as well as help people who’ve been in life changing accidents.  Information tech like the internet and cell-phone can be improved and made into insurance against corrupt authoritative government, despite the seemingly authoritarian leanings of my own Verizon. Finally, there’s Nanotech. Nanotech is the most far off, and the most difficult for me to understand, but seems to have more promise than even the rest of the technologies-- for better or worse.

The two of us generally find enough common ground to stand on.  Despite being a science guy, he’s pretty well read, easily just as well read as me even though I’ve devoted the last four years to learning literature and language.  And despite me not being a science guy at all, I am interested.   I’ve told John plenty of times that, though I don’t know a lot about future tech, I’m a believer.  I don’t see how anything that liberates people can be that big of a bad thing.

What surprises me, though, is John’s foresight.  He, unlike me, has not yet succumbed to the current batch of smart-phones.  Surprisingly, his cellphone is even lousier than mine.  I want to call him cheap, but it’d be a copout.  It’s like he already knows something better and less expensive is on the way.

3.

My entire life, I’ve been surrounded by my Anglo-Irish Catholic relatives who assert that “the world would be a better place if everyone was a Christian.” I’ve always wondered about what owning things like iPhones meant for Christians.  My parent’s families are full of what’d I’d consider upper-middle class white collar types who go to better schools than I do- but, to be honest, all of us own nice things.  I haven’t gone to mass regularly for ages, but I’ve always been curious as to how accruing personal property and owning nice things is answerable to that line in the bible about getting into heaven wealthy like getting a camel through Eel’s Eye.

Even if their Christianity is more out of convenience than anything else, though, these people are decidedly right leaning.  They are disillusioned youths who grew up to be soft libertarians.  Never will you hear them utter that technology is the answer to a better planet like John will, or higher taxes like my friend Pez the socialist will, or doing anything other than going to work and abiding the important laws. Their excuse is their religion, even if their religious experience is mostly inactive and takes the back seat to the rest of their lives.

I like them- I love them all, actually- but I feel different enough from them, even if we all agree that the iPhone is a fantastic device that we all want.  For awhile, I thought that I might be a socialist.  I even joined a group on Campus and went to a few protests.  I found that while that label might apply to me in some circumstances, it certainly doesn’t apply in all of them.

4.

I’ve found that I, too, am a religious person.  In her book The God of Small Things, Arudhati Roy makes a creative comparison between Christianity and Marx that I still remember clearly, even though I read the book at least two years ago.  Communism is like Christianity, she says.  Both are obstacle courses with prizes at the end.  All one needs to do is replace Marx with God, and Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with Marx’s ideal society, and there you have it.

Roy could have just was well substituted Marxism with Technology.  People like my friend John and Humanity+ have, in some ways, done what religion used to do before God became (in Joyce’s words) “a personal God.”  But who are the believers? Authoritarian Verizon clearly isn’t a believer, even though they sell this stuff.  Same goes for Apple—there’s nothing technologically “liberating” about a computer that you need a unique set of screws only the Mac store have to open up and mess with.  My relatives aren’t believers either. Nice cell-phones and computers and being able to afford expensive ways of combating cancer might be trendy, but they don’t mean anything if they support these things in ways which help break down class barriers. Christianity tried (and failed) to create a new system of equality.  Democracy tried (and failed) to create a new system of equality.   Marxism tried (and failed) to eliminate class boundaries.  But nothing is more capable of flattening the world than cheap technology everyone can afford and everyone has access too.

I, too, believe that technology is the asnwer. I pay top dollar for it, too, whenever I can, regardless of whether I’m buying the iPhone or an electronic copy of a new novel or record. Whether my consumerism validates my beliefs or is a reflection of my own insecurity about it, though-- I’m not really sure.  

Blog 16- Brainstorming Essay 3

As I said in class, I'm going to be focusing on technology, both the promise of technology and the reality of technology as something that's always near but never really obtainable. I will focus on my own yearning for the i-Pod, as well as a friend of mine who considers himself among the "Transhumanists"- essentially, a group of people who look up to technology as a utopian answer to all the world's problems much in the same way Marxists do Communism and Christians do Christianity. 


My description of the i-Phone will be decidedly idealistic, which I hope will juxtapose nicely with the Transhumanists description. I don't have an i-Phone myself, which makes me an apt candidate for praising the merits of something that hasn't happened yet.


My overall "goal" is to present Technology not as a "thing" but an "idea" and a positive-though-flawed  "system of belief"  to which we've all already opted-in.


My description of the i-Phone is the overall belief held by most people about technology. I'm basically making myself out to be the voice of everyone- the person who wants something new and knows it's going to be great, even though it hasn't happened yet. I'm ignorant, yet optimistic. 


I'm looking for a lot of feedback. Mainly, people's experiences with technology, how they feel about it in a general sense, and whether they have any stories about it. I also would like to be told if anyone feels like my topic is confusing.