Author Archives: M.L.

The Best of Luck

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My sister graduated from high school yesterday. She wore my white gown and straightened her long hair and posed with our parents and her friends. She walked with way more elegance than I had four years ago. She graduated in the top 10% of her class and wore a sash to show her membership in the National Honors Society. She’ll be going to James Madison University to study nursing. She looked beautiful last night, in the setting sun, the slight drizzle from a single obstinate rain cloud, with a double rainbow in the background of a newly renovated football stadium. She has it way more together than I did.

As I sat in the stands, holding a program over my head to fend off the rain (having dutifully forgotten the umbrella that was sitting on the floor of the car, merely 100 yards away), I looked forward to the Commencement speeches and hearing what the students had to say about their high school experience. I’m always curious what words of wisdom an 18-year-old can come up with, having not seen much of the world from our “bubble” as we call our town. As I was sitting listening to the speeches of my sister’s classmates, I suddenly and sadly realized that I don’t remember who spoke at my own graduation. I don’t remember their words of wisdom or their hopes for the future. I don’t remember my brother’s graduation speeches two years ago either. As much as I look forward to hearing what people say, all I remember from them are words that are hopeful and happy, remembering wonderful days of high school and looking forward to making dreams come true. That’s what high school graduation speeches are always about.

But in my experience, high schools days were not always that happy. Dreams don’t come true right away. The world doesn’t change just because you go to college in a different city. I may sound slightly cynical here, but I’m only telling the truth. High school is a long, hard road with bullies and mean girls, failed grades, terrible relationships, love found and lost, a rollercoaster of emotions and milestones. I think everyone would also agree that the entire, roughly 260-person, class of 2008, or 2012 (or whichever year you graduated) was definitely not all friends. When I graduated there were a few people I had never even met. (This is not to say that I never had fun. I had plenty of good times in high school.)

So when students go to the podium and face the crowd of proud and expectant parents, they tell them what everyone wants to hear. That their time at school could not have been better. That they worked hard, played hard, had fun, but learned so much in the process. That they all grew up and became the best of friends and now that they’re parting ways, they will move on to bigger and better things, but retain their loyalty to the place where they grew up and the people that helped them along the way. This is what parents and administrators like to hear.

(As a side note, my high school no longer ranks students in terms of GPA, so instead of valedictorian and salutatorian speeches, they chose and carefully selected the “best” entries from the students’ speech submissions.)

This year, the school chose as their distinguished alumnus, a man who has worked as a cinematographer for National Geographic, BBC, the Discovery Channel, and ABC. He was not able to be at the Commencement to give his speech, so his childhood friend stepped up for him. What stood out in his speech was his continuous reference to how hard he worked and how he made the dreams in his life come true.

I disagree with his philosophy. I think that it does take a certain amount of effort to achieve your dreams. It does take hard work to get through college and earn a degree. But really, living out your dreams is largely a matter of luck. If your dream is to become a professional baseball player for example, it is luck that brings the right recruiter to the right game where you happen to play well. If you want to work at National Geographic, you can work as hard as you like, practicing photography and researching. But it is luck that brings you into contact with the editor on your vacation in Naples. Out of all the millions of people that you could meet, you must be lucky enough to meet the right person, at the right time, who will make your dreams come true.

This distinguished alumnus also acknowledged in his speech that some of the graduating seniors may not know what they want to do with their lives or what they want to be. And he told them that that’s okay. He said there is plenty of time to figure out who you are and to take the necessary steps to get there. Again, I disagree. As a senior in high school, I was one of those grads, sitting on the field, drinking in advice like this. I had no idea what I wanted to be “when I grew up.” Now four years later, I wish I had taken a little time to explore more and figure it out. If you don’t know where you want to go, then you don’t know how to proceed, and it will take you a lot longer to get there than if you had taken the time to figure it out sooner. Talk to anyone who has changed their major more than once and they will tell you. They are spending thousands of extra dollars “figuring it out,” completing their degree years behind their peers and entering the workforce with a disadvantage because they didn’t get the same internships, not to mention they have more debt. Everyone needs some kind of goal, or you will never achieve anything. So those speakers at Commencements who are telling students that it is perfectly okay to not have a clue what you want to do are lying. Have some kind of clue.

So I look at my beautiful, confident, radiant sister and I applaud her. I commend her for working so hard in high school, for discovering her talents, and already having her dreams in sight. I hope she thinks back on her high school days as mostly fun and wonderful. I hope she goes to JMU with an open mind and an open heart, and always remembers where she came from. And most of all, I hope she continues working hard, but I also wish her a little luck.

Apathetic Citizens–Unite!

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People might be spending more time with social networks and entertainment programs, but they still manage to unite for a common interest.

According to the theories of selective exposure, perception and retention, people either avoid information that is incongruent with their own beliefs, or if they do view this information, they consume it through biased eyes or remember only the parts that adhere to their beliefs. Earlier in the year, we also talked about how people seem to be paying less attention to hard news, and a new genre of infotainment is becoming more prevalent. People are actively choosing to watch the Daily Show, for example, because they agree with John Stewart’s more negative criticisms of politicians and governmental practices, or at least find him entertaining. If this is the only “news” people view, we would say that they are only exposing themselves to the ideas that already fit with their beliefs. It is widely known that conservatives watch FOX news and liberals watch CNN and MSNBC. Even on these generally hard news sources, we can see some evidence of infotainment. One of CNN’s recent tweets today was “Do allergies actually benefit your health?” One of the stories on the U.S. news page of MSNBC was “Teen banned from prom over Confederate dress.” On the ABC News home page, “Katherine Heigl adopts second baby.” And even on the home page of FOXNews, “Does the G-spot exist? New study fuels debate.”

We can speculate, then, that even though these are traditionally hard news sources, they are finding that people like infotainment. People like to be entertained and with so many other outlets to find entertaining information, games, and social media, the hard news sites are just trying to keep up and compete. Remember, news is a business.

So scholars argue—are people becoming apathetic? Are people becoming less involved in the governmental process and less knowledgeable about important issues? According to Facebook’s newsroom, there were 845 million active users at the end of December 2011. According to a Time Magazine articlein September 2011, there were 100 million active Twitter accounts, with an average of 230 million tweets per day. According to Wikipedia, television ratings showed that in 2008, The Daily Show had 1.45 to 1.6 million viewers daily.

With these statistics, it would certainly seem like people are turning more and more to media that can entertain, especially media that is available on mobile devices, and has quick and easy access. So are these scholars right? Do people care less about what’s going on in the world and more about what’s going on in their world?

I would argue that while so many people are turning to Facebook, Twitter, and entertainment TV shows, the media still has the power to move people to action. Even those who selectively choose the media that they watch decide what is important to them and they are moved to act on it. People who may appear so apathetic in their TV show choice and entertainment value still do care about the world around them.

For example, the MSNBC website prominently displays a headline reading “Autistic boy wired up to show teacher bullying” with a video next to it. In this video, a father is outraged by the abuse his son endured at school, which he secretly recorded, and he posts a YouTube video displaying his feelings and several of the recordings. This video post led to the school firing this boy’s teacher. The video has about 1.5 million views. On the page, there is a petition that sympathetic viewers may sign to show their support for the father and his son and to try to change New Jersey legislature so that teacher who bully students are immediately fired. This petition has been signed by over 85,000 people.

Another example of people stepping up as active participants comes from a story on FOXNews this morning about the Arizona immigration law Senate Bill 1070. Immigrants and pro-immigration activist groups are taking a stand today and protesting what they believe is a discriminatory law, a continuation of their protests two years ago when the bill was signed.

And finally, we see millions of people step up and rally behind Presidents, rally behind Presidential candidates, rally for low interest rates for students and the death of Osama bin Laden. Even recently on the University of Delaware’s campus, where a few years ago, the students here were known notoriously as apathetic, the students have become more involved; they left their houses in the middle of the night to march to Memorial Hall. The students here rallied for justice in the Trayvon Martin case. People may enjoy connecting with their friends on Facebook and they may like to see what their roommate has to say about her exam on Twitter. People might find John Stewart humorous and they might not want to look for every angle of every story every day. But when they find something they care about, many people in this country find a way to become active members of the community. Whether they are signing an online petition against teacher bullying or passing along the message about KONY2012, many people are still finding ways to be informed and be engaged. And while, their selective exposure, perception and retention might skew their information and might make them slightly biased, I think the most important part is that they found something. 

Citizen Journalism and Social Media

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This a blog post that I wrote for my Communications class a few weeks ago. The class, taught by Professor Lindsay Hoffman, was an introduction into analyzing how the media and politics work together to form what we know as “political communication.” Prof. Hoffman featured several students’ entries from our class on her blog for The Huffington Post.

Here is what I had to say about citizen journalism:

In this age of expanding internet and social media, more people are turning to online sources for their news. It’s faster, easier and more convenient when we are already perpetually connected. This also requires news outlets to produce news content at an unprecedented rate. News organizations are constantly competing to be the first to break a story, if not the only ones to do so, and it’s very convenient that Twitter’s “retweet” button allows for quick and vast dissemination of any piece of information. It is just this exact tool that also gets news outlets into trouble as we can see with the false breaking news that South Carolina’s Governor, Nikki Haley, would soon be indicted.

An article in the New York Times details how the unfounded information, posted on a small blog, called the Palmetto Public Record, went viral after just about twenty minutes. In the race to be first with information, the blog article was reposted by several news organizations, including major news outlets like the Washington Post. With tens of thousands of followers, the false information quickly spread across the nation and cyberspace. News organizations made corrections later, but the damage to Haley’s reputation was done.

We’ve discussed in class that multi-media is becoming more and more popular, especially online sources such as Twitter, where consumers can get news in 140 characters or less. This is especially appealing to the public as iPhone and iPad sales increase and computer screens are made even smaller. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook also allow for the public to feel that they are more a part of the news process by promoting “retweets” and “likes” so that friends and followers can stay up to date on the news as well.

The trend of this so-called “citizen journalism” becomes more popular with blogs and Twitter because we know that realistically, news correspondents and journalists can’t be everywhere, covering everything. We have come to rely on this citizen journalism to fill us in on the things that major news organizations miss and to fill the holes with on-the-scene footage and pictures. Major news channels and TV networks, like CNN and NBC ask the audience to send in photos of storms, for example, or if they “see news happening” to call the hotline. As a society, we have come to accept this and we trust the major news outlets to filter out the information and present what is real and true in an unbiased way. But this takes time and resources—things that journalists can’t afford if they want to stay on top and keep their ratings higher than anyone else’s. This is all part of the politics of the media. The ideal of the news is to report events objectively, but the reality is that news needs to appeal to the audience in order to get viewers and readers and to stay in business.

This leads us to stories such as Haley’s false indictment reports. News outlets and citizen bloggers are so anxious to get the news and spread the news—especially when it is scandalous and sensational, two things that make a story newsworthy—so the fact-checking and filtering stops. It is natural to say, next, that journalists are humans and as capable of making mistakes as anyone else. But the ease and speed of social media dissemination leads to grave errors, spread to tens of thousands of people. So where do we draw the line? Is citizen journalism only valuable to the public up to a point?

We recently discussed in class that the media have the ability to frame the way the public sees the story.  A story can be framed in many different ways, depending on the context and the word choice and language used. There is no story written that was not written with some kind of frame. This goes along with the notion of bias that we talked of earlier in the semester as well. Journalists are required to present the news objectively, without bias. But there is rarely a case where there isn’t at least a little bias. As we also said, there is no one “truth,” there is only the truth as we see it, and each person sees it differently. So who is to say that the way the citizen journalist sees a story or event, is worse or less truthful than the way the New York Times journalist may see the same event? This is what advocates of citizen journalism may say.

However, we also know that journalists at news organizations have been trained to check facts and examine all possible known sides of a story. Citizen journalists on the other hand, have not, and their blogging and tweeting therefore cannot and should not be evaluated on the same level.

We saw the detrimental effects of social media news dissemination when Joe Paterno’s death was falsely reported and reposted by and to millions on Twitter. The New York Times wrote an article afterwards explaining the mix-up and what followed as they tried to make sense of the power of social media.

Social media outlets allow for non-journalists to post and repost “news” or even just commentary and false information can go viral all too easily. While social media sites are admittedly a growing outlet for news, the information must be critically evaluated before it can be noted as “truth.” Many citizens do not have the knowledge to read news critically and to accurately make a judgment on its authenticity. Until all citizens can effectively evaluate information on social media sites themselves, there is no way that we can use Twitter and Facebook as effective tools for “citizen journalists.”

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

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Since this is my first blog and blog post, I feel the need to explain my title.
If you have taken twelfth grade English or are at all familiar with classic poets, you may vaguely recognize the title of my blog. It comes from a poem by T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” written in 1920. The actual poem is rather long and I admit that I don’t understand all of it. I appreciate the poem in the way that you recognize something beautiful and perfect but you don’t need to know the why and how of it. You know that there is a deeper meaning to the poet and a different interpretation for each individual who comes across it. My favorite verses of the poem go like this:

“Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all-

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?”

I love the way these verses suggest that there is something bigger in this world than us. We are small beings, here for a short time, drinking our coffee every morning, and going about our business each day. So my goal with this blog is to offer some insight into this big world the way I see it. I know that I am neither right nor wrong in my opinions about anything. There is no absolute truth, there is only truth the way I see it.

So I will measure my life with coffee spoons. I will appreciate each day and thoroughly enjoy my morning cup of coffee.