Technological Complexity (MCL)

After reading Ruchi's recent post, I got the urge to write about an example of technology usage gone wrong. Her main question is 'At what point does technology use no longer benefit society? One example of this might be when technology complicates things instead of simplifying them

One example of this is the New Trier language lab. As much as I think technology can help learning, trips to the language lab aren't trips to learn so much as gawk at overly-bureaucratic, expensive technology. The technology makes nothing easier, faster, or more efficient, and does very little that is unique. Further, it doesn't do much in the way of community-building, as the students are all confined to desks for extremely simple things.

Its once-weekly usage often consists of students logging in, then logging in to another system. Then the teacher might lock the screens and broadcast corrections of homework, while students correct it at their cubicles. After that, online textbook activities, discussions with other students via mic/headset, and other things like that take place. Perhaps IM conversations or pictionary (I have experienced each once and they were used terribly).

The problem with this is that almost all could be done in the classroom, face-to-face. The only unique things are the online textbook, which has extra practice, and recording. The head sets are high quality and great for recording, but they largely go unused for that purpose. Most interesting is that, while no student really needs the lab for most of these activities, the lab technology is so complicated it requires tech support staff to be present at all times because the teachers don't understand it. Does that make sense?

Although I hate to make this comparison, as I think it's exaggerated, it reminds me of Huck Finn, where Sawyer/Huck are acting out their escape plan. Clearly, they could just escape right out the door, but they invent this weird scenario where they invent hoops to jump through. That's how I feel in the language lab-- suspended in some artificial scenario. The only reason I need to use the lab technology to begin with is because we're placed in front of it, with no mobility. As a result, we do not use the technology as an extension of ourselves-- our actions are merely an extension of the technology.

Do you think the language lab is beneficial?

Minimum Wage

Instead of focusing on poverty in general, as worried about in my last post, my focus will be shifted to minimum wage--

Why is minimum wage ($7.25) the way it is now?
Since my last post I've found an assortment of articles and almost finished my book Nickeled and Dimed, which reports grimly about the lives of minimum wage workers, many of which work in harsh conditions without the ability to make ends meet without either sharing housing/being homeless, working two jobs, and/or skipping out on many things we may consider necessities. These sources have helped establish background knowledge for when I will soon look more in to the specific causes/historical background of the minimum wage's changes.

A useful graph I found started me off nicely by helping me visualize an overview of minimum wage over time:


When looking at the blue line, the minimum wage has visibly increased from $.38 to $7.25, but as you can see, since the '80s there have been 2 long periods (horizontal blue lines) of time where it had not been adjusted to keep up with inflation. The 'real value' (dollar value adjusted for today's inflation) of the minimum wage appears in red, and over the two longest periods of time when congress didn't update the minimum wage, its real value plummets a lot, reversing 4 or so increases mandated by congress from around 1956 leading up to the peak in '68.

Interestingly, the author of Nickel and Dimed began her investigation of what it's like to live as a member of the working poor in 1998, which on the graph is just after the second extended period of congress inaction begins (which lasts 10 years). She mentions briefly in her book that the rhetoric of that time was all about prosperity-- and yet I doubt minimum age workers shared prosperity with the rest of the country as their already-minimum earnings decreased in value, especially as much as the upper class (which she calls "the owning class" from her perspective as a journalist-working-as-maid for 6+$ an hour). Sadly, the maids she works with, with their limited job skills and perpetually recurring health/housing/food problems, when asked how feel when they clean mansions, say they are inspired that they themselves may, with hard work, enjoy that much property in the future, which near-certainly will not happen (the graph portends their fortunes having an opposite trend).

Anyway, from this, my currently emaciated vegan thesis is:
'The minimum wage is the way it is because we didn't adjust for inflation between 1981-1990 and 1996-2006 and it was probably within many peoples' interest for it to be that way or something.'
needz moar meat

At least from here I know I have to look at how/why the minimum wage was created to begin with in 1938, what was going on in the years leading up to '68 that made the minimum wage so high, and why, from 1981-1990 and 1996-2006, minimum wage wasn't being adjusted for inflation for ~twice as long as usual. What was going on during those times, politically/economically? What legislation was in place? What were peoples' rationales for increasing or not increasing minimum wage? And when minimum wage was adjusted in 1990, 1991, 1995, and 1996, why were the increases relatively small? Why was there a 5-year-long plateau from '91-'95 after such small increases? And what was going on in 2007-- why is our current minimum wage only as high in real value as it was in '59?


Other things I will hopefully end up looking in to:

How many people work minimum wage jobs and remain below the poverty line?

How adequate is the minimum wage to allow people to live well?

Why have several states mandated, instead of the minimum wage, the "living wage," which demands higher pay than the minimum wage? How might the effects of "living wages" demonstrate minimum wage isn't high enough?

How did the minimum wage change in times of increased prosperity or depression?

How are people impacted by changes in the minimum wage-- does it reduce poverty?

How much do minimum wage increases help the economy or, as some might claim (however erroneously/accurately I don't know), harm it? (Opposing Viewpoints has poisoned my brain.)

Why are there periods on the graph where the minimum wage is increased with more frequency than others?

Are we going to adjust it for inflation relatively soon, or will we go further than that and raise its value? (conc?)

What roles have unions played with this, if any?

How do chain/corporate businesses view unionized workers?

Have different interpretations of Christianity/Jesus contributed to income inequality? (criticized in both Capitalism: A Love Story and Nickeled and Dimed)

Some of these sub-topics aren't ones that answering will necessarily affect my thesis, but they'll hopefully allow me to look critically at decisions made by the government. A few are too off-topic, though, and I'll just hope they pop up while I'm looking at other things.

Junior Theme

After trying to pick topics for a while, I think the question I will be focusing my junior theme on is (for now, anyway-- it needs a crazy amount of hacking down):

Why are there ~40 million people in the United States under the poverty line (12% of the population) while US is the world's richest nation?
At first I was deciding between either a topic related to wealth distribution or welfare programs in the United States, but I think focusing on poverty will allow me to look a bit at the history of both along the way.

Because at this point the topic is so broad, the process of looking in to it will eventually allow me to pick a more specific topic related to the economic structure/public policy/wealth in the united states.

--- [edit]

Meh. Perhaps not. I read a bunch of articles and watched one of my sources-- Capitalism, A Love Story-- and while they were interesting and raised a lot of questions for me, they didn't really help me specify my area of focus more.

Another major problem I guess I'm having with formulating a specific why question is that asking a why question implies knowing the state of how things are without making too many generalizations, which takes a lot of time. I don't know that much about the current state of welfare, poverty, the US economy, etc., so I feel like I still might have a ways to go before confidently asking a question and sticking with it. That might be normal to some degree, though. List of tentative other questions:

Why is there an achievement gap in US schools (compared to other industrialized 'first world' nations)?

Why is the US military composed the way it is (ex. who is represented in it most/least and why)?

Why did we do a bailout?

*something about welfare (ex. perception of welfare/the poor, comparing corporate to other forms of welfare)*

We'll see...

lulz

Advertisement & Consumption: Modern Day Ritual?

As time has passed, our focus has shifted from religion to consumption. Towns used to be centered around churches as the largest building-- now churches are centered around us, and massive office buildings dominate cityscapes. Religion has become more centered to our convenience than in the past and plays a lesser role. Is consumption/advertisement in some ways like a modern day secular ritual for Americans?

The purpose of religious rituals from an evolutionary standpoint was to help hold members of a group together. According to costly signaling theory, a ritual requires a set of costly behaviors that demonstrate the person has, essentially, genuinely bought in to the religion. The act of an individual performing ritual actions sends signals to other members about their adherence to the group, and their following of societal values. Rituals also re-enact a religion's mythologies, reinforcing the strength of the shared myth on the whole of the group.

How similar do you think consumption might be to ritual from this perspective?

Child-targeted ads build the foundation for consumption early in life, enforcing consumption as a set behavior and societal value. Not necessarily unlike religious instruction that would raise a person to live their lives in a socially-cohesive way. Also, buying a brand is like buying in to a set of mythology, as what may be what makes one product different from another (ex: Coke vs. Pepsi). Additionally, the costs of purchasing one type of product sends signals about themselves compared to others, as well.

While it appears advertisement/consumption has many similarities to religion, what do you think might be the comparison's limits? Do you think the difference between advertisement/consumption and religion might be degree, or is there something fundamentally different? Is religion especially distinct, or are all things just ideas?

What Americans See: the Biggest, Fastest, and Shiniest

Mr. O'Connor recently mentioned how the first images we see shape how we see the rest of the world. I read a really interesting article somewhat related to that, which talked about the differences between the way people perceive things/think in different parts of the world.

An experiment was done in which people in America and Japan were shown an animated underwater scene, much like a desktop screensaver (example), which featured one large fish that swam around among other, smaller fish, and other wildlife. They were then asked to describe the scene.

The Japanese subjects were way more likely to begin their description with the background, while Americans tended to comment on the largest fish first, and focus their attention on the biggest, fastest, or shiniest objects. In general, the Japanese subjects' ways of seeing things were more contextualized:

"Japanese subjects in the study made 70
percent more statements about aspects of
the background environment than Americans,
and twice as many statements about the relationships
between animate and inanimate objects"
Another difference between American and East Asian (Japanese & Korean) subjects was how they responded to contradiction.

"[When] presented with weaker arguments running
contrary to their own, Americans were likely to solidify their
opinions... clobbering the weaker arguments, and resolving
the threatened contradiction in their own minds. Asians,
however, were more likely to modify their own
position, acknowledging that even the weaker
arguments had some merit."
Overall, the studies suggested that while Americans tend to think in a more linear fashion and have a lower tolerance for contradictions, East Asians tend to have more ease seeing things in a more contextualized/holistic manner. It also shows that ways of perceiving images and thinking logically change from culture to culture. (There are some better explanations and more examples in the article.)

Where do you see these sorts of characteristics reflected in American culture?

Fox News & The Stimulus

I wasn't originally going to blog about this, but I was flipping channels and became rather annoyed when I came upon Fox News to see they were doing a special on how the money from the stimulus is being wasted, in the form of a 102-item countdown.

While I can't say much with confidence about the stimulus, the news station clearly misrepresents what is funded by it. Sure, it's perfectly reasonable to suspect that funding to some areas is done out of political interests rather than need, as demonstrated by our reading about the construction of the Winnetka tracks. Analyzing funding in that way would be valuable for a popular news station to do. But I could probably present a more Fair & Balanced™ look at the stimulus package than Fox has tried to by just doing a google search.

In seconds, the viewer's attention is brought from one stimulus item to the next, and it all whirls together, giving them little time to think or ask questions about what's just been presented as "waste."


What is considered waste, exactly?

1) One of the items Fox host Hannity whizzes through is 1.7 million dollars towards researching pig odor.

What Hannity essentially says: Pig odor? Silly scientists, that sure sounds weird and useless, and it probably won't create jobs. Moving on...

2) Another thing Hannity criticizes is funds going towards raising a railroad track 18 inches, as it is not level with the main road, creating the need for drivers to take a detour around it.

Hannity basically says: How wasteful. Can't those drivers just drive around? Instead we're spending our tax payer dollars on this, *appeal to Americans' personal responsibility*.

3) Another complaint was that 25,000 dollars went to a puppet theater that produces socially-conscious shows.

Hannity: The theater is named after Che Guevara, so it must be bad.


For the first example, pig odor creates problems with air quality, which can lead to lawsuits by locals against farms. If this problem is solved by scientific research, farms and locals could coexist, and living conditions in small towns would improve. It might not be the most appropriate thing to have in the stimulus, which might be a valid point to make, but clearly it's not "waste," as it has a long-term payoffs for science, business, and peoples' quality of life.

The second example sounds wasteful, but raising the track will actually "create access to property where a developer wants to build a hotel and shopping center," which would create 100-200 jobs.

As for the third example, regardless of how the stimulus money may help the puppet theater, Hannity makes sure to imply that investment in the public arts is almost the equivalent of paying homage to socialism. He also considers art in general to be "waste," considering another criticism of his for a park spending money on putting in new sculptures.

Overall, it's really unclear what Hannity considers to be waste. Things that don't create jobs are waste, even when they're funding scientific research, education, improvement in the environment, improvement of infrastructure, or art. Meanwhile, things that do create jobs are wasteful, too. This leads me to believe that Hannity doesn't care what is or isn't wasteful spending, so long as it makes Obama look bad.

Are all voices heard?

"Language is... the means through which people make sense of their own experience, produce meaning, and act on the world... to ignore the role of language as a major force in shaping human identity is to... deny the life histories and experiences of the people who use it" (119).

In class it was mentioned that schools tend to value only what is quantified, and as a result quantifiable subjects are prioritized while other school programs, like art, get the boot. Another subject that can be victim to this is language education in general.



On standardized tests, the only language that is measured is Standard English, and pressure for schools to be "accountable" and do well on such tests has resulted in multicultural/bilingual education being pushed aside for exclusive emphasis on English. Other languages have no quantitative value, so there is less incentive for schools to focus on them in addition to English classes.

This causes problems for children who speak another language in the home. Language has strong ties to one's cultural identity and individual expression, and bilingual students often feel losses of self-worth, frustration, and anxiety when they are put under pressure to assimilate to English, as they are given what seems to be a choice between connection to their community and success in school. Like comparing appreciation for science to the arts, English is shown as more than a road to success-- it is instead portrayed as a more important language.

How importance is having linguistic diversity? On one hand, the loss of bilingual programs is hard for bilingual students. However, does multiculturalism, in some respects, just make it harder for Americans to communicate, as some would argue? Is it better to assimilate? What amount of assimilation should people from different ethnic backgrounds have to go through? How should English be portrayed in relation to other languages?