Thought That Came Unbidden

There is no question that the internet and all of its attendant technologies (web sites delivered via HTTP, instant messaging, photo sharing, web cams, peer-to-peer networking) has changed the way human beings interact. From dating and mating to how we entertain ourselves, the continued development of the internet has given us options that weren’t available even a decade ago, and those options have brought about greater opportunity for relationships, but at what cost to depth of involvement?

With an odd sort of clarity, we seem to have developed the ability to have deeply intimate relationships with people that we barely know, exposing our secrets to people who may or may not be who they say they are. The one area, though, where the internet seems to falter, seems to still be growing at least, is mourning.

A recent article in the New York Times addresses some of the issues faced by families where deceased relative had a heavy internet presence:

Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning. Such sites have enrolled millions of users in recent years, especially the young, who use them to expand their personal connections and to tell the wider world about their lives.

Inevitably, some of these young people have died — prematurely, in accidents, suicides, murders and from medical problems — and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night’s parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time.

The pages offer often wrenching views of young lives interrupted, and in the process have created a dilemma for bereaved parents, who find themselves torn between the comfort derived from having access to their children’s private lives and staying in contact with their friends, and the unease of grieving in a public forum witnessed by anyone, including the ill-intentioned.

Families, then, are forced to deal with two things right away: the death of a loved one and revelations about other aspects of that loved one’s life that were previously hidden. The latter is not an uncommon occurrence upon death, though in previous eras these revelations more frequently came via the photo found in a desk drawer or the hidden shoebox full of love letters. What makes mourning different in the internet age is the lack of context families have for the grief felt by that loved one’s online friends.

At the same time, Ms. Walker’s mother, Julie, wrote in an e-mail message, the family was overwhelmed by unsolicited e-mail messages from strangers offering platitudes and seeking to advise them on how to handle their grief. The family found such offerings unwelcome, however well intentioned.

“The grief of our own friends and family is almost more than we can bear on top of our own, and we don’t need anyone else’s on our shoulders,” Mrs. Walker wrote.

Mr. Shorkey said he and his wife remained in touch with their daughter’s friends through MySpace. And they visit her Web page daily.

“Some days it makes me feel she’s still there,” he said. “And some days it reminds me I can never have that contact again.”

Global time and the ability to reach across the country, even across the planet, near instantaneously puts digitheads like me and the other folks who work on Amphetameme in contact with other cultures and viewpoints that in previous eras we may not ever have experienced. But how well do we know each other really?

Hard conversations, conversations about real emotions, are made easier by the distance of the screen and the pixels. It’s easy to sit behind your keyboard and pretend your feelings don’t hurt, that you aren’t crying like a baby over some issue or remark; not so easy to do the same thing on the phone or face to face where traditional context clues like tone of voice and body language give you away. In some instances, that distance gives people who don’t necessarily fit societies’ ideals an easy social outlet, one where they are judged on their depth of knowledge of sci-fi trivia or their ability to write coherently about movies, for example, rather than on the clarity of their complexions or the size of their busts. What interests me more, though, is this dichotomy between intimacy and connection.

How much can you care about someone about whom you know the intimate details of their childhood but not where they actually live? And how is this strange dissonance affecting our ability to form communities outside “the box?”

More to the point: how are communities really formed? Are they about knowledge? Are they about proximity? Or are they about something more, something less tangible?

These are questions that we will, I think, continue to grapple with as the knowledge sphere expands and the world manages that most Escherian of concepts: getting smaller while simultaneously staying the same physical size.

This entry simultaneously published on Amephetameme.org

My office is in a residential neighborhood in a building that used to be a convent which means we have rather a lot of oddities including a decent sized backyard. One of my coworkers decided that with the constant money problems the organization has been having (hey! we made payroll this month! whoopie! And a whole month without anyone resigning! Double whoopie!) we haven’t been having anywhere near enough fun so she went out and bought a Frisbee^®.

She sent a note around just to the folks who were in the office today, 15 minutes of tossing the plastic disc around at 3pm. Only two of us took her up on the offer but it was the most fun I’ve had in months. Easy and relaxing even though I totally suck at it (note to self: remember to look where you want the frisbee to go before you throw it).

Funny thing is that I’ve always found situations like that the antithesis of relaxing. I never know how to act and am always afraid that there’s some big joke no one is letting me in on.

I guess everything is relative.

Next week: juggling!

^® Frisbee is a registered trademark of the Wham-O toy company.

I had occasion to be at the Zoo today and after watching about a dozen school groups wander by in the late-Spring sunlight I was forced to wonder: why is it that girls’ private school uniforms always suck?

Inevitably the boys are wearing some version of white shirt (dress or golf) with navy blue or black pants over black shoes. The girls, on the other hand, are usually wearing the same god-awful polyester jumper in some fake plaid that’s never seen the inside of a Scottish clan meeting and a blouse with the Peter Pan collar. What’s wrong with white shirt and blue pants for everyone?

And a couple of other random questions from yesterday…

The city’s leadership, in their infinite wisdom, decided about two years ago that street light banners, the kind that are stretched between two short polls that have been attached high on a light pole, were just the thing to perk up neighborhoods that never get street sweeping, don’t have enough police patrols, and really, really need some attention from DPW‘s paving crews.

I’m not sure how but someone managed to get a banner up there that reads “God loves you.” Yesterday it was hanging upside down, the top sort of ragged and flapping, detached from the upper pole. Now, white knowledge¹ tells us that a flag hanging upside down from its intended position is a sign of distress. So, does this mean that God doesn’t love us?

And, lastly, one of the radio stations in DC recently switched formats, from “oldies” to what they’re calling “the greatest rock and roll of all time.” Now, I don’t think they fully grasp what that means because they’re not playing any Pink Floyd or any Doors, or any Janice or Jimi, which begs the question: what’s the difference between rock and pop? Between rock and blues?

Weird things my mother and I discuss in the car on the way to the grocery store.

¹ white knowledge n. information acquired without conscious effort. Double-Tongued

Here is what is wrong with DC, not with Official Washington, mind you, but DC the city that surrounds the seat of the U.S. government: everything immediately comes down to race even when it’s not.

Like most cities, churches of various Christian flavors sit scattered throughout the city. For decades parishioners at said churches have been allowed to double and triple park, essentially reducing streets to a lane or a lane and a half for traffic passage and blocking residents’ in until services are over in the early afternoon. Now that the character of a lot of these neighborhoods is changing (read: developers have come in and put in overpriced condo buildings that are largely being populated by white buyers in traditionally black neighborhoods), the new residents are pitching a fit.

Naturally, of course, the church-goers are crying racial discrimination. From The Washington Post

The issue has become a contest fraught with racial and class issues, pitting the city’s 600 congregations against homeowners, many of them new to the city, who want the city’s parking laws enforced.

Every Sunday, large numbers of worshipers descend on neighborhoods around Logan Circle, as well as areas from Capitol Hill to Shaw, parking in front of hydrants or walkways or hemming in other cars by double-parking. Police acknowledge that for years they have basically overlooked the practice, particularly when there is no safety violation. But complaints from residents in Logan Circle have placed the issue high on the agenda of the city’s political leaders.

“We want to do something the gentrifiers don’t want us to do: Join together,” Lorraine C. Miller, president of the D.C. chapter of the NAACP, told the churchgoers who gathered around the statue of Civil War Gen. Thomas A. Logan. Members of different congregations cheered when their pastors took their turn at the microphone.

Miller said the parking issue is the “tip of the iceberg of discontent on how decisions are made.”

The Rev. Canon William Barnwell of Washington National Cathedral told the crowd that cracking down on Sunday parking violations would “kill or deeply wound many of our congregations.” And he said the city could turn into a “one-class, one-race, gated community that shuts people out rather than letting them in.”

Many of the speakers said places of worship have long helped their immediate communities through aid for the needy, day care and other services.

…

Logan Circle resident Todd Lovinger, who has been active in calling for greater enforcement of parking regulations, called the mayor’s moratorium announcement “a disgusting cop-out.” He said, “Out-of-town parishioners are getting greater rights than D.C. taxpayers.”

Now…let’s reason this out for a hot second.

• Churches pay no property tax in the District of Columbia, which means the city gets no income from the land on which they sit.
• Condo owners pay property tax on their apartments.
• Fully 75% of the cars you find taking advantage of this parking leniency have non-DC tags on them (which means these folks pay no fees to the government for DMV related matters, no income tax, and no property tax to the city)
• The people complaining are DC residents.

Granted, churches have done good works in their neighborhoods over the decades, and that should count for something, but as neighborhoods change and needs change, how are churches going to contribute to the changing neighborhoods? My guess is that they aren’t. Which means these heart-full church going folk expect privilege while contributing in the most minimal way possible.

And this is about race how?

Of course, the thing that always floors me about discussions of this type, especially when they involve some sort of enforcement by the DC government is that there are exactly three high-ranking DC government officials who are not African-American. So who, exactly, is doing the discriminating?

Read the complete article at Washingtonpost.com

It’s been seven years since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine high school in Littleton, CO, angry and armed to the teeth, and murdered a teacher and 12 of their schoolmates. Seven years, enough time so that, among the student population at least, there is no one left who was actually at the school on the day of the event. There was a quiet remembrance at Columbine high school to mark the day of the shootings, but have we really learned anything? I don’t think so.

American culture has always been violent. Going back to the first major U.S. motion picture (that’s Birth of a Nation folks), our media have depicted images of raw violence with absolutely no regard to what effect they might have on the viewer. But do our media encourage violence, or are media images violent because violent images sell? I don’t think it’s a question that can be answered, but the conclusions reached by a group of FBI analysts and psychiatrists about just why Harris and Klebold did what they did open a window on to something that is, I think, a much more evident problem in American culture.

According to an April 2004 article on Slate.com:

Most Americans have reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it. The first conclusion is that the pair of supposed “Trench Coat Mafia outcasts” were taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable for them. The second conclusion is that the massacre was inexplicable: We can never understand what drove them to such horrific violence.

But the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists have reached an entirely different conclusion. They believe they know why Harris and Klebold killed, and their explanation is both more reassuring and more troubling than our misguided conclusions….

The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the popular narrative about the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafia—click here to read more about Columbine’s myths—and to abandon the core idea that Columbine was simply a school shooting. We can’t understand why they did it until we understand what they were doing. [Emphasis from the original article]

A fascinating read, the article goes on to talk about the analysis, culled from hours of interviews with friends and family, hours of tape the boys made of themselves, and hundreds of pages of online and traditional journals, of Harris and Klebold’s personalities. The conclusion: that together Harris and Klebold were the perfect psychopath with delusions of grandeur. Young men that, together, were the center of the universe with absolutely no regard for anyone else’s right to exist. “It wasn’t just ‘fame’ they were after — Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term — they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power,” the article states.

Like a lot of Americans, I spent a good portion of my day not working, huddling around the TV and watching the situation in Colorado unfold live, kept on the edge by a lot of speculation and grainy helicopter-based photography. I admit that I’m one of the people who bought the idea that the shootings at Columbine were an act of revenge, a cry against what is essentially institutionalized torture for kids that were different. And while I’m willing to let go of the idea that Harris and Klebold had simply had enough, had gone for the nuclear option against a system that would give them no help and parents who didn’t seem to want to bother to stand up for them, I’m not willing to let go of the idea that systemized meanness is condoned in American culture. Why? Because it’s now become our defacto foreign policy.

America’s current relationship with the rest of the world is built on an us vs. them dichotomy that could only be made more clear if the government took the step of actually legislating segregation again. That us vs. them dichotomy, though, didn’t just spring full-blown from George W. Bush’s forehead the way Zeus birthed Athena. No, we’ve been getting that dichotomy fed to us in a steady drip by Madison Avenue for the past 50 years.

Marketing exists to create a demand for a product that, in reality, you probably don’t need. The way it creates that demand is by trying to convince you that you belong to some super-special subgroup that this product is just perfect for and that the only people who can have this product are members of that select elite. Us, the chosen, the ones destined to use this fabulous machine, wear these stylish clothes, or smear on this miraculous cream, versus them, the unfortunate, the ones with appliances where the nobs come off in your hand when you turn them on, the raggedy looking, the ones with wrinkles or zits or whatever the cream is supposed to cure.

Where this elitism and exclusionary behavior get systematized is when institutions, such as schools, treat those who represent the ideal differently than those who don’t. In American culture the ideal is still Christian, white, heterosexual, thin, beautiful, and athletic. Don’t believe me? Fine.

Find me a high school that has on its cheerleading squad a girl who is 5’5″ and weighs 275lbs.

Find me a high school where the student body president is an openly gay Jewish boy.

Find me a homecoming queen who doesn’t shave her underarms.

Not an easy thing to do, is it? It’s not just mainstream culture that promotes elitism and exclusionary practices, though.

My gay friends in DC are constantly complaining about how it’s impossible to get another guy even to talk to them if they’re not wearing the “right look.” Any hint of individuality is seen as a sign of weakness, a sign of “otherness.” And lesbians are no better, though our code for this stuff is a little bit less obvious with “professional lesbian” signifying “must be able to pass for straight” in the personal ads. And God forbid you be even the slightest bit butch, which is a whole set of exclusionary rules in and of itself, and be interested in someone like yourself instead of your opposite femme like you “should” be.

All of it, social codes, what’s cool and uncool, product marketing, and politics, the whole thing adds up to “I’m OK, and you suck” which, at its core, is just plain mean.

So if we’re doing this to ourselves, is it any wonder our government is trying to do it to the rest of the world? Terrorist/not-terrorist. Friend/enemy. Good/evil. All of these are dichotomies that are present in current political rhetoric. They keep us isolated and afraid. Cowed and unwilling to rock the boat (after all, you don’t unseat a sitting President during the middle of a war) for fear that if we do we’ll fall out and the big, bad shark with the razor sharp teeth that we just know is down there swimming circles underneath us in the inky-black water will bite us in half.

It is this fear reflex that is, I think, at the basis of the bulk of the exclusionary behavior in our culture. Can’t be seen at the geek table because what would your friends think? Can’t let anyone know you’re dating the fat girl because they’d think you’re a loser and can’t get anyone “better.” Can’t let “foreigners” into the country because they’ll steal “our” jobs. Can’t tolerate another’s sexual orientation because “it’s against God’s wishes.” (As if someone can personally know what God wants, but that’s a whole different issue) Can’t show any signs of difference because you’ll be excluded from the group. All of these can’ts and shouldn’ts are based in fear, fear of loss, fear of difference.

So, what happened to humanity’s supposed “higher brain” functions, you know, the ones that separate us from the animals and allow us to make judgments and decisions that aren’t based on the fight or flight reflex? When did we turn into such herd animals, afraid of the slightest variation in behavior or thought?

I don’t know, but I do know that if we don’t turn our brains on and start thinking, even to the minimal extent that we had been, our extermination as a species will come that much more rapidly and after a period of brutal chaos at which cultural and socio-political developments of the past decade have barely hinted.