A damp and gray and glum day. It was a great day to sit inside and do not much of anything. A day to think of all of the things I have to do tomorrow, and Thursday, and Friday. It was a never do today what you can put off until tomorrow sort of day. An “I’ve had three phone calls and washed clothes and was doing housework well after midnight last night anyway,” sort of day.
Some Tuesdays are just going to be like that, right? And better it happen on a Tuesday than a Saturday or Sunday, or a Monday.
Yesterday was Monday, and that was a bit draggy early in the day. There was class prep and writing other classes and so on and so forth. I laid out the timing just precisely right for the day. Had anything come up, I would have put us behind schedule for the evening, which was still ahead of my regular schedule.
My lovely bride went to campus with me this evening. She had to address a class and also watched part of a lecture series that’s offered to students. The guest tonight was Dan Baker, the man who does PA for the Phillies, and formerly the in-stadium voice for the Eagles. He’s a Rowan grad. And they had him use his stadium voice to announce some prestigious internship appointments this evening. That was probably a thrill for the students who heard him call their name.
In my much less exciting class — how do you compete with that, really? — we talked about identity, specifically through Eugenia Siepera’s “New Media and Identity.” The class liked this one, which discusses identity and the self, Michel Foucault’s tecnologies of the self, gender and gendered technologies, ethnic and religious identities in the modern landscape.
I think this one works because the current student sees it and feels a lot of this intuitively. Also, it’s a fair amount more sophisticated than what I was taught in their shoes a few decades ago. How could it not be?
Moving from the University College of Dublin we moved to The New School in New York, with a short piece that Kate Eichhorn wrote as a lay supplement to her brilliant work about the online media environment.
My research suggests that these users aren’t outliers but part of a growing demographic of tweens and teens who are actively curating their professional identities. But should 13- or 15-year-olds feel compelled to list their after-school activities, academic honors, and test scores on professional networking sites, with photos of themselves decked out in corporate attire? And will college admissions officers and job recruiters start to dig even further back when assessing applicants—perhaps as far back as middle school? The risk is that this will produce generations of increasingly cautious individuals—people too worried about what others might find or think to ever engage in productive risks or innovative thinking.
The second potential danger is more troubling: in a world where the past haunts the present, young people may calcify their identities, perspectives, and political positions at an increasingly young age.
I got the impression that this one is something that many in my class already begun to internalize at an individual level. Getting beyond that, considering the broad, general and societal impact(s) is, perhaps, something you can only touch on until you see demonstrable examples.
That let us wrap up with Derek Thompson’s recent piece in The Atlantic, which is just brilliant.
And so what? one might reasonably ask. Aloneness is not loneliness. Not only that, one might point out, the texture of aloneness has changed. Solitude is less solitary than ever. With all the calling, texting, emailing, work chatting, DMing, and posting, we are producing unprecedented terabytes of interpersonal communication. If Americans were happy—about themselves, about their friends, about their country—then whining about parties of one would feel silly.
But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted. Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”
I don’t think hanging out more will solve every problem. But I do think every social crisis in the U.S. could be helped somewhat if people spent a little more time with other people and a little less time gazing into digital content that’s designed to make us anxious and despondent about the world. This young century, Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in the world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves, gazing into screens, wherein actors and influencers often engage in the very acts of physical proximity that we deny ourselves. It’s been a weird experiment. And the results haven’t been pretty.
It was interesting to watch what happened in the conversation here. People gravitated to the aloneness versus loneliness part, which is only a part of what Thompson is getting at. And, as young people living in this world, they seem to appreciate what he’s saying about the physical isolation, but the room would split and go back and forth about the value of online interactions. This is great because in the last few weeks one of the things we’ve been talking about is how that technology has removed geographic considerations. How you can find like-minded people wherever, not just on your street, in your class or at your gym. But when they read this they could also see the other side of it — and so many people are emerging with this healthy realization that there’s good and bad, too much and and too little, pros and cons. It feels like a broad thought in a sequence of semi-critical analyses. If that’s one of the four things they get out of this class this semester, I will call it a success. One of the other things is that I was, last night, able to talk about the difference between correlation and causation. What Thompson writes about is, presently, just correlative. Someone asked how much correlation does one need to see something as causal. This gave us the opportunity to briefly revisit the scientific method, and I hoped that some of this might bounce around in their ears until it can latch on to a semi-permanent memory.
If it did, that’d be a great second thing to take from the class.
The other two things are software and production-driven, and they have grades involved with those and they will work themselves out naturally.
These were just the next few video clips off my camera from our recent dive trip, but they line up and feel like a best of collection. There’s some great sponge, your standard issue reef fish, a nice long overhead view of a ray, a regrettably wide shot of a small sea turtle, a close up of the always hypnotic anemone and a closeup with a shark.
It’s amazing to watch a fish or a shark swim along and, when someone gets to close, they put a stop to that. And, in the case of that shark, it was just one big whip of that powerful body to create the distance.
We didn’t check in on the cats yesterday which, despite the many awesome SCUBA photos and videos, remains the most popular feature on the site. We should do that now.
Phoebe just wants your attention. She will jump on any surface and reach out to grab you, if necessary. Unfortunately, that silly portrait feature was highlighted when this happened.
How could you not want to pet her at every opportunity? Look at this face.
Poseidon, not to be outdone, is also a paper bag model.
But if there’s no bag available, he’ll just find some blankets and make himself cozy.
No idea why he, a strictly indoor cat, thinks he wants to go outside all the time, when he needs to be warmer inside the house constantly.
As you can see, the cats are doing just fine. We’re all just waiting for the sun to return, but everyone here is having a great time on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet.
