Coming to grips with social constructs

Hello All,

I have always had trouble with the concept of a social construct. This was not because it was too lofty of a concept for me to understand, but rather because I thought it was a charged term. I hate academic terms that seem to smack of political persuasion. However I need to be honest about this, and remember that as academics learn theoretical concepts, the next step is to apply these to real-life situations. When this happens, ideas that academics hold in theoretical terms quickly become pragmatic guidebooks.

This could stem from my history background, or from my religious background, or my conservative one. None of those are important. What I need to understand here is that social constructs are very real entities. This is clearly true because many concepts, theories, norms, and mores stem from previously accepted social institutions. Thus, society builds upon (or sometimes razes) past experiences or ideas. When I look at the term social construct from this perspective, it is not so offensive to me. As a historian, it is clear that most ideas are build upon previously accepted ideas. For an idea to not be at least partially constructed, it would need to disregard all that came before it. Because we learn things, read things, and see things and don’t always remember where they came from, I would imagine that we are all building ideas that are indebted to all knowledge that was discovered before us. In this way, it can be argued, all information is socially constructed. This is perhaps the more cynical way of explaining the term, “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

With this framework in place, I was better able to understand Kress and Van Leeuwen’s arguments about how such abstract entities as colors and symbols can come to embody very concrete ideas in the reader’s mind. They point to such words as “classic” to underscore this point.

It can be argued that the reason that people (in the northern hemisphere at least) come to associate colors such as brown or orange with the idea of autumn because the terms have been used to construct this association. I like how the authors have used this example to underscore their point that symbols and colors and language have been socially constructed to embody meanings that do not exist within themselves.

It’s that time of the year again–allergy season

Hello All,

Some people are more prone to some kinds of illnesses as opposed to other ones.  I for one get sinus colds/infections frequently.  While I was bitten with that nasty flu bug earlier in the semester, so were a lot of other people I knew as well.  That was a nasty bug.  I was laid up for almost a week, and that was weird for me.  This week, I started coming down with something on Monday, and was sick ever since.  That reminds me, I need to go out and get some more vitamin c.  I hope I’m better before I have to go in to work tomorrow, or at least well enough that I won’t hate myself for having to work when I’m sick.  While it is illegal, I believe to work when you are sick in the food industry, it is very much looked down upon to call out of work, and to a lesser extent to give up a shift.  So you can imagine, I’ll be at work tomorrow, regardless of my condition.  Yay for financial imperatives!

Joe

I wrote this article for Advanced Feature Writing. It’s flawed, but it reports on some interesting developments

Google. Enter keyword: Presidential Election. Results: Google News 2008 election, PresidentialElection.com, United States Presidential Election– Wikipedia, 2008 Presidential Election– See Where Their Money Came From, 2008 Presidential Election on Yahoo News. Click: PresidentialElection.com. News is easy to come by today. If I want to learn about the 2008 Presidential Election, the weather, the War in Iraq, or when that new Batman movie is coming out, all I need to do is ask my friends Google or Yahoo. This is the grim reality facing newspapers today.

When this search was performed via Google, the first eight hits were not from newspapers websites, but from websites not affiliated with print sources. The Washington Post and New York Times had websites detailing election information, but were not found until hits 9 and 10 on the search. People are using this method to find their news today, and the newspapers, once a respected bastion of political information, may be soon be fitted with a new coffin.

News on the Internet is fundamentally different from traditional media for two main reasons: the speed in which information can be posted online, and the participatory culture that follows. While there are traditional media sites that provide the same stories online that they provide in print or on television, these sites are not as profitable as their newspaper and television brethren had been in the past, and if the Google search is any indication, they are not the most used news sites. Many people today are growing accustomed to using blog sites that pick up stories from larger venues and add their commentary. While some bloggers are professional journalists, most are not, and anyone can start a blog and begin writing about anything online, no matter how factual or false their findings. Most blog sites also offer forums in which people can discuss the latest developments. Instead of being given the facts and a commentary in the past, people, growing increasingly weary of traditional media outlets including newspapers, are now turning to the Internet to find more diverse opinions of the news, and to present their own.

According to “Out of Print”, a recent article published in New Yorker Magazine by Eric Alterman, “Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.” The article continues, saying, “Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have.” That is a lot of revenue. Almost half. Newspapers are now terrible business propositions. Also, Alterman reports that, “Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.” These findings could mean one of two things: either no one wants or needs the services provided by newspapers; or more realistically, people are finding their news in other places. The article claims that the average age for newspaper readers is 55.

The failing health of the newspaper does not exist within a vacuum, and may be contingent on a couple clear developments. Alterman suggests that one fundamental problem with newspapers is public perception. News sources in the past attempted to present a fair, objective view of the facts, and for the most part, claim to continue in this aim. According to recent polling, however, many people believe that news outlets actively try to, “influence public policy”, and are not presenting news that is impartial. One observer suggests that 2043 will be the end of newspapers. If we remember that newspapers have been around since about 1720, and were doing brisk business until five years ago, that assessment is worth noting. This comes in the wake of many lay-offs, bureau closings, and loss of readership and advertising. Alterman says that the newspaper, “is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.”

The alternative: the Internet. The younger, faster, and in some ways smarter venue for news has come into its own as late. The Carnegie Reporter shows as early as 2004 in its study, “Abandoning the News”, that, “At the heart of the assessment of the news-related habits of adults age 18-to-34 are fundamental changes driven by technology and market forces.” Furthermore, the article reports, “Data indicate that this segment of the population intends to continue to increase their use of the Internet as a primary news source in the coming years and that it is a medium embraced in meaningful ways.” In other words, people that have kept their ears to the ground have seen this coming. Young people prefer the Internet, and don’t have the historical ties to media outlets such as a newspaper or television program that past generations may have had. The Internet provides an immediacy, a near instantaneous distribution of information.

The Carnegie Report finds that young people, aged 18-34 reported that using the Internet was, “the most useful way to learn”, as opposed to television or newspapers. Also, the report finds that young people prefer to use to Internet because it provides information, “when they want it.” The ability for webmasters and web users to use hypertext to link various sites together and to archive previous articles may very well be at the heart of these findings. If someone wants to learn about the 2008 Presidential Election, the example we used earlier, he or she would likely find scores and maybe hundreds of sites from around the world that provide coverage. If someone wants to find more information on Hillary Clinton, they can find her website. When the user stumbles upon Barack Obama or Hillary’s husband Bill, the user can embark on a new trail of information. While this process can be highly disorienting for some users, it can be highly engaging for younger readers, according to Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger’s Prioritizing Web Usability. A whole generation of young people is growing up with this outlook on information in general and the news in particular. One more thing, this news on the Internet is free.

Wired Magazine reports that while The New York Times and Wall Street Journal had been offering paid subscriptions for its services in the past, almost all of their services will be free by the end of this year. In Free! Why $ 0.00 is the Future of Business, Chris Anderson explains that part of what makes the Information Age so transformative is the price of information. While this article is not entirely about how The Times and The Wall Street Journal have lowered and/or cut subscription costs, its implications are significant. If this trend continues, and people grow to believe the idea that paying for information, goods, and services provided on the Internet, including news isn’t necessary, newspapers will certainly have more trouble in the future. Anderson argues: “The rise of ‘freeconomics’ is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web.” He continues, “Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.” Surfing the Internet, reading a movie blog, listening to a band on myspace, and reading the news are all the same in some people’s eyes, and all of these things should, and can be free, according to some observers.

Newspapers appear to be far behind to curve and slow to respond to market demand in light of these findings. By charging fees to use their services, The Times and The Wall Street Journal, and any other respected paper of the past may have really been selling itself short. While it is difficult to anticipate what could have happened, it is clear that the market is quickly passing these two former giants by. This can be seen as liberating to some, and dangerous to others.

There is something fundamentally democratic about this process. On the one hand, we see old media institutions, oligopolies, really, running their perspective shows with no end in site. With the advent of the Internet, and user-generated content, Old Media is quickly becoming irrelevant. If a tornado takes place in Texas or Oklahoma, and destroys 10 houses, I can probably wait until it’s shown in the newspaper the next day. Or, I can go online and see videos of the event and read about it immediately. The point is really that in the past, the few (newspapers and television outlets) spoke for the many (everyone else). This is no longer the case, and everyone can now share in the distribution of news. A story can hit cnn.com or The Times’ site, and a blogger can write about it. That same day a person can Google the story, and can be brought to that blog site. People can link to the blog post or email it to friends. Thus, news is becoming fragmented, with the audience being split among various television shows and an ever-increasing variety of websites.

While this development is seen as having mostly positive effects, some people, such as Andrew Keen, author of The Great Seduction: The Cult of the Amateur disagree. In his book, Keen reports, “the new Internet was about self-made music, not Bob Dylan or the Brandenburg Concertos.” Keen continues, “Audience and author had become one, and we were transforming culture into cacophony.” (Emphasis added.) Really, it can be argued that the decline of the newspapers is just a natural development in the wake of the Internet’s growing influence. News is just one of many institutions that is being beleaguered and beaten by the onslaught of the Web, and this development may not be entirely positive.

The newspaper is not dead yet, but it is clearly on the decline. However, observers argue that this isn’t necessarily because the medium is inherently flawed, but rather because it has just been slow to react to fundamental market changes. Most large (and even small papers, for that matter) now offer most, if not all of their coverage online, and for free. Also, papers have been quick to add blogs and forums to their sites so that their audience may have some involvement in the news discussion and commentary. The near instantaneous nature of the Internet, and the participatory culture that it engenders are seen as the major impediments to the success of traditional newspapers. With these new changes, newspapers can perhaps reclaim their place as the most trusted and implemented of American news distribution institutions. There is no guarantee that newspapers will survive from these recent developments, but their adaptability will give them a fighting chance.

There are a lot of books I want to read

Hello All,

While my reading skills have probably been improving this semester (because I’ve been reading so much), I’m still looking for ways to get better.  I received an email from the dreaded Rowan announcer this week that talked about SQ4R, a reading method that is intended to help one retain more of what one reads.  I thought this was a novel concept.  I’ll be checking it out online in the next couple days to see if it helps me out.  I have tried the Evelynn Wood speed reading program, but I lost the book.  So, now, I can’t practice to see if it has made me any better.  I figure that I have much to read, and only so many hours in a week because of my various responsibilities.

If anyone has any experience with alternative reading or speed reading programs, I’d be glad to hear it.  Thanks everyone.

Oliver Stone, the master of historicity, is making a GW Bush movie

Hello all,

I just read this on the Level Up blog.  You can read the ABC news story here.  While I am no lover of President Bush, I am disappointed to see that Oliver Stone is making this movie.  I would love to see a movie that attempts to portray an accurate picture of the president.  I wouldn’t even mind the director taking too much of an artistic license with it.  But Oliver Stone?  He has made a career out of gross historical inaccuracy.  One of my old professors went on a rant once when we were talking about the Kennedy Assassination.  He was frustrated because he had to spend much of his time debunking Stone’s myths.  And that Alexander movie?  That one made me mad.  It was creepy.  I think Colin Farrell was about 28 at the time of that movie, and Angelina Jolie, who played his mother, was about 30.  And the movie was red.  Or purple.  I don’t remember.  But I do remember that whenever anything important happened in the movie, the screen turned red.  Yuck.  The only good thing about that movie was Angelina Jolie.  She is such a … humanitarian.  Boo to Oliver Stone!  Boo to misleading people for the sake of money.

Syverson Reading, Miller Chapters

Hello All,

I’m going to make some observations about the readings for this week.  We read the last two chapters (4 and 5) of the Syverson text, and two chapters from Richard Miller’s Writing at the end of the world.  The portion of the Syverson text that I’m responsible for was a little awkward I thought, because chapter 4 builds on ideas presented from previous chapters, and chapter 5 served as the conclusion.  When I began trying to figure out what questions to ask for the discussion this week, I kept thinking of the stuff we talked about last week.  Considering we covered those chapters thoroughly last week, I tried to steer the questions squarely on the texts for this week.

Chapter 4 opens with some more theoretical stuff.  Syverson introduces the concept of a perturbation of a complex system.  I looked up these newfangled terms on wikipedia, and found short, though helpful descriptions of the terms.  I was also introduced to the idea of reductionism; viz., the idea that the parts of a complex item, idea, or entity can be reduced to their smallest parts, and can be studied individually to explain the whole.  Wikipedia reports that this concept was actually traced back to Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy, to which Miller introduced us. While I have no way of certifying how accurate these articles were, they were written well, and appeared legitimate.

I  was a little frustrated at first because some of the ideas that Syverson presents seemed to have some sort of philosophical underpinning that I was not aware of.  I looked up some things on modernism and post modernism, and though I found some similarities, I thought it best to try to take the text for what it is: an individual book by a singular author.  However, if I accept Syverson’s premise that writing is a produce of a complex ecology of factors including readers, writers, and texts, I wonder if it is possible to accept the book as a singular item.  I got a little hung up on this concept, but pushed forward anyway.

I heard in a podcast recently (on 1up Yours, because I’m a geek and I listen to that videogame podcast), that “(every message board) goes to shit.” At first, I believed this.  I see it all the time.  I see an article written for any number of websites, and afterwards, I see many uninformed opinions trashing other posters or the author of the article.  However, when I was introduced to the xlchc forum, I had high hopes for it.  Composed of a group of scholars from around the world, I expected a lively, though civil discussion of the Gulf War.  It didn’t take long for the forum to, “go to shit.”   I think it all started either when someone blamed the US for the War, or when another person said that the scholar and his family living in Israel in a sealed room, forced to do their business in a bucket had it better than the people getting bombed in Iraq.  The conflict that ensued was pretty detrimental to the group.  This conflict is the “perturbation” that Syverson spoke of.  This surprising example helped flesh out the author’s complex system argument well.  That argument stands in stark contrast to the “reductionist” explanation of composition studies presented in the past.  I had some reservations about this point of view at first, but after completing the text, feel more comfortable accepting it.

Also interesting was Syverson’s willingness to conduct research that is interdisciplinary.  Questions about this immediately sprang to mind, but the author was quick to address them.  She argues that it’s good to approach work in this field (composition studies) from many angles, and look to make new kinds of connections between it and other complex phenomena that we can explain (such as the nervous system example that Syverson used).  I like this idea, but I fear that a lack of specialization could be crippling in this or any other sort of research.  However, as the author mentioned, people from specialized fields can oftentimes fall victim to the “harmony of illusions” that Fleck talked about.  I’m looking forward to talking more about this in class.

The Miller reading was interesting, and I almost wish that we got to read more of it. I liked the perspective that he brought.  While his work was certainly well written and well-researched, it also brought with it a sense of moral intensity that I have rarely seen in academic writing.  While there’s probably more of this type of writing, I have hitherto not been introduced to it.  We read the first chapter and the seventh.

Miller brings up the prospect that the Age of Information has marginalized and largely relegated the humanities to a second-class (or maybe third) disciplines.  He suggests that perhaps, the humanities are now less relevant than they have ever been in the past.  This was sort of shocking, as I have been reading much that suggests the Information Age will herald a sort of golden age of the humanities.

Miller talks about Columbine, and the reading, writing, research, discussion process that the young men went through that perpetrated that atrocity.  It was kind of frightening to see that the boys went through all the motions a good reader, writer, discusser is supposed to go through.  They were just reading, writing, and discussing the wrong things.  It made me me think about all that again.  I was a freshman in high school in 1999.

I thought Miller’s chapters were a little crazy in how many different ideas and authors he brought to the table, but felt he made some interesting arguments.  I liked the discussion of Descartes and T. S. Eliot, and the quotes of those authors that he provided.  I just hope he’s wrong about the death of the humanities.  I may never get a good job, MA or not.

Questions for Thursday’s Class

1.  Continuing her explanation of what agents cause changes in “complex ecologies”, Syverson argues that, “Consistent with the power law discovered by Bak and Chen as a property of ’self-organized criticality’, the vast majority of messages generate a fairly small disturbance in the overall system (142-143).” This chapter talked about what we today would term as a “message board.”    Syverson is using this language to support her premise that networks of readers, writers, and texts form “complex systems.”  Is the exchange of information always a perturbation?  And are perturbations necessarily negative forces?

2.  Syverson urges that it is important to be wary of the “‘harmony of illusions’ of a different thought collective (188).”  As scholars navigating sometimes unfamiliar texts, and unfamiliar with what thought collective is at work in producing a text, how can we avoid this potential trap?

3. Miller suggests that the arrival of the Information Age has marginalized academic studies of the humanities.  I would argue that they just as important as ever if we are to understand how societies are changing in the wake of these new perturbations.  Do you agree with Miller’s suggestion?

4.  Miller’s text mentions Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.  Descartes sets out to “raze” the “false opinions” he had been brought up with.  While Miller casts doubt on Descartes’ true intentions for writing the text, a clear question arises in my mind: as graduate students living in the digital age, and bombarded with information from literally every area, how are we to separate the wheat from the chaff?

5.  Miller quotes T. S. Eliot as saying, ” When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.”  Though I’m no poet, I find that the more I learn, the more things in the world that seems utterly different and unassociated are really connected in interesting ways.  Thus, information has been a clarifying force in my life.  Do the other people in the class share Eliot’s (and my own) perception that knowledge brings clarity?

composition stuff

Hello all,

I’m going to try something different this time in my discussion of the text.  Instead of just running down what the text said, I’m going to approach it a bit more personally.  By this, I mean that I want to compare the process introduced by Syverson to the process I went through in learning College Comp 1 as a freshman 6 years ago at Rowan.  For this week, we read the first 3 chapters of Margaret Syverson’s The Wealth of Reality: an Ecology of Composition.  I have to say that based on the title, I really had no idea what to expect. Based on the bookcover, which looks like a printed picture of synthetic wood grain, I was expecting even less.  Still, the old saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover”, rings true.  I know that sounds cheesy, but for anyone that’s seen this cover, it’s certainly one of the most ill-advised pieces of graphical work you’ve ever seen.  Still, the book is informative, and presents a way at looking at composition studies that I had not yet been exposed to.

Syverson presents a different way of looking at composition.  Instead of explaining that writing is a contained process on the part of a writer and his text that exists within a vacuum of isolation, the author argues the opposite.  Instead, writing is a culmination of many things: author, ideas (notice the difference; in Syverson’s estimation, the author and the author’s ideas are separate entities), sources, upbringing, prior experience, emerging experience, context, physical environment, mental environment, and peers.  While Syverson may have mentioned more, I have at least presented the basic idea.  What Syverson discusses most is how these various factors interact and react with one another and how the author negotiates these considerations and produces a text.  Essentially she argues that the composition of a text is an interplay of sorts, with the author being a facilitator and organizer rather than a creator.  While I don’t know if I agree with this entirely, I do like the fresh perspective.

First, Syverson talked about the experiences of Charles Reznikoff, a Russian Jew that grew up in New York in an era when the population was exploding.  Reznikoff’s experiences and by extension, his writing were an amalgamation of his social and economic situation, his religious beliefs, the influences of his Russian-born parents, of his fellow Russian Jews, and of social hardships he faced by Jews that came to the US before him.  Against this rich social tapestry, we can see Reznikoff’s development take turns that may not have made sense otherwise.

After presenting this example, Syverson talks about some of her experiences teaching a first year writing class at a first-rate state university.  From what she was saying, the university she taught at was probably a little more selective than Rowan, probably more on par with TCNJ, with most students in the top 12% of their high schools in California.  Still, I think I can roughly compare my experience with that of the students Syverson discusses.

Syverson explains first the importance of composition in a college setting, and how this class was set up to best equip students in negotiating the news spheres in which they would be expected to write.  The class was small, with no more than 16, and students were then broken into groups of three or so.  Writing was a highly collaborative and communicative process.  While the essay about noise in the dorm room was perceived by most everyone involved as lackluster, I thought the process was interesting.  The students, who all seemed to be pretty motivated and responsible, worked together on all of the essays.  They bounced ideas off each other and the professor.  I think they developed a more well rounded idea of the writing process and the importance of dealing with opposition than I did at that age.

As mentioned before, I think that I was somewhat shortchanged as a freshman, and this came back to haunt me later.  While these students had to constantly rework and rewrite things, I think that looking back, this process helped them all as writers.  On the contrary, it seems that CC1 and CC2 at Rowan were more concerned with just getting the students at a certain level of proficiency, as opposed to teaching them about the process.  When I came into the classes, I was ahead of the curve, and I got A’s in both classes without any problem.  Later on, with my history work, I faced a pretty steep learning curve, and it wasn’t until the end that I feel it all “clicked” for me.  Maybe it’s not fair that I’m criticizing my CC1 and CC2 (college composition 1 and college composition 2) classes, as they certainly made sure I was good enough to write in college.  I don’t know.  I do know that while I had a good sense of diction and wordplay, my organization skills needed a lot of work.

hypertext–perfect for the add generation

Hello All,

After being exposed to some of hypertext’s theories, we were introduced to hypertext literature, and I have to say, I’m confused.  I understand the concept of a branching storyline, and I think that’s great.  With a branching storyline, everyone starts in the same place, but will end up in one of several destinations.  Decisions you make in the text will determine where the story takes you in this type of setting.  While this makes sense, and sounds really cool (at least to me), the hypertext literature that our class was exposed to was not so much.

For the Unknown reading, we were presented with a block of text.  Fair enough.  However, the page had approximately 20-30 hyperlinked words on the page.  Whenever you clicked on one word, the rest of the passage would change.  It was really a never-ending, meandering story.  It was cool because I’m sure that everyone that read the text would have either a slightly different or an extremely different experience with the reading.  They bad thing is that we probably didn’t read the whole thing.  If our class read something from Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, or Lewis, we would all be talking about the same text, the only difference is that we’d be talking out our own interpretations of the text, or our likes or dislikes.  Hypertext is more akin to one person reading Eliot, another McLuhan, another Chaucer, and another, a wikipedia article.

Trying to read the Jew’s Daughter was worse.  While clicking on the Unknown text caused the page to change, just scrolling over the hyperlinked words of this text entirely reconfigured it.  It was extremely difficult for me to follow it, and it was extremely jarring as well.  I would there to be a somewhat linear path that I could deviate from at my leisure as opposed to this wholesale reconstruction.

I thought the Landow book was a bit dryer this time, though there were some things I found that were extremely exciting.  Landow’s explanation of how (in the due process of time) every book were put online, it could change scholarship forever.  For example, Landow says it would be possible to look at a book online, and see a footnote that seems to be interesting.  You could then click on the footnote and the whole text would come up.  For that book, many others were consulted, and the search would continue.  This conceivably could make research easier than ever before.  The prospect of using the inherent strengths of the computer to make research easier is very exciting for me.

However, as good as the prospect of making research easier online is, I fear that it could erode the set of checks and balances we have with the current academic peer review system.  If one wants to publish a book from a university press, it must first be peer reviewed by other experts in the field.  This process is indispensable to maintaining the high level of scholarship we enjoy in our academic books today (wenger and fleck notwithstanding–haha).

This democratization of information is great, the potential bastardization of information is not.

The Information Age and the Democratization of Information

Hello All,

I had my first computer-related mini tragedy last night. I was working on a post about the information age and politics and the democratization of information. I was very happy with the post, and I was developing some ideas that I had been mulling around for some time. Then, my windows updates restarted my computer, and it was lost. I didn’t save it as I went, so I lost the whole thing. I thought the wordpress program saves it automatically, and that I didn’t need to. I thought wrong.

Anyway, I will try to piece together the piece I was working on last night.

The Age of Information has ushered in an exciting time. With the advent of the Internet, much of the world’s knowledge is at our fingertips, and this canon of prior knowledge is growing online, as is the canon of human knowledge in general. One may now read news (both mainstream and from other, lesser hear points of view), read literature, history, encyclopedias, use dictionaries, see maps, learn about math, physics, chemistry, biology, or any other academic discipline. In the past, one had to be wealthy to afford college, and needed to own a large library of books. This is no longer the case, and all one needs now is a computer and an internet connection. Actually, you don’t even need a computer, just a library card, then you may use the internet and read a great many books.

Knowledge, then is no longer for the elites, it is for the masses. Karl Marx would be beside himself. Recent developments make his work and that of his co-writer Engels less relevant all the time. Knowledge is quickly becoming democratized.

Many feel that the growing wealth gap between the rich and poor is an unfortunate situation and needs to be amended. The Liberal/Democratic response to this is to implement a graduated income tax in which more wealthy people are taxed a higher percentage of their income. This effectively punishes wealthy people for their success. The “Conservative”/Republican response to this is to give the wealthier people tax breaks so that they may have more money to invest, creating more jobs for less wealthy. This is my rudimentary understanding of the “trickle-down” effect. I use the term conservative in quotes because I don’t think that the Republicans are representing conservatives well, and have effectively branched out into another ideological sphere. The only “real” conservative that attempted to nab the Republican nomination is Ron Paul, but that deserves another post. Anyway, the point is that we have a problem, the growing wealth gap, and we have two competing parties that have very different ideas as to how to remedy the situation.

Some have hailed the information age as the beginning of the end of social and economic inequality. I hope that this is the case to an extent, but I’m not confident that it is. I don’t think that social inequality in and of itself is the problem. A perceived lack of opportunity is the problem. With more and more information available online now costing essentially nothing, people have more opportunities to learn outside the classroom than ever before. The ushering in of the information age will essentially make more people more competitive for better schools, and in turn, for better jobs.

This “new world” of more equal opportunities will undoubtedly change many things about the spheres of education and the workplace.  This is a good thing, to be sure.  It will turn our society into more of a meritocracy, a society in which people are awarded solely on merit.  It will not however, act as a socialist-style implement to redistribute wealth just because the opportunity is there.  The sad truth is that even though more people can become successful, it does not necessarily mean that they will choose to.

When I started my undergraduate work, people would often ask me what I was studying.  “History,” I would reply, quickly adding, “but I want to be a lawyer.”  I felt strange for telling people the truth,  “Yeah, I want to be a lawyer, but I enjoy studying history because I enjoy knowing how the world became the way it did.”  People thought that was strange.  Even other college students thought it was strange.  History students thought it was strange as well when I told them I had no interest in becoming a history teacher.

While my experiences should in no way serve as a yardstick for our culture, they do illustrate a certain point: the quest for knowledge for the sake of knowledge is perceived in many circles as strange, if it does not directly correlate to a more lucrative career.  With this assumption in place, I can see the wealth gap increasing.  This gap will not be based on racial differences, gender differences, religious affiliation, or sexual orientation.  A new gap will emerge, based primarily on two groups: those that wish to learn, and those that wish to remain ignorant.