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Ed Webb

On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009030501541.html

washingtonpost reading books generation youth culture

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls -- or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.
  • two-thirds of freshmen identify themselves as "middle of the road" or "conservative." Such people aren't likely to stay up late at night arguing about Mary Daly's "Gyn/Ecology" or even Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."
  • "I have stood before classes," he tells me, "and seen the students snicker when I said that Melville died poor because he couldn't sell books. 'Then why are we reading him if he wasn't popular?' "
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  • a notable uptick in superficiality and a notable uptick in the anesthetizing of that native curiosity that was once a prominent feature of the adolescent mind."
  • maybe young people's reading choices reflect our desire to keep them young
  • "People don't necessarily read their politics nowadays. They get it through YouTube and blogs and social networks. I don't know that there is a fiction writer out there right now who speaks to this generation's political ambitions. We're still waiting for our Kerouac."
  • "Don't trust anyone over 140 characters."
  • Ed Webb on 09 Mar 09
     
    Please tell me this article has it wrong...
  • Jim Franklin on 09 Mar 09
     
    I think the article got it right for the most part. Sadly.
Ed Webb

The End of Solitude - ChronicleReview.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...21b00601.htm

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09 - Cached
  • if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Discuss!
  • Reading, as Robinson puts it, "is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity." "The soul encountered itself in response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass." With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice became available to, even incumbent upon, everyone.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Mark Edmundson makes a similar argument in "Why Read?" - http://the-ed-rush.blogspot.com/2009/01/book-review-why-read-by-mark-edmundson.html - he believes reading has the potential to be life-changing.
  • The world was now understood as an assault on the self, and with good reason.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city. In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth: Eliot's London, Joyce's Dublin. The mob, the human mass, presses in. Hell is other people
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      "Hell is other people" - L'enfer c'est les autres - is one of the more famous utterances of Jean-Paul Sartre.
  • authenticity
  • heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast and terrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights
  • the universal threat of loneliness
  • But through the 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      This begins to veer into conservative reaction - compare to Rothman on television. Is all so gloomy, really? Would we all be happier if things were more like the 1950s? I really don't think so. Only the rich white men would be happier.
  • A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point.
  • Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection
  • My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude
  • The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern
  • Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one's lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.
  • consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.
  • has been said
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Passive mood raises questions: said by whom? in what context?
  • the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Wow - now, that is nicely written, whether one agrees with it or not.
  • Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading
  • Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Are both kinds of reading not possible?
  • there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."
  • The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self
  • The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Do we really buy that suggestion? Does anybody? I know what Facebook et al are selling, but am not convinced too many are buying it.
  • We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.
  • One must protect oneself from the momentum of intellectual and moral consensus — especially, Emerson added, during youth.
  • Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts. But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. "The saint and poet seek privacy," Emerson said, "to ends the most public and universal."
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Harsh, dude. But possibly fair. Does this mean universities are broken? Beyond redemption? Or is the argument too sweeping here? Not everybody has the talent or inclination to be a seer. Those that do, will find their solitude, surely?
  • Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone.
  • But it takes a willingness to be unpopular.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Almost anything worthwhile takes that willingness.
  • Not for nothing does "gregarious" mean "part of the herd."
Ed Webb

Television viewing and cognitive decline in older age: findings from the English Longit... - 0 views

www.nature.com/...s41598-019-39354-4

television TV health aging mental

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Watching television for more than 3.5 hours per day is associated with a dose-response decline in verbal memory over the following six years, independent of confounding variables. These results are found in particular amongst those with better cognition at baseline and are robust to a range of sensitivity analyses exploring reverse causality, differential non-response and stability of television viewing. Watching television is not longitudinally associated with changes in semantic fluency. Overall our results provide preliminary data to suggest that television viewing for more than 3.5 hours per day is related to cognitive decline.
  • Despite some such studies showing positive associations with language acquisition and visual motor skills in very young children2, many more studies have shown concerning cognitive associations including with poorer reading recognition, reading comprehension and maths3, and cognitive, language and motor developmental delays4,5. However, much less attention has been paid to the effects of television viewing at the other end of the lifespan. Indeed, despite it having been hypothesised for over 25 years that watching excessive television can contribute to the development of dementia1, this theory still remains underexplored empirically.
  • Watching television for more than 3.5 hours per day was associated with poorer verbal memory six years later with evidence of a dose-response relationship: greater hours of television per day were associated with poorer verbal memory at follow up (Table 2)
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  • When comparing the size of this negative association with other predictors of cognitive decline, watching television for >3.5 hours a day had a greater sized negative association (standardised beta = −0.034) than being in the lowest wealth quintile (as compared with the median quintile: standardised beta −0.027), while watching television for >7 hours a day had a greater sized association (standardized beta = −0.048) as being in the highest wealth quintile (compared with the median quintile: standardised beta = 0.043) or having no educational qualifications (standardized beta = −0.058).
  • associations between television viewing and verbal memory remained even when considering a range of variables relating to sedentary behaviours, suggesting that it is not just the sedentary nature of television watching that is responsible for its relationship with cognition.
  • Television involves fast-paced changes in images, sounds and action and, unlike other screen-based activities such as internet use and gaming, television is the most passive way of receiving such stimuli
  • television leads to a more alert but less focused brain
  • In addition to any potential cognitive stress created through the alert-passive interaction while watching television, the content of the programme itself can be stressful, such as through the depiction of graphic scenes, violence or the creation of suspense. Analyses of UK television from 2001–2013 (covering the country and much of the period of the data collection for the study reported here) have shown between 2.1 and 11.5 violent scenes per hour in UK soap operas, with 40% of these being categorised as moderate or strong violence22. It has even been proposed that the vividness of such experiences is greater than real-world experiences of events such as violence, conflict or disasters, as the drama is enhanced for entertainment purposes23. Chronic stress is known to lead to increased levels of glucocorticoids, which can have a direct effect on the hippocampus due to the presence of glucocorticoid receptors in that region of the brain. Consequently, stress has been shown to lead to atrophy of the hippocampus and impaired neurogenesis24, alongside impairments in cognition25.
  • excessive television could be linked with verbal memory through displacing other, cognitively beneficial activities such as playing board games, reading and engaging with cultural activities11,26. This theory implies that the relationship between television viewing and memory is not entirely down to television having negative effects per se, but rather television reducing the amount of time that people spend on more activities that could contribute to cognitive preservation
  • This study is not suggesting that watching television in older adulthood confers no benefits. Indeed, research with adults has suggested that TV dramas in comparison with TV documentaries can increase performance in tests of theory of mind, suggesting that television can enhance understanding of others27. Educational television can be an efficient way of learning when programmes are designed appropriately28. Television has also been shown to be a form of escapism from difficult life circumstances29. Further, research investing the effects of television viewing in the context of people’s daily lives has found that adults routinely report television as a means of relaxing30 (although this should be considered in relation to the potentially stress-inducing effects of television viewing discussed earlier). Nevertheless, this study suggests that watching substantial amounts of television is longitudinally associated with poorer verbal memory in older adults.
  • it remains unclear whether television viewing might affect other components of executive function
Ed Webb

An Iraqi Actress to Sue The Economist Over 'Fat' Photo - New Lines Magazine - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...e-the-economist-over-fat-photo

economist media Arabs Iraq women health patriarchy

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Aug 22 - Cached
  • On July 28, The Economist ran a story on what it said is why women are so much “fatter” than men in Arab countries. The story, titled “Why women are fatter than men in the Arab world,” laid the blame primarily on cultural restrictions on women that hinder their access to exercise and outdoor spaces. To accompany the short report, The Economist chose a photo of Enas Taleb during her performance at Iraq’s annual cultural Babylon Festival, thus portraying Taleb as an example of such overweight.
  • Taleb, 42, is a veteran of Iraqi TV dramas who began her career in locally produced shows at the age of 16. From 1996 to 2002, there were hardly any TV shows that did not include her as one of the main protagonists. She has appeared in ads and music videos in Iraq over the past two decades and is admired and respected among audiences and peers alike for her highly praised on screen performances and down-to-earth offscreen persona. Until The Economist used her image depicting “fat” Arab women, Taleb had largely remained distant from controversies, be they political, social or religious, unlike many other artists in Iraq’s entertainment scene. Also unlike many in the entertainment business, the married mother of two adolescent daughters has hardly changed her appearance over the years, eschewing the usual plastic surgeries that have become commonplace throughout the Arab world.
  • Also not properly examined in The Economist piece are other influences, like a culinary culture that encourages the overconsumption of carbohydrates, especially sweets and refined sugar, as exemplified by a rise of imported trends like junk food and sugary soda drinks that are not properly condemned by local health authorities. A general predilection for staying up late at night, which is common behavior throughout the Arab world, could also be an understudied factor contributing to the epidemic in the region.
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  • “Audiences have loved me for many years. It was disappointing to see an international outlet label me as if all my accomplishments mean nothing. I am healthy and happy with the way I look, and to me that is all that matters,”
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