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anonymous

Plato's Pop Culture Problem, and Ours - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...s-pop-culture-problem-and-ours

Plato media television correlation-causation reality violence

shared by anonymous on 30 Aug 10 - Cached
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Aug 10
       
      This is the key question.
  • To answer these questions, we can no longer investigate only the length of our exposure to the mass media; we must focus on its quality: are we passive consumers or active participants? Do we realize that our reaction to representations need not determine our behavior in life?  If so, the influence of the mass media will turn out to be considerably less harmful that many suppose.  If not, instead of limiting access to or reforming the content of the mass media, we should ensure that we, and especially our children, learn to interact intelligently and sensibly with them.  Here, again, philosophy, which questions the relation between representation and life, will have something to say.
  • And while philosophy doesn’t always provide clear answers to our questions, it often reveals what exactly it is that we are asking.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In their book “Grand Theft Childhood,” the authors Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson of Harvard Medical School argue that this causal claim is only the result of “bad or irrelevant research, muddleheaded thinking and unfounded, simplistic news reports,.”
  • This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on a case that may have the unusual result of establishing a philosophical link between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Plato. The case in question is the 2008 decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals striking down a California law signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2005, that imposed fines on stores that sell video games featuring “sexual and heinous violence” to minors.  The issue is an old one: one side argues that video games shouldn’t receive First Amendment protection since exposure to violence in the media is likely to cause increased aggression or violence in real life.  The other side counters that the evidence shows nothing more than a correlation between the games and actual violence.
  • To begin with, he accuses it of conflating the authentic and the fake.  Its heroes appear genuinely admirable, and so worth emulating, although they are at best flawed and at worst vicious.  In addition, characters of that sort are necessary because drama requires conflict — good characters are hardly as engaging as bad ones.  Poetry’s subjects are therefore inevitably vulgar and repulsive — sex and violence.  Finally, worst of all, by allowing us to enjoy depravity in our imagination, poetry condemns us to a depraved life. Both Plato and Arnheim ignored the medium of representation, which interposes itself between the viewer and what is represented. This very same reasoning is at  the heart of today’s denunciations of mass media.  Scratch the surface of any attack on the popular arts — the early Christians against the Roman circus, the Puritans against Shakespeare, Coleridge against the novel, the various assaults on photography, film, jazz, television, pop music, the Internet, or video games — and you will find Plato’s criticisms of poetry.  For the fact is that the works of  both Homer and Aeschylus, whatever else they were in classical Athens, were, first and  foremost, popular entertainment.
  • In 1935, Rudolf Arnheim called television “a mere instrument of transmission, which does not offer any new means for the artistic representation of reality.”  He was repeating, unawares, Plato’s ancient charge that, without a “craft” or an art of his own, Homer merely reproduces “imitations,” “images,” or “appearances” of virtue and, worse, images of vice masquerading as virtue.  Both Plato and Arnheim ignored the medium of representation, which interposes itself between the viewer and what is represented.
  • But what about us?  Do we, as Plato thought, move immediately from representation to reality?  If we do, we should be really worried about the effects of television or video games.  Or are we aware that many features of each medium belong to its conventions and do not represent real life?
anonymous

Foreign Language Programs Cut as Colleges Lose Aid - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...05languages.html

language foreign education college cost

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 10
     
    "If the cuts have struck a nerve far from this upstate campus and in more than one language, it is in large part because they involve language itself, and some cherished staples of the curriculum. The university announced this fall that it would stop letting new students major in French, Italian, Russian and the classics. The move mirrors similar prunings around the country at other public colleges and universities that are reeling from steep drops in state aid. After a generation of expansion, academic officials are being forced to lop entire majors. More often than not, foreign languages - European ones in particular - are on the chopping block. The reasons for their plight are many. Some languages may seem less vital in a world increasingly dominated by English. Web sites and new technologies offer instant translations. The small, interactive classes typical of foreign language instruction are costly for universities. But the paradox, some experts in higher education say, is that many schools are eliminating language degrees and graduate programs just as they begin to embrace an international mission: opening campuses abroad, recruiting students from overseas and talking about graduating citizens of the world. The University at Albany's motto is "The World Within Reach." "
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 10
     
    The TOK issue here is whether or not European foreign languages are necessary or valuable and thus, whether or not their elimination is a loss to higher education.
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