Unscreen Relationships

Sitting down and staring at a blank screen for 25 minutes didn't seem like a good idea. With projects and essays being due and finals right around the corner, doing nothing for a period of time just felt like adding to my stress and anxiety for the comings weeks. Last semester when I did the Student Reflection Paper for SOCI 1101 it was a strange new experience. We live in a world where we feel like something or someone constantly has to have our attention. Actually sitting and staring at a blank screen, first made me feel anxious but then when I started to settle into the quiet room with the blank screen in front of my (my living room with my TV) I started to feel calm and relaxed. While the extent of my experience with meditation and clearing of the mind was doing Gaiam yoga classes, it made me think of the meditation Buddhist monks do and why they think clearing the mind of strenuous racing thoughts and notions is very important in their religion. I felt a (short lived) sense of calm that helped me approach the rest of my day with a refreshed mind.
This time I decided to stare at my powered down iPhone 6s. I realized, especially this past semester, I have been checking social media a lot more than I usually do.  I don't know if it's because we are currently in the throes of a Presidential election or my new love for snapchat, I am always checking my phone. So I definitely needed time to reflect on my obsession with this tiny device. When I had to stare at my TV last semester it took awhile for me to settle and stop worrying about all the work I had to do, but this time I was ready and calm very early into staring at my phone. Having my phone turned off and not buzzing with notifications is oddly calming like you have less worries. It's like when you go on a cruise and you have to turn off your phone because there is no cell service on open waters or when you have to turn your phone on airplanes mode on an airplane because it could disrupt the planes instrumentation (not really). Not having a phone forces you to find a new way to connect to the people in your immediate vicinity and have conversations, or go to sleep on the plane so no one talks to you. Staring at the blank screen of my phone made me think about how much I rely on it to maintain my relationships and friendships. When I have to talk to someone I send a text, Facebook message, or SnapChat. Or sometimes when I am with a group of friends and we use our phones to show each other funny memes or talk about a certain topic. If my phone was permanently removed from my life, would I talk as often as I do with my friends now? Would I even know how to get in contact with them? I started to remember the times in middle school (before cell phones) when we would just see our friends at school every day and then when summer break started and we no longer had to see each other every day so we would stop talking. Then school would start up again and if you didn't have the same class with those people you would lose touch and not talk anymore. Our phones have given us this new ability to stay constantly connected with the people close and far from us. Without the phones would we still be able to maintain the relationships we have or are some of them phone dependent?

Bulletin Boards (BBS)

In Gergen's The Saturated Self, he talks about electronic mail and bulletin boards and how you were only able to talk and communicate with people from the same city or organization. Honestly, when he began explaining bulletin boards I thought he was talking about the bulletin boards all over campus that get overloaded with fliers. But the more I began to read about the concept of bulletin board systems (BBS) it reminded me of the old chat rooms me and my friends would talk on in middle school. Gergen goes on to explain that these "boards" created different cultures and subcultures where people could talk about different shared interests and hobbies, but only within a certain circumference of the user. If you wanted to talk and connect with people outside of your area you were charged by your phone company. (Dial-up...remember all those noises?) This article  talks about how the limited access of BBS's led to hacking, so users could access other BBS's in different areas. Which back then probably seemed like a foreign concept, but we now know is commonly practiced not just on sites but also personal information from personal computers. It also talks about BBS's still being used in places around the world where the internet is still underdeveloped and new. BBS's have now evolved into chat rooms that is now a world wide way of connecting people, some of my cousins in the Philippines actually use them to talk about anime and online games with other users. I remember using AOL Instant Messaging (IM) to talk to individual users or TinyChat to not just chat but also also video chat with multiple people at a time, and different users could request to join the video chat, so instead of talking to a simple username you can now talk to an actual person on a screen. It also evolved into entire virtual worlds, like club penguin and IMVU, where you can create an avatar, and chat with other users from all over the world. Although, some of these boards are still up and running today, I think more users prefer the new forums because these new sites are more visually engaging and organized, so instead of being bombarded with an unknown number of users talking over each other you can now pick and choose who you want to converse with. What do you think? With the slow extinction of BBSs do you think we will need chat rooms or IMs in the future?

March Media Log

Television:

Nikita
Gossip Girl
The Vampire Diaries Season 6
The Originals Season 3
The Fosters Season 3
The Bachelor Season 20
Jane the Virgin Season 3
Modern Family Season 6
Scandal Season 6
How to Get Away with Murder Season 2
Project Runway All-Stars Season 4
Nashville Season 3
New Girl Season 4

Music:

130 Mood: TRBL by Dean
Team by Iggy Azalea
Be Alright by Ariana Grande
low kii savage by Kiiara
Lights by Jessame
Unbreakable Smile by Tori Kelly

Books, Magazines, Articles, etc.:

Relevant Magazine
Buzzfeed Videos

Wait. Who Does He Remind Me Of?

Hollis Doyle played by Gregg Henry

Scandal has always been a fantastical show about the United States capital's most political elite and all the dirty secrets and lies that Olivia Pope (D.C.'s most wanted fixer) has to cover up in order to allow those elite to keep their pristine image that is "for the people". This show has always told fictional stories, putting forth the "All Persons Disclaimer" but lately this season they have been drawing some very strong, close parallels. The current 2016 Presidential race has seen a variety of people and characters and the writers of Scandal have taken those characters and essentially serialized them onto the show itself. Mille Grant (the President's ex-wife) the former First-lady, now a Senator of Virginia, her husband, the current President, has had an affair, granted not with an intern, but the parallels are way too obvious. But the Hillary Clinton double is not the most striking character on the show. Hollis Doyle is a billionaire oil tycoon whose abrasive and offensive vernacular gets the right-wing crowd cheering and everyone else cringe in disdain. Yep, not only can we not get away from Donald Trump in the news, but now we can't even get away from his offensive behavior on TGIT (thank god its thursday). Check out a few of his quotes. Just like how we talked about in class about the news media giving Donald Trump pretty much most of the media coverage so far this Presidential race, the show seems to be capitalizing on the "donald trump" appeal as well. So not only do we get to Donald Trump in real life we also get him in the fictional world. There is no escaping this guy! Maybe the show will induce media-reader interaction and help us humanize Donald Trump or maybe we will just get more of the same. All of us who are big fans of this show, what do you think of this "new" DT character?