E3 and stuff

So the principle of social construction is basically that if enough people believe something to be real, it may not reflect empirical assessment, but on some level it must be treated as real -- there will be real consequences and effects.

The categories of hardcore and casual gaming are a misleading classification. They place a limitation on individuals by assigning them an exclusive classification of "gamer." While some individuals may self-identify in that manner, a majority of the population does not classify themselves as exclusively a "gamer." They are individuals who spend a varying amount of time playing video games. The distinctions of casual and hardcore are arbitrary. There is no consensus, nor is there much discussion , of what is the metric of a gamer.

Oh message boards are talking about some of these concepts, but they are a poor measure of the penetration of this information or this discussion. Those individuals represent a small portion of the message board population and and even smaller percentage of the overall population. There is no metric for the discussion of this media outside of the internet.

I can't say anything about the things people say in their living rooms and on the phone and with their friends. There's some anecdotal examples of families using the Wii together and grannies playing FPSs, but making any assessments on that would be informed conjecture.

However, a large portion of the message board population -- including the media sites -- reference the casual and hardcore groups as markets. These ideas have had mainstream penetration through tech blogs, popular magazines and newspapers. This mentality and subsequent self-identity have created a culture around the casual and hardcore markets.

The major producers of this media also buy into these distinctions. The recent media conferences from the big 3 hardware producers indicate a distinct and bilateral approach to the gaming market. If the major producers of the content buy into the idea, then we are stuck with the idea.

So in a few swoops casual hardcore are first built by media outlets and blogs as a social construction and identity and then cemented into reality by 3 enormous corporations.

It's not so bad, but it's kind of funny

Anti-Intellectualism exposes false differences in society

While it pains me to say this, Sarah Palin is a symbol for a major social movement.
Palin’s claims that she was a simple, average person battling against Washington insiders made her a symbol of anti-Intellectualism.

But there’s more to anti-intellectualism than the difference between Wasilla, Alaska and the Ivory Tower. Anti-intellectualism is one the longest standing social movement that, even today, stands in the way of progress.

When Sarah Palin burst onto the political scene in 2008, many people were enamored by her personality and “folksy” charm.

Popular opinion on Palin was often split, with some thinking she was a back woods moron and others viewing her as a symbol of the everyday American that worked a wage job, raised kids and brought a perspective based on “common sense” to the political game.

My favorite thing about Palin’s run was the subtle hint of anti-intellectualism that flowed through her own speeches and the speeches of her supporters.

For many, last year’s election was reduced to the everyday working mother versus the intellectual and his Washington insider buddy.

The truth of those conceptualizations will always be up for debate but those characterizations tapped into the feelings of many Americans feel distant from the highly educated.

Historically there has been somewhat of a social distance between intellectuals, the highly educated who pursue academic or intellectual pursuits professionally, and the blue collar world.

In the past, that bias was fostered more by the government and other leadership than it was by actual interactions between intellectuals and other people.

Totalitarian governments often feared intellectuals due to their tendency to analyze their circumstances and social situation and publicly elaborate on their often negative findings.
Religious leaders often diminished the contributions of intellectuals because they felt it devalued the role of religion in people’s lives. Early scientists often took issue with religious explanations of the world, thus creating the historical religion versus science debate.

Those examples come from times when the amount of information shared by individuals was limited to their ability to read and their exposure to books and to other people.

In our society the availability of information is nearly ubiquitous, but some of the same issues remain.

While we certainly do not live in a totalitarian state, the distance between intellectuals and our government leaders has often, but not always, been significant. Leaders with military and legal experience have been favored over those trained in social research and other applicable academic areas.

In regard to religion, I’d like to say things have calmed down a bit since the old days, but the debate between religion and science is still very intense. The battle is now fought through late night anti-evolution infomercials and mean-spirited books written by snarky scientists rather than the hard-fought court cases such as the Scopes Monkey Trial or the political maneuvers of the Catholic Church — but it’s still present.

While those elements of the bias still remain in some form, the biggest changes lay in the ubiquity of information and the isolation of the academy.

The advent of 24-hour news, the Internet and news sources dedicated as much to analysis as they are to reporting, has created a new line of information sharing.

No longer must individuals wait for public thinkers to engage in big debates and examine their findings — the TV news is now often as much about focused analysis and punditry as it is about reporting.

As a result the contributions of intellectuals and academics now frequently lie in the background of blogs and talking heads.

Some of the blame for this bias also lies with the intellectual community itself.
Most intellectual thought is incubated in top universities, and academics and intellectuals employed in those universities often live in somewhat of a bubble.

Whether or not it is intentional is up for debate, but many universities tend to be insulated from the outside world.

That’s not to say intellectuals lack access to newspaper, television and radio — the events of the outside world are their bread and butter. But often there seems to be a social separation between the people who spend their time in academia and the 9-to-5 crowd.

The causation for this bubble is most likely a complicated and tangled mix of social factors, personality issues and the sheer fact that universities themselves are often the equivalent of small cities.

For years intellectuals have remained cloistered in their Ivory Tower under the assumption that the average person wouldn’t appreciate or understand their precious work.

These distinctions are exacerbated by cultural occurrences such as Sarah Palin’s speeches which attempt to separate the blue collar world from intellectuals and academics.

That division creates a false dichotomy.

We are all cut from the same cloth and when petty distinctions are exaggerated we often become disenfranchised from our peers and fellow humans.

The secret to human survival has always been the mixture of talents and skills.

We must be careful of situations that try to separate people into distinct and opposing groups. While one group may seem better than another, we all suffer when things go wrong. As always, balance is the key to maintaining a consistent and nurturing world.

In the end it’s just as foolish to ignore the contributions of the highly educated as it is to act without consideration for all members of society.

Organized religions lag behind Scientology on Internet

Religion has always advertised - regardless of the denomination. That's not a value statement, but one of fact.

Some say it's brainwashing disguised as philosophy and others consider it existential salvation. The reason doesn't really matter - in order to acquire new members and continue their heavenly mission most religions must press the flesh and bring in new converts.

We're all familiar with the traditional methods - the pamphlets, the yelling, the slightly disturbing comics handed out by grammar-school-age children who aren't actually in school - but none of those matter anymore.

They are relics of an archaic time.

Organized religions are lagging behind in their proselytizing technique. The Internet is the religious wave of the future - and Scientology is riding it like champion surfer.

The press has been remarkably unkind to the Church of Scientology and often fails to point out the positive things it does.

I can sympathize with the media though. It's got to be difficult cherry picking the good stuff when the weird stuff just pours all around you. It's like trying to find a silver dollar in a swimming pool full of Jello.

All joking aside, this lack of positive mainstream attention has forced Scientology to take its message to the public in a rather modern way - it uses the Internet.

Those looking to join the Church of Scientology can log onto its Web site, look over recruitment materials and read about the history of the church. There is also a free online personality exam, which comes with a caveat as potential Scientologists must sign up for a meeting time to find out the exam's result.

That last part makes the whole thing kind of sketchy, but there are some interesting lessons to be learned from this.

Traditional organized religions do have a presence on the Internet, but most sites are superficial at best. Those with resources have Web pages that look slick and feature Web 2.0 interfaces that pop with color and flashy graphics, but ultimately they fail to deliver in substantive ways.

These sites miss the point of the religious experience. To most people, religion is about a personal connection with their chosen deity and the self-evaluation and betterment that come about from that connection.

Whether it's a scam or not, Scientology's personality exam and Web community are strong ways of getting its potential members to evaluate their lives and draw them into the church.

That's the one thing that seems to terrify people most about Scientology - it understands what its followers want and uses it to draw them in.

Traditional organized religion could learn a thing or two from Scientology.

I know I'm on shaky ground here. After all, I just suggested that traditional religions should take advice from a group that is widely classified as a cult and a scam.

My reasoning is sound, though.

All major religions in the United States are interested in the acquisition of young people. They are aware of the mortality of their current congregation and many churches are seeking out new, younger members.

Some churches, such as the modern full-gospel churches that blend pop music with religion, have done an excellent job of modifying their style to attract younger adherents.

However these groups are not organized into a unifying structure and often exist as regional centers with loose affiliation to other regional groups.

More organized religious groups, most notably the Catholic Church, have struggled in recent years to draw in new blood and their ranks have diminished.

The Internet could be solution to this problem.

With each successive generation, knowledge of and access to the Internet has increased, and its penetration into society will only grow deeper with time. It's foolish for traditional religions, both organized and regional, to ignore the Internet.

Scientology has a natural advantage. After all, the odds are pretty good that someone interested in a religion based on a science fiction novel would also be fairly Internet savvy.

That's just a head start, though, and doesn't mean Scientology will replace traditional organized religions. However, they are competing for the same prize.

Whether people like it or not, modern religion is more like a business than it ever has been.

Churches are competing for congregants and the leaders are treated like the CEOs of major companies.

If traditional organized religions are going to compete for the attention of young people, they will have to adopt modern methods to do so, but not just superficially.

Flashy sites without substance will not cut it. The online presence of traditional organized religion must convey the sense of community and belonging they represent.

Otherwise they may find themselves behind the curve even more.

Comic book movies bring complex heroes to our youth

When gazing over the crowd at any comic-book movie, one sees a wide range of characters both on- and off-screen.

While their groups vary in demographics, their mission is the same - they want to see that awesome new movie where one person takes the weight of the world on his or her shoulders and proves there is something good deep inside all of us - except things are a little different these days.

The days of patently good and evil characters are long gone. Many of our modern heroes are awash in a sea of grey intentions and complex goals - yet their audience remains unchanged. Like the current generation of adults, today's teens are growing up with comic books. But do gray heroes create a gray populace?

The business of comic books had been in trouble for a long time. The sales of actual comic books have been sliding for many years and Marvel Comics even declared bankruptcy in the '90s.

For both Marvel Comics and its chief rival DC Comics, movies have been the saving grace, making them millions of dollars. Just this past weekend Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" set box-office records.

With their popularity, comic-book movies are set to supercede their paperback forefathers as the creators of cultural mythos.

In the past, comic books have served as the dyed-in-the-wool representations of right and wrong - Captain America defeated the Nazis, Batman fought the Joker and so on. Each representation of evil was clean-cut and clear.

This was done partially because comics were marketed toward a young market. However, the content of comic books has always reflected the society that produced them.

The world itself was not so cut and dry, but the image presented was that simple. Our enemies were evil, and the U.S. a force of pure good. The true complexities of the characters involved and the collateral damage of war were left hidden and unreported.

The messages given to both adults and children were similar and, in truth, those comic books were not far from the propaganda the U.S. government used to rally the nation to support its cause.

Times changed though. The fall of communism and a more intrepid media led the world to a new era of knowledge. Adults were now steeped in the truth that there is no dichotomous good and evil.

Comic books didn't really change all that much, though. Sure there were some more complex stories, but the market and the message remained the same. There are those who are good and those who are evil.

Here we see a slight break in the portrayal of the world. Our children are still sheltered from the world, but we are not.

The late '90s and early 2000s, Sept. 11 specifically, changed damned near everything.

The complex arguments and discussions that were hidden in the past are now out in the open. TV news is business and our society is more complex and faster.

Children are no longer protected from the complexity of the world. It is now beamed into their homes through the Internet and television. Rising to the occasion, comic books found a new medium and a new hope: movies.

Interestingly, some of the earlier comic-book movies that adhered to the old style of good and evil fail at the box office. Joel Schumacher's "Batman Forever" and "Batman and Robin," with their campy portrayal of violence and lack of complexity, bombed at the box office.

Comic-book movies hit it big in the 2000s with the popular movie versions of The X-Men, Spider-Man and Frank Miller's gritty Sin City.

The old medium is gone. Kids aren't reading comics nearly as much as they have in the past - they now come to their heroes through the big screen portrayals of these characters, who themselves are more complex than ever.

"The Dark Knight" portrays Batman as a vigilante, both loved and hated by the populace he protects. Mobsters and convicted criminals are now victims and the hero has some rather severe psychological problems.

These movies will not create a gray populace - they feed one that already exists.

Today's kids don't need the heroes of years past because the world they live in is faster and harder than ever. They can no longer relate to pristine imagines of valor.

In the end, it will not be the heroes themselves that matter, but young people's critical reasoning and ability to understand complexity.

We don't seem to understand that yet, though, and still cling to old standards.

Maybe we really do need Batman.



Originally published in The Daily Reveille...

McDonald's boycott has social movement potential

People are finally starting to boycott McDonald's - but not for a good reason.

The newly-established McDonald's boycott isn't because it treats its employees poorly or because it serves food that rots you from the inside. No, those things actually make sense and would be great reasons to boycott McDonald's. We're dealing with a different type of boycott here. A select group of folks based in our neighboring state of Mississippi have chosen to boycott McDonald's because the chain "supports the gay agenda."

I know it's easy to just brush this off as another example of the religious right freaking out about something, but this little social movement is actually pretty interesting and may function as a litmus test for future American social movements.

This whole issue started in early 2008 when Richard Ellis, vice president of communications for McDonald's USA, took a seat on the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce board of directors.

The NGLCC is a non-profit organization that encourages and helps develop businesses owned by members of the LGBT community. While it is not an official government agency, though its name implies such, it does act as a middle man between gay and lesbian business owners and their local chamber of commerce.

It's pretty easy to see where this is going.

The American Family Association, a religious group based in Mississippi, took issue with this business deal because its members believe the McDonald's corporation is supporting the gay agenda.

The AFA, also a non-profit organization, is concerned with the preservation of the American family, so the rusty and broken-down chain of logic is obvious - homosexuals are bad people; McDonald's has someone on the board of an organization that helps homosexuals; thus McDonald's is also populated with bad people. Not because it makes bad food, but because it supports gay people.

The AFA has called for a national boycott of all McDonald's restaurants because, as posted in an article on its internally run Onenewsnow.com site, "The AFA took issue with McDonald's refusal to remain neutral in the culture war."

Currently the AFA is telling its members to boycott eating at McDonald's restaurants and to call their local franchises to inform the management staff of McDonald's secret plot to help out the gay community.

This isn't the first time the AFA has called for a boycott of a national corporation that supposedly supported the gay agenda. In 2006 the group called for a similar boycott of Wal-Mart that was scheduled to take place over the post-Thanksgiving shopping weekend.

When threatened with the loss of sales on Black Friday, Wal-Mart backed down and issued a statement confirming its neutrality on gay marriage. The AFA subsequently canceled the boycott.

They haven't canceled this one yet.

Through a letter sent to the AFA, McDonald's confirmed its commitment to diversity and has refused to back down.

It's crunch time for the AFA. Can they make the mighty McDonald's bow down?

Sure there are some faulty causal mechanisms at work here, and I'm honestly not sure who is putting together this so-called gay agenda, but this group has serious potential as a mechanism for social change.

In a column this past spring I wrote about the potential power of conservative Christians as a voting block. While my focus was on the political power of conservative Protestants, it's not the only possible outcome - this boycott could serve as a field test for the modern social power of religion.

Here in the U.S., that translates into the social power of conservative Christians.

By their sheer numbers conservative Christians represent a large portion of the U.S. population. According to the 2007 Pew National Trusts Survey on Religious Life, more than one quarter of U.S. citizens self-identify as evangelical Protestant - the group of denominations most commonly associated with conservative Christianity.

Conservative Christians are more than just evangelical Protestants and may self-identify with any denomination. However, they do frequently share beliefs on hot-button issues.

A unified belief on an issue can certainly serve as the glue for a social movement. In this circumstance the culture war against the gay agenda serves as a very strong bonding element. When combined with a large potential audience, you have the makings of an old-school social movement.

Their opponent, however, is a grease-spewing juggernaut that will be fairly difficult to topple.

That doesn't mean they can't have an effect though. After only a few weeks of threats the AFA got Wal-Mart, also a large and powerful corporation, to back down and claim neutrality - so there is precedent and potential.

Whether that potential will open us up to a new era of activism or condemn us to an oppressive theocracy is still up in the air.

Digital distribution has potential advantages for students

One day in the future, nearly everything you need will come to you digitally - without boxes, cases or instruction manuals.

That's right - books, video games, music, nearly anything you can think of that doesn't rot - will be beamed directly into your home through that magic system of tubes: the Internet.

While it's true digital distribution may be the wave of the future, we're not there yet. The infrastructure that currently exists is not set up to deliver a full digital package and some of the hitches are surprisingly low tech.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, digital distribution is a method of product delivery that shoves aside the packaging of a product in favor of shipping it to the consumer via the Internet.

Most students at the University are already too familiar with the concept, however not in the legal way. I imagine most University students are familiar with it's free-spirited cousin - peer to peer networking.

Peer to peer (P2P) networking involves the sharing of media

between individual users - usually distributing pirated software, music and games.

While P2P networking does distribute things digitally, its not what I'm talking about here.

The type of digital distribution I'm referring to is next step in a process the general population is already familiar with - it's like shopping, except you don't go anywhere and never get to actually hold anything.

The legal version of digital distribution involves manufacturers selling it to consumers directly and then allowing them to download the product at their leisure.

It's already pretty popular.

iTunes and Rhapsody.com already make millions of dollars from digitally distributed content, and sites such as Netflix.com have recently opened up on-demand downloadable movies.

Even video games are transitioning to digital distribution with Nintendo's WiiWare and Microsoft's X-Box Live Arcade.

Digital distribution may be in its infancy now, but the road to complete digital distribution will lead University students to some big payoffs.

For the general population, digital distribution may actually be more expensive than traditional methods of shipping.

Blogger Nick Beaudrot, of the site Cogitamusblog.com, calculates that it's still cheaper to ship products the old fashioned way. Production of the items that are easily digitally distributed is still remarkably cheap. The CDs and DVDs that contain our music, movies and video games are pressed out rapidly, and the packaging is usually pretty meager outside of special editions.

The cost of production and light weight of transport make them relatively cheap to ship compared to the cost of bandwidth. As one anonymous comment on Beaudrot's post said, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.

In truth, Beaudrot's idea is sound, and the increasing cost of gas and increasing availability of broadband Internet will eventually make digital distribution paramount.

What Beaudrot doesn't take into account is the other forms of digital distribution - namely books, magazines and academic journals.

These are the media that most directly apply to University students.

University students already have access to many periodicals and e-journals through Middleton Library.

But that's not where the real gain for students is.

For University students, the real gain will be from e-books, podcasts and digitally distributed lecture videos that are already here in some cases and on the way for others.

Other universities are already on top of this. Universities such as Purdue, Washington State and U.C. Berkeley, among others, offer podcasts and in some cases videos of lectures that students can download.

The University has taken the first steps toward getting it all lined up, but the future holds tons of promise.

Unlike DVDs and movies, the benefit of digitally distributed books is easy to see. Books are costlier to produce than disc-based media and it would be much cheaper to distribute them electronically.

Podcasts and videos of lectures may get bogged down in image rights, but by far the biggest hurdle here is an administrative one.

If podcasts and videos of lectures are online, why would students take notes? Would attendance matter anymore? These are anything but trivial issues, and they cannot be resolved easily.

The age of digital distribution is coming, but it's not here yet.

In the case of popular media, it's close and coming fast. For the academic community, it's merely a tiny shadow on the horizon of an academic revolution.

It'll be here eventually, but in the meantime we should all invest in bigger hard drives.


Originally published in The Daily Reveille...

Poverty problem affects everyone, not just the poor

Poverty is a complex issue. On the surface it seems like someone else's problem, but a deeper look can show its impact on others. You don't have to be poor to see the effects of poverty.

As a teenager, I thought poverty was something that in itself couldn't actually affect anything. I felt poverty was an outcome of someone else's poor decisions and lifestyle choices. The poor were merely unable to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps - as the saying goes.

In hindsight, I didn't really think about it at all. I imagine most people don't. As with many other aspects of the world around us, our exposure to poverty is mainly through the lens of television cameras. The poverty we see on the news is real, but it's not just on TV - poverty is problem all over the United States, and especially here in Louisiana.

In its most base definition, poverty is deprivation. People living in poverty are often deprived of access to healthy food, clean water, proper shelter and education.

People are classified as impoverished when their income is lower than the poverty line or they meet federal poverty guidelines.

The poverty line itself is calculated by the U.S. government and considers inflation and the cost of living, and is used primarily for statistical classification. The federal poverty guidelines are a little more flexible and are used to grant access to government programs such as Women's Infants and Children's Nutrition Fund.

They are both highly influential in the classification of people in poverty and the public perception of what constitutes poverty.

The 2008 poverty line for a single person is $10,400 dollars of yearly income, according to the Federal Register. That means a single person who earns less than $10,400 is technically living in poverty. The line changes for the number of dependents the head of the household has, adding $3,600 for each dependent, so a family of two must be less than $14,000.

They're not the most holistic methods of measuring poverty, but they're the easiest way to see poverty from the outside.

On the national level, 13 percent of the U.S. population lives below the poverty line according to the 2006 U.S. census. That seems like a fairly low number, but in terms of poverty prevention and intervention, the U.S. is one of the lowest-ranked developed nations according to the United Nation's development program. On the human poverty index the U.S. ranks 18th - below most of western Europe and Japan.

That's pretty awful, but poverty in our state is even worse.

Around 14.4 percent of all families in Louisiana are impoverished, as are 19 percent of individuals according the U.S. Census 2006 American Community Survey.

Locally things don't look so good either. 2006 figures show 20 percent of Baton Rouge families and 27 percent of individuals living in poverty.

There are certainly some post-Katrina factors in those statistics, but arguments about the definition of the numbers won't change anything - we're still in pretty bad shape.

The big deal here is that many of the same factors that keep Louisiana on the lowest tier of nearly every U.S. ranking are the result of or a determinant of poverty. The issue really isn't as individual as people tend to believe - poverty affects entire regions.

Two of the major determinants of poverty, education and healthcare, are major problems in Louisiana and have far-reaching effects.

Our poorly funded and staffed schools keep our children uneducated and unskilled in a world that is rapidly requiring advanced training for even the simplest of jobs. Our future workforce will be tainted by poor living conditions and unskilled for the future.

Our inadequate medical facilities can barely handle the sick they have now, but children born into poverty have a lesser chance of survival than those born out of it. High infant mortality is inexcusable in the modern world, but it is also something that damages the future of our state by cutting our population.

Both of these measures seem distant and abstract. But new young people and their education are of utmost importance to the betterment of this state and to the public policy that will be drafted by the state. These are just two examples, but there are many more.

Whether an individual is poor or not is almost irrelevant. Poverty itself is influential and will affect our future.

Originally published in The Daily Reveille...