The Adventures of College Girl and Life

Text And Then the U.S. Will Build a Robot Army

In “The Real 2012 Race: President Obama vs. Candidate Obama” (2012), Arianna Huffington points out the differences between Barack Obama as a presidential candidate and Barack Obama as the actual president, predominantly through his failure to keep promises. Huffington describes “Campaign Obama” or “Candidate Obama” as an inspiring figure who “challenge[s] a broken status quo”, asks “Why not?”, and believes in “the fierce urgency of now” for change; yet, she goes on to portray “Governing Obama” i.e. the President as slightly hypocritical: someone who “engineered a new [health] system that…relies on the same players”, asks “Why ruffle too many feathers?”, and “seemed to be governing with the fierce urgency of…sometime later.” Huffington brings to light the contradictions of Obama’s term in office thus far in order to provide awareness of the necessary reactions should Obama be re-elected. She calls the American voters to action in her confrontation of which Obama will be elected for 2012.

Huffington, Arianna. “The Real 2012 Race: President Obama vs. Candidate Obama.” The Huffington Post. 14 March 2012. Web. 17 March 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/president-obama-candidate-obama_b_1340036.html>

Normally, I despise reading/writing about politics, but this article intrigued me. Despite my embarrassing lack of knowledge on the current state of the presidential campaign, I totally understood what Huffington was getting at; Obama, like so many of his predecessors, has made promises that he just can’t keep. He’s run his campaign on the idea of change and the pledges to break out of the status quo, yet his current policies suggest otherwise. His actions betray his words; whether it’s due to lack of will/motivation to go against such fierce opposition as the companies who benefit from the status quo, or it’s due to actual inability to change policies as quickly as he had once thought he could, I don’t know. So personally, I can’t criticize the president for doing pretty much nothing, because who knows, maybe he has good intentions but too many obstacles. He’s not a superhero.

Huffington’s reaction to the latest turns of events, though, are quite amusing. She has pretty much dismissed the idea that Obama has any competition other than himself in the upcoming race (and I’ve gotta agree with her). But she also has a plan to “vigorously cover both tracks of the election…between President Obama and the Republican GOP nominee [and]…Obama vs. Obama.” And she’s doing this “by using satire.” At the end of the article is the first in a series of videos addressing Obama’s somewhat hypocritical campaign nature.

As Paul Krassner, founder of The Realist, once said, “Sometimes humor is just a way of calling attention to the contradictions or the hypocrisy that’s going on officially… That’s the function of humor — it can alter your reality.” And our reality definitely needs to be altered.

I love that quote. And the video, “The Long Game,” is hilarious. It shows a clip of Obama on 60 Minutes stating one of the quotes used in the article, about how change is a “long-term project” that will take more than a year or two years, but probably two terms, or two presidents. Following this is an interview of Obama’s “chief strategist” who states that their strategy is to do “not much.” The US will eventually be run by corporations, Texas will secede, North Dakota will become part of Canada, and California will fall into the ocean. The president will be cryogenically frozen only to wake up in 2084 and become CEO of the country. “Everything we know and love about our country will be destroyed. And that’s when we make our move.”

This reminds me of an xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/887/
Note that, according to Randall Munroe according to Google, in 2047, the world will be run by banks and corporations. Well, if two internet-famous people said it, it must be true, right?

#The Huffington Post #Arianna Huffington #Obama #2012 presidential campaign #the Long Game #xkcd #future

Text The Virality of Virality

In “Virality Uber Alles: What the Fetishization of Social Media Is Costing Us All” (2012), Arianna Huffington brings to light the recent problem of obsession with social media. Huffington points out how “going viral has gone viral” which causes “moving forward for the sake of moving” and thus “trending topics” with little substance; she describes how companies are “hungry to embrace social media and virality, even if they’re not exactly sure what that means” and argues that “social media are a means, not an end” because overall, social media has become “a major distraction” from the more important issues of “poverty” and “downward mobility” or “ingenuity and innovation.” Huffington argues against the fetishization of “social” status in order to illustrate the superficiality of much of today’s social media. She writes to American society to make people think twice about their everyday use of social media and how much of it is worthwhile.

Huffington, Arianna. ”Virality Uber Alles: What the Fetishization of Social Media Is Costing Us All.” The Huffington Post. 8 March 2012. Web. 11 March 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/social-media_b_1333499.html>

Man, I really like Huffington. Her writing is just so relatable. I’ve noticed that she likes to point out the ill-informed focus of the media. First, it was with the focus on the bad and not the good in the Abundance article; then it was the focus on the culture war and not the real issues; now it’s the focus on the progress and not the purpose of the progress: the act and not the destination. I think she’s making an important point here. (uber alles, by the way, means above all) People in general need to realize that just being “viral” doesn’t reflect at all on the thing’s value in society. Huffington quoted another HuffPost writer, Michael Calderone: “Nothing is too inconsequential to be made consequential.”

I see this crap every day on Facebook. Every single day, there are countless new “memes” made by bored teenagers with the hopes of becoming viral. The members of the Facebook community thrive on the number of likes their statuses and wall posts and photos receive…yet, is the value of those words or pictures changed by how popular it is? If no one “liked” your status about your goldfish dying, does that make you unpopular?

The answer should be absolutely not. This “fetishization” of social media is affecting the self-esteems of teenagers across the nation. You can tell who’s the most dependent by how many “selfies” they have in their wall photos: pictures the person took of themselves, usually with a phone, either in the mirror, or from above so that the viewer is given a good look down her shirt (and yeah, usually it’s a girl). I mean, having a few photos of yourself is okay; everyone likes to share pretty pictures of themselves now and then. But posting one every day with a caption of “I am beautiful no matter what they say” or “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is basically screaming “Like my picture because I’m pretty and I like knowing that you think I’m pretty!” After 230 pictures, I think we get it.

So back to the topic of memes. This was my favorite paragraph from the article:

“We are in great haste,” wrote Thoreau in 1854, “to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” And today, we are in great haste to celebrate something going viral, but seem completely unconcerned whether the thing that went viral added one iota of anything good — including even just simple amusement — to our lives. The truth is that sometimes it does, but very often it doesn’t. It’s not even a very complex question; the problem is that we seldom bother to ask the question before we dutifully hop on the algorithmic viral wave. We’re treating virality as a good in and of itself, moving forward for the sake of moving. “Hey,” someone might ask, “where are you going?” “I don’t know — but as long as I’m moving it doesn’t matter!” Not a very effective way to end up in a better place.

SO TRUE. Memes aren’t even funny most of the time. Just today, after I read this article, I saw that someone had created a Facebook page of “*** High School Memes” (*** being the name of my school). Really??? We honestly are so lame that we need to have our own page of memes?? I mean, it’s cute and all; everyone gets to put all the school’s inside jokes into meme form, like how we haven’t had a snow day this year or what happened in the library the other day. But has it added “one iota of anything good” to anything? NO! People are just going viral to go viral. And it has no meaning. We as a society need to realize that social media is a tool, as Huffington states. We have to use it for some greater purpose, whether it’s to advertise a benefit concert or simply to update friends on what’s going on, which was the initial reason behind Facebook. But time spent on pointless unentertaining viral videos and pictures is time wasted.

Anyway, enough with the rant. I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the article, based on the original quote by Saint Bernard:

So, the road to social media hell is paved with well-intended hashtags — as well as disingenuous or inauthentic ones.

#Huffington Post #Arianna Huffington #viral #memes #society #Facebook #selfies #social media #fetishization

Text Today, Birth Control; Tomorrow, the World as We Know It

*Note: This week, Arianna Huffington’s blog post was about a new section of the HuffPost online, so instead of writing about her writing about that (kinda boring, in my opinion), I decided to read/analyze one of her older posts.

In “Balloon Boy Politics: The Media’s Embrace of Birth Contracalypse, 2012” (2012), Arianna Huffington argues that the latest “culture war” has been overexaggerated by the media and as a result the country’s more pressing issues for the upcoming presidential election are being overlooked. Huffington expresses her shock at the media’s renewed focus on “cultural and social issues,” (primarily “the rule announced by the Obama administration that employers must provide free coverage in their health insurance plans for contraception”) and claims that birth control “is an issue that for the vast majority of Americans hasn’t been controversial for decades; she points out the ridiculousness of the “war on the Catholic church” (called so by Newt Gingrich) by pointing out that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control but assures that she has “no doubt that the plight of the poor and America’s struggling middle class will be much more on the minds of voters in November than birth control.” Huffington provides several contradictions to the latest arguments on the contraception issue in order to illustrate the superficial nature of the media culture. She speaks to American voters and American society in general to open their eyes to the real issues facing the country.

Huffington, Arianna. “Balloon Boy Politics: The Media’s Embrace of Birth Contracalypse, 2012.” The Huffington Post. 13 Feb. 2012. Web. 4 March 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/balloon-boy-politics-the-_b_1274892.html>

I gotta say, the more I read of Huffington, the more I like her and the more I realize that our writing styles are sort of similar. Well, similar in that they’re not formal and pretentious-sounding (at least, I don’t think my writing sounds pretentious…I hope…) For instance:

But birth control? In 2012? Seriously? This isn’t abortion, it’s birth control — an issue that for the vast majority of Americans hasn’t been controversial for decades.

If I were writing about this, that is definitely how I’d approach it. Exclamation points and rhetorical questions and a lot of “seriously?“‘s (if you don’t believe me, check out my post about The Glass Castle when Walls gets molested by the 11-year-old and I rant about adolescent sexual behavior). Anyway, just a thought.

About the topic at hand: I totally agree with Huffington (that’s another thing: so far, of everything I’ve read by her, I agree with what she says. weird.). We are in the 21st century, people! Who cares about this whole birth control thing? Since when does birth control elicit a culture war? I’ll tell you: the 1960’s. But now? It’s not like companies are being forced to give their employees birth control pills; they just have to cover it in their insurance plans. Nobody’s being forced to do anything against their own religious policies. And besides, 98% of Catholic women have admitted to using birth control. Ninety-eight percent. I find this rather hilarious. And if the Catholics don’t have a problem with it, that’s saying something. I don’t know what Gingrich is talking about with his “war on the Catholic church.” I find it funny, though, that Mitt Romney said that this law doesn’t belong in the US but he was okay with it when he was governor of Massachusetts, where it’s a state law.

The point is, when people get to the ballot boxes, they’re not going to check off Rick Santorum because he hates birth control. Huffington is right when she points out that there are more pressing issues facing the country. The national unemployment rate, for instance. The “plight of the poor and America’s struggling middle class.” All the media is doing is stirring up trouble and trying to make something out of nothing. Today, it’s birth control; tomorrow, there’ll be renewed speculation over whether or not President Obama is a terrorist. Whatever makes a good headline.

#Arianna Huffington #Huffington Post #birth contracalypse #birth control #contraception #precis

Text 1
Notes A Not-So-Bleak Future

In “Abundance: A Reminder of the Need to Focus on Our Surpluses and Not Just Our Shortages” (2012), Arianna Huffington points out the need to maintain an optimistic outlook on life. Huffington uses the book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler to illustrate how the United States, and society in general, tends to focus on “where we’re coming up short” rather than “our surpluses” of “ingenuity, energy, spirit, and expertise”; she describes the growth of “meta-intelligence” across the globe and how the world’s continued fixation with past failures instead of future successes could create a “potential for transformative ideas to go unheard — and for destructive ideas to gain traction.” She elaborates upon the technologically-advanced state of the global community in order to show how the road to success requires optimism and innovation, not pessimism and stagnation. Huffington speaks to both American society and people across the world to convey her message of hope and motivation to everyone.

Huffington, Arianna. “Abundance: A Reminder of the Need to Focus on Our Surpluses and Not Just Our Shortages.” The Huffington Post. 21 Feb. 2012. Web. 26 Feb. 2012 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/abundance-review_b_1291773.html>