David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech

                David Foster Wallace’s speech is a fairly unique commencement speech in which he discusses the point of education and the harsh reality of life. He expands on the often heard “We are teaching you how to think” statement. He explains what that really means is that we’re learning how to control our thinking and how to choose our meaning of events.

                One of the things he talked about that I particularly enjoyed was the “default settings” of us as people. He claims our default settings are set to have us self centered and selfish.  I’ve heard several things supporting this such as how people mostly enjoy talking about themselves in a given conversation, and the psychological principal called “Actor-observer bias” where one mistakenly attributes someone’s actiosn to their personality rather than thinking about if their current situation has caused the action (the example David used was the person driving the SUV).

The Banking Concept of Education Responce

       Freire discusses the short coming of our current educational system in "The Banking Concept of Education". He describes our current education system as dehumanizing, and that it limits creativity and detaches us from reality. He argues that this won't allow future members of society to help shape or transform reality. He feels that this form of education is oppressive and even likens it to necrophily. He presents his solution to the "Banking" education as the "Problem Posing" education. In this form of education, students are also teachers and teachers are also students and most of the learning and insight is gained through dialogue with the class.

       I feel that the "Problem Posing" form of education is a better way to learn as it encourages active participation from the student. However I feel that we still require the "Banking Concept" in order to get anything done with our education. One cannot simply just learn subjects such as mathematics just from talking about it; students need to be able to memorize key facts and able to retrieve them. This also holds true for subjects where discussion is more applicable to some extent. In order to discuss history for instance, a student should know some basic historical facts. So I believe the answer to education lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Part of me feels that the author is being a little over dramatic with the current education system; particularly when he compares it to oppression and necrophily. Also I feel that our development as a human comes from outside of school, instead the people who raised us and the community we lived in help us to learn to interact with the dynamic world.

Research Prospectus

                Whenever one hears about videogames in the media, it’s rarely a good thing. The media seems to enjoy painting videogames as a violence-inducing activity that people with no social skills seem to partake. As a videogame player and a technology fanatic this highly negative press of videogames is particularly annoying for me. So I’m going to try and argue that videogames not only not cause violence and not promote social withdrawal, they may even improve society.

                The first thing I’m going to have to work on is disproving the fact that videogames are linked to violence. Then disprove that they promote social withdrawal which can most easily be disproved by citing the rise of online gaming with other people. The last thing and possibly the hardest thing to do is to prove how videogames may be beneficial. I’ve read several articles here and there discussing their use in therapy; both physical and psychological and other articles similar. I once recently found an article where a videogame based on protein folding called Foldit, where gamers tinker around with amino acid chains to attempt to find the most efficient way to fold it. Players have managed to help scientists fold a retroviral enzyme within 3 weeks. This can assist with the prevention of AIDS and other retroviral diseases. To sum up the last few sentences I have yet to home in on what I really mean by “improve society” but I’m zoning in around either education, therapeutic, or problem-solving such as the Foldit example.

                One of the counter-arguments against me may incorporate things such as violence within videogames and perhaps the effect that violence has on children. Those studies also rarely account for the long term and only test for immediate aggression. Also those studies only show correlation, not causation. I can probably find some study or statistic to show that this isn’t necessarily true with “fake violence”. If all else fails I can use the claim that the ESRB rating system is designed to alert parents to the levels of violence within videogames. If the parent allowed the child to play a rated M game then that’s just bad parenting.

                In order to find sources I will use the University of Florida’s Library, Google Scholar, and to find valid resources for this assignment.

                Videogames and Real –Life Aggression: A review of the Literature, by Lillian Bensley and Juliet VanEenwyk (from Washington State Department of Health),  Could Violent Video Games Reduce Rather than Increase Violence (ScienceDaily) both imply that the studies of videogames causing long term aggression were inconclusive and implies  that it may in fact reduce violence. Problem Videogame Playing, Self Esteem, And Social Skills: an online study by Daniel J Loton concludes with the fact that even people who play more than 50 hours of videogames a week doesn’t seem to have major social problems or low self esteem.

                I hope by doing this research I can help dispel this negative stereotype and hope to find some positive things about videogames.

The Acheivement of Desire Responce

                One of the interesting things about “The Achievement of Desire” is how easy it is to find something to relate to. Personally I relate to the author’s background: my family, like the author’s, isn’t as well educated as me. This somewhat created a minor divide between and my parents and I do get a little embarrassed by my parents, particularly my mom who was raised in a country where school isn’t free like here in the US. However I disagree with the author about one of the effects of being a “scholarship boy”, I doubt that education can completely separate someone from their family and even their heritage regardless of how uneducated they are. However I’ve seen other aspects of the scholarship boy from other kids in my school: complete enthusiasm about classes, utter respect for the teacher.etc.

Kanye West: Power

            Kanye West is a highly successful rap artist. At potentially the height of his career, he created a song called “Power”, with a fantastic video that almost acts like a painting. Kanye West uses the lyrics and the accompanying video to the song “Power” in order to show the inner conflict between his love of power, and the insecurities having this power may bring.

            The video starts out with showing Kanye, with extremely confident looking eyes, at the end of a long hallway made up of pillars. It zooms out revealing a thick huge chain necklace with a large Egyptian eagle amulet. The camera zooms out even further to reveal a large multitude of mythical feminine figures: horned women wielding scepters, a cherub, two gravity defying women carrying pots of water, two women making out, and other figures. The zoomed out picture also reveals a hovering sword over Kanye’s head. Finally the video flashes between individual scenes of the figures only to show a battle between a man and a woman with Kanye in the middle of them. The majority of the imagery described establishes the fact that Kanye is very successful at being a music artist. Kanye being in the center of the whole scene already establishes importance in him. This is further supported by the fact he’s wearing a giant Egyptian falcon head which turns out to really be Horus: one of the most important Egyptian deities. Horus fulfills many roles in the Egyptian myths such as their sky god, god of war, god of hunting, etc. One of the mythical figures in the foreground of the image is a four winged angel. Turns out there are a specific type of angel that has four wings called a “Cherub” whose main duty is to basically worship and praise god. Most of the people in the video are women which expresses Kanye’s sexual prowess. All these images establish that Kanye has an almost god-like power. However looming above Kanye is a floating sword which appears to reference The Sword of Damocles. In The Sword of Damocles Dionysus temporarily gives the throne to Damocles; however Dionysus hangs a large sword over Damocles head by a single hair. This is supposed to demonstrate the sense of fear and insecurity one has when gives a lot of power. All of this reveals the vast amount of power Kanye has, but also the fear this power has given him as symbolized by the sword above his head. The scene ends with all of the mythical beings disappearing and a man and a woman about to battle each other in front of Kanye. All of this shows the inner turmoil within Kanye as he fights between his love of power and his insecurities.

            The lyrics support and expand what the video has said.  The first few lines which says “I’m in the 21^st century doin’ something mean to it, Do it better than anybody ya ever seen do it” is him establishing his dominance in the music industry. The song then proceeds to go into the main chorus which says that “No one man should have all that power. The clock’s tickin’ I just count the hours. Stop trippin’, I’m trippin’ off the power. 21^st Century Schizoid man” This shows that while he does enjoy having all this power, he’s well aware that no one should have too much power. Later in the lyrics he directly admits to his egotism when he said “Now I embody every characteristic of the egotist”, but then shortly after he starts lamenting the loss of his “childlike creativity, purity, and honesty”. Kanye says “Reality is catchin’ up with me. Takin’ my inner child, I’m fightin’ for it, custody, with these responsibilities that they entrusted me”. He’s basically saying that having a lot of power can stricken your inner creativity and innocence which is one of the causes of the insecurities he’s dealing with. After repeating the chorus again he then once again shows off his power and sexual dominance, but suddenly the song takes a drastic shift in tone when Kanye said “Now this’ll be a beautiful death, I’m jumpin’ out the window, I’m letting everything go, I’m letting everything go”. He repeats the message of his suicide another time then finally closes his song with “You got the power to let power go.” The counting down in the main choruses is probably counting down the final hours of his life until he committed suicide. This suicide reflects that the power has overwhelmed him, and he’s now lost all of his power. That’s also what he probably meant about us having the power to let power go. One of the nuances about this song is the flipping between enjoying and showing off the power and his revealing of his inner insecurities. This is showing an inner conflict between the fact that he wants to have all that power but he wishes to have true happiness. This inner conflict is probably what the final scene in the video where a man and a woman seem to attack each other in front of Kanye.

            Kanye West combines the video and the lyrics in order to express his insecurities caused from the huge amount fame, fortune and power he has achieved from his music career. Kanye is divided between the feelings of his insecurity and the feeling of being powerful. He eventually however becomes overwhelmed and loses to his insecurities when he “committed suicide” at the end of his song. This all goes to show that you need to learn to control power before it controls you.

Pain Scale

In “The Pain Scale”, Eula Biss discusses her thoughts on pain and the short comings of the pain scale. She presented several interesting reoccurring themes and ideas but the ideas that caught my interest were the comparison of the pain scale to other scales. She seems to use those other scales to express the short comings of the pain scale.

In the first section, she discussed how every scale has a zero point. She then discussed the zero point of the Kelvin temperature scale and compared it with the pain scale. She said that “Even at absolute zero, their motion does not stop completely. Even the absolute is not absolute.” (172) What the author seems to be saying is that like how there is no such thing as molecules with absolutely no movement, there is no such thing as not feeling pain.

 In the next section Biss talks about the Beaufort scale, a scale used to measure the wind. She talked about how the scale was organized. She said there were twelve categories. Each category has a title, a number, and a description. On the other hand with the pain scale you only have numbers. Only two of those numbers have labels: “No pain”, and “The worst pain imaginable”, which is subject to the limits of one’s imagination. This makes the whole pain scale very vague compared to the more well defined Beaufort scale.

The final scale discussed in the passage was the Wong-Baker Faces scale which is another pain scale. The only difference is that each number had an associated face with it. Biss then discusses about how emotional pain and physical pain are both interrelated, and even our words seem to reflect this: pain can refer to both physical and emotional hurting. This interrelation of emotional and physical pain makes the pain scale even more inaccurate since the number given by the patient can be skewed by how they’re feeling. This can pretty much render the whole scale useless since it will vary person by person even if they’re feeling the same amount of pain.

Biss showed that compared to other scales, the pain scale is perhaps the most useless scale due to the lack of concise fixed points, the lack of descriptions, and the fact that one’s emotions and experiences may interfere with someone’s response.