Kate Redburn

Contrary to popular belief, humanities courses are not meant to facilitate the passing of knowledge from wise, old professors to eager, young students but rather to indoctrinate students with an inscrutable pseudo-scientific jargon, vomited from the depths of Derrida's tortured soul. In the natural sciences, technical terms have necessarily been developed to describe brand-new phenomena. But the liberal arts have adopted a vague vocabulary with two functions. It is a gauntlet thrown down to the students daring to think they can understand academia, and it is an infinitely moldable putty for filling careless cracks in theories and information. An academic willingness to skim along on a smooth surface of jargon may simply be lazy, but to the student, it is one more way to sequester academic knowledge in an elite and unknowable realm.

"Don't be such a girl" is the kind of unenlightened throwaway that you might expect from a frat boy or your older brother. You would probably yell at him or peg him with a football. But it's harder ("that's what she said!") to combat in the average liberal Columbia male. Letting these comments go seems anti-feminist, but no one wants to hit her male friends in the head with the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto. A couple years ago, the hockey team posted signs telling potential recruits not to "be a pussy," and while the team was disciplined (for swear words, we presume, not chauvinism), that phrase has yet to die its rightful death. And with explicitly defined feminism having gone the way of "Gym Crow" on campus, there seems, in our unscientific observations, to be some tendency to regard the term with skepticism.

"That girl's shoes are totally hideous."

Progressives, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Over the past month we've seen Obama's numbers skyrocket while McCain's campaign has resorted to such sleazy tactics that even former Bush advisers are jumping ship. Polls show that brand new states are in play, and a lot more people are eligible to vote this time around because of the efforts of partisan campaigns and evil-doers like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. We'd like to propose that there is more at stake this time than the winner of the presidential election. So, at the risk of sounding pretentious, dictatorial, and activistier than thou, here's how you, Joe College-student, can matter this November:

In lieu of this week's Shock and Awe column, the authors have decided to run an interesting letter we received this week. Shock and Awe will return to its regular bi-weekly schedule on Oct. 14.

As we have all been reminded ad nauseaum, Columbia today lives in the shadow of over forty years of leftist political activism. True to that tradition, the spectrum of political groups on campus leans left. For progressive students, the fall activities fair presents an abundance of opportunities for involvement, based on everything from party affiliation to favorite social cause to personal identity.

We attempted to stake our claim as the generation of cynicism, and thankfully we failed miserably. With our lives on hyperdrive, where post-modern discontent and hipster irony twist the denotation of cultural and consumer slogans into unintelligible status symbols, we somehow found ourselves chanting "Yes We Can." Say what you will about Barack Obama, but he alone was not the victor last Tuesday.

When Bollinger stands with hair flapping Your grandparents all will be napping We'll sit there in rows And stare at our toes When suddenly there will be clapping. That's the sound of your real life arriving The culmination of undergrad striving Throw your Red Bull away Today is the day! That no more all-nighters need your surviving. No more tests, no more greeting the dawns Feeling shunted like somebody's pawns This school can be taxing Now there'll be relaxing, In the real world you can sit on the lawns! Throw a party, no school to say "NO" Someone might steal all your stuff though, In full naiveté You'll call Public Safety Sorry, but they're not going to show. No more will you snooze in your lecture With a prof rambling 'bout his conjectures Knowing full well That the midterm as well Requires only weak mental gestures. But won't you miss getting invited To see leaders universally spited? While protests insist That we're all communists We all feel First Amendment enlightened. Don't forget all the fun that you've had Spending money from Mommy and Dad Someone's theater debut Sandwiches from 212 Maybe a fifth year would not be so bad... Didn't hear? Are you out of the loop? Sorry kid, you've got to fly the coop Four years they fawn But then they want you gone To make room for the next year's group. Perhaps you've gotten a job YouTube taping the latest flash mob It doesn't pay well But oh, what the hell Who wants to be a desk-sitting blob? Many here will teach English abroad And frankly the rest are all awed Now you make your bread Just from something you said To booze with the occasional maraud. For those returning to parents' free couches Normally you'd be called louses But with no new jobs coming It seems not quite bumming To slink back to suburbanite houses. Or "onward to grad school!" you say The life of the mind is your way We hate to sound bitter But these days, schools don't tenure And deep thoughts will be all you're paid. You'll forget the old sacrilege The one few dare acknowledge Where everyone cared Only I don't, I swear If you're Barnard or Columbia College. Don't worry too much about May It'll come just like every day Enough with nail biting Finish your thesis writing Or frolic, 'cause Spring's on its way! *with deepest apologies to Lorca Sarah Leonard is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. Kate Redburn is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and African studies. Shock and Awe runs alternate Mondays.

Last week, I saw the end of civilization. Turning the corner of Dodge from Low Steps to 116th and Broadway, I saw a man trudging down College Walk with the familiar stooped gait of someone sending a text message. This guy was enthralled by that even rarer breed, the iPad. I watched him proceed, eyes still fixed on the flashing screen, and walk at full pace into a row of passersby. Not pretty. It was a sad footnote in the history of supposedly connective technologies, but more than that, the man and his iPad were the latest casualties in what I like to call the Postmodern Clusterfuck. Postmodernism has captured us. The way it obliterates hierarchies can be liberating, but the mistrust of any boundaries, the openness to literally anything, leads to a dogma of blind acceptance (emphasis on the blind). Tolerance and open-mindedness should be our highest values insofar as they promote egalitarianism and outright celebration of diversity. But those very virtues are tempting for the intellectually lazy. Openness becomes misconstrued as a disdain for opinion or judgment, and egalitarianism of ideas becomes an excuse not to stand for anything. Human beings need standards by which to sort out right and wrong answers to life's questions, whether mundane or world-historic. There are myriad standards that have proven both arbitrary and narrow-minded. But we haven't replaced outdated-but-clear standards with better standards—we've done away with standards altogether, leaving us at sea. The most obvious examples from our lives seem to be in relationships: they can be open, polyamorous, "complicated," hook-ups, or otherwise ambiguously committed. The Postmodern Clusterfuck has merged with radical politics to create a unique pressure that compels people to pursue relationships on terms that confirm their political ideals. The problem is that while we may have done away with harmfully restrictive sexual mores, we haven't replaced them with any framework. It's wonderful that norms about sexual relationships are being blasted away and that our cohort is open to a variety of choices. If you're polyamorous, more power to you! The problem lies in the difference between understanding, even loving, the existence of myriad solutions to the same problem, and getting tangled in emotional knots trying to act out intellectually ideal politics within our emotional bounds. Thus, we arrive at the political result of the Postmodern Clusterfuck: the ascendancy of opinion. If all truth is relative, then the natural tendency would be to elevate opinion. Infinite possibilities to connect to other people await, but nothing can be evaluated as better or worse than anything else. We're left in an echo chamber of global proportions, shouting at people about how we feel. Opinion cannot be refuted except on the facts, and those are all topsy-turvy anyway. The implications on technology are enormous as well, and not just for personal safety when walking near people operating seductive Apple products. The advent of truly portable Internet will change the very definition of knowledge. Google reps often talk about "cloud computing"—the idea that instead of storing personal files on PCs, people will start storing data "in the cloud" online. Forget cloud computing—we're heading toward the age of cloud knowledge. As the barriers to accessing data become lower and lower, there is decreasing pressure to retain any information in our heads. Cloud knowledge means that capability will be measured in an individual's ability to find data and to synthesize multiple sources rather than to retain and improve upon information on their own. How can we judge in this environment with the pressure to access existing data? Why actually think through an issue if I can find six opinions between Wikipedia and JSTOR? There are obvious problems with this trajectory. If all things are equal, how do we distinguish between instant messages and face-to-face interactions? It's not such a futuristic nightmare anymore to imagine full human lives conducted online. The Postmodern Clusterfuck traps us in a corner, unwilling to say that text messaging is cowardly or that cell phones in public are rude. Columbia is not immune to the Postmodern Clusterfuck, as we simultaneously champion the Western canon through the Core Curriculum and the most prominent criticism of the Western canon through our fantastic array of critical theory/subaltern/postcolonial studies classes. These are the big questions that confront our society in an age of collective cognitive dissonance where screaming Republicans and cutesy kittens have the equally insidious effect of distracting us from war, economic collapse, and social and political injustice. At the very least, let's debate these issues in an open forum, one in which we can look each other in the eye. If trouble arises, just Google it or something. Sarah Leonard is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. Kate Redburn is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and African studies. Shock and Awe runs alternate Mondays.

For all you Gmail users out there—and if you're not on it, get with it—your inboxes were invaded last week by Buzz, the Google mashup of Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter. Buzz peeked at your email history, automatically added a handful of your frequent contacts to your Buzz feed, and directed you to the feed itself, which allows you to post updates and comment on other people's updates. As if we weren't already driven to extreme online procrastination by the existing parade of social networking options, we have a new integration of voyeuristic/exhibitionist faux interaction to distract us. The official Gmail blog posted this last Tuesday: "Today, we're launching Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting and share updates, photos, videos and more. Buzz is built right into Gmail, so there's nothing to set up—you're automatically following the people you email and chat with the most." One, this is a scary development, even forgetting, for a moment, the privacy issues raised by Foreign Policy's Evgeny Morozov, who writes, "Without you ever touching Google Buzz's privacy settings, the entire world may know who you correspond with (yes, including that secret lover of yours and that secret leaker at the White House)." Two, the legal problems alone are mind-boggling, and indeed, a Harvard law student has apparently already taken the bait and filed a class action suit on behalf of everyone who was automatically signed into Buzz. Three, beyond this range of privacy concerns, Buzz's debut raises big questions about how our generation sees itself, and about what we expect from our relationships with other people. Much has been made of our courtship culture, which expects sex now and connection later. Anyone whose parents read that New York Times article about "hooking up"—yes, that's what the kids are calling it—is rolling their eyes right about now. But perhaps our means of communicating, of building relationships, is in part to blame for how dedicated we are to putting the cart before the horse. The Internet doesn't just give us unfettered access to knowledge—it gives us unfettered access to each other. A friend recently described a bungled romantic encounter: Set up via text message, the pair had gchatted, arranged to meet by email, became Facebook friends, and then failed to meet in person because a text message did not deliver properly. This is not to say that we don't socialize anymore. We do, and some evidence suggests that social networking sites actually increase some users' in-person social interactions. But reading back over that last sentence, there's still something sick in the way we're dividing up our encounters, as if a date can be divided into wall post units, or a phone call is worth six text messages. Buzz was just the most recent, and blatant, evidence that we're losing sight of the real purpose of new technologies, and allowing them to cripple our social skills. Yes, Twitter did help Iranian activists organize, and yes, we think it's terrific that you kept in touch with a friend from elementary school through Facebook, but these uses are exceptions. None of the connections we maintain online would be impossible without the social networking sites, so are we really gaining so much in making them easier to maintain? The entire value of communication has been reversed. Where we were once socially rewarded for making the effort to write, telegram, or call, we're now punished for failing to text, gchat, or tweet. We spend all our time wondering why she hasn't called, instead of being pleased when she does. The cost of communication is so low that we're penalized for all the time we spend not doing it. Technology should free us from previous constraints, allowing us to pursue real experiences—make art, exercise, debate and wander—with the knowledge that we can make virtual contact if necessary, whenever we want. But instead we're connected all the time, tethered to an array of hooked up devices without which we can hardly tell left from right. The problem isn't necessarily the technology itself, but us. Our worst competitive tendencies run rampant as we feverishly develop online personas within every social network, and then neglect to consider how else we could be spending the same amount of time. The arrival of Buzz was actually unique, in our opinion, for the immediate skepticism that met it. Maybe Buzz was the first in what will surely be a series of web inventions that are immediately rejected for their redundancy. For now, let's lead ourselves out of temptation: While it might be hard to figure out, it is possible to turn off Google Buzz. Scroll all the way down the inbox page and read the small links at the bottom. Click "turn off buzz," skip class, and do something. Sarah Leonard is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. Kate Redburn is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and African studies. Shock and Awe runs alternate Mondays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com