Authentic or Dead

Can authenticity actually be used to give credit to the societies? Well what about on an individual human basis? I believe that adapting to our surroundings is part of human nature; some of us embrace it gracefully while others seem to avoid it like an evil plague. An example of is miss interpretation is one I just finished hearing about on NPR, where in Mogadishu, Somalia religious officials are banning radio stations that are playing music that is too “western” such as rock and pop. Their reasoning is that this type of music just “isn’t Islamic”. Cell phones and TV’s are OK but watch out for music you listen to.

It is in my opinion that an individual will take what he or she wants from the world a files it away it the memory cabinet and chooses to remember it as they experienced it. At the threshold of information technology our inner desires become more readily available. Where once it took good going to the scene to gather information on a story we now watch for them on Face book. Access to information has, is, and will continue to spread until the people look to rely on themselves for what is true to them. Then and only then will the will the “contamination” become the norm.

Authenticity is a double edge sword sometimes you feel like nut and sometimes you don’t. As people we never want to forget the past, after all it is what shapes our future, but if we don’t try to understand “why it is” instead of throwing rocks at each other, we’ll become that dead society that Appiah talks about. What makes us different is the most beautiful characteristic we all posses and wanting to learn about them and understand them is what makes us human.

Good Idea, Bad Idea

Damn, when don’t I? Being caught up in the moment is a great distraction for shooting yourself in the foot. Take for example one of my earliest blunders, not an intellectual one but never the less a blunder. I was 15 years old, and lost in translation. I was invited to eat at a lovely young ladies house so that I could meet the family, yes I kind-off had a thing for her. So everything is going great, trying to get my ethos on, I had on my lucky socks, favorite jeans and an ironed buttoned down shirt, and a splash of Old Spice. Pretty snazzy.

So we’re eating dinner and everything is going great. Her dad and I found some common interests. I flirted a little with her mom and yes everything was going good. I was on a roll before the unthinkable occurred, I dropped the ball, I really dropped the ball. We’re at the dinner table just talking after we finished eating, and the dad says to me “So, how was the food, would you like some more?” I replied “No thank you I’m famished”. WHAT!?!? FAMISHED!?!? Are you kidding me? So the mom is giggling and the dad looks to me and says “Is it the good kind or the bad?” I didn’t figure it out until I got home later that night. In every sense of the word I made an ass out of myself. What was I thinking, couldn’t I just say stuffed like a normal teenager. Even till today those seven minutes of my life haunt me.

Mom, dad, her everyone was convinced I was an idiot. What business did I have using a word which was not and still to this day isn’t in my vocabulary? Was I trying to impress them by using a big word, maybe? In regards to a culture that is either unfamiliar or not in good standings with western culture, this incident might have cost me internal shame as an outcast. Or maybe even a war between tribe or nations. But not in the good old USA, no sir they just forget about you as if you were another notch under the belt. As a politician, maybe I wouldn’t get off that easily, but I’m not hurray for me. Looking back at that particular point in time helps remind me that just being myself in the truest form is the best me I can offer anyone, talk if you know shut up and listen if you don’t.

My Media-Your Media

Talk about an interesting 48 hours. NO TV’s in my partners’ house, what is the world coming to. Not weird, but certainly different for me at least. I watch around three to four hours daily. More than anything CNN or CNBC and on Tuesdays for some twisted unexplainable reason, LOST. I was however pretty lucky in the sense that I didn’t have to deviate too far from what I’m used-to. I didn’t fall far from the tree. A primary source of information that we shared was the mighty WEB, not to say that it is where we go to find information, but more so where information is hurled at us. Part of the experience was to go to the website to read a magazine instead of reading it in line at the grocery check-out. “Clean-up on isle 9”. In honor of my partner, who listens to a lot of mp3’s, I opened an account with Pandora Radio an online website that play the music you like based on artists, genre, and style. I even downloaded the app to my Blackberry.

I spent more time on the on the web than normal, surfing and fighting my way through all the crap advertisements. “Click here to know your credit score”, “Earn $950.00 from your home computer”, “Most popular celebrity pics”. Go away!!!!!! Watching TV is so much easier, change channels until you find something you like or catches your attention, and when a commercial comes on just change the channel. Not like the web where it’s up to you to search for what you like. Don’t get me wrong it has it advantages but damn, it feels as if the intension is to grab your attention and pull you in another direction. Luckily since there wasn’t a big difference between or our schedules, I didn’t feel the impact some of my peers did. My perception of how people gather info certainly has changed however. Gathering, analyzing, and making use of information, including information about the natural environment is presented to us via all mediums from TV to a Starbucks cup. Useful or not, that’s up to what you value.

Information Black Out

News is a tricky thing. It can be the good, the bad, and the ugly kind. Some types of news, in my opinion, are a necessary intrusion of our solitude although it can certainly drive some people into a deep level of paranoia. Through an “information black-out” we were asked to experience for a period of 48 hours, I found myself to be much more dependent on the out side world than I had anticipated. There was a moment a couple of hours in that I felt this hint of anxiety, the kind of need to know who is everyone, where and what they’re doing. Coincidentally I found more time to be out side doing something with myself that was kind of conducive to my health. It took me back to my childhood where you left the house at the crack of dawn and didn't come home until the sunset. Went to the park with the dogs and stumbled onto the Coconut Grove Art Festival. It felt weird that I kept reaching to my side checking for messages on my BlackBerry that wasn’t there, oops, forgot I left it at home.

What caught my interest most was the amount of time left over for me to think for myself. It was in a way relaxing not to have to filter the good news from the bad news, deficit this deficit that, why Americans are so over weight, what will Obama’s hair look like after his term as president, what celeb is hooking-up with what other celeb. Is the world running out of things to talk about? I have daily news needs however that I absolutely need. First is the weather, it guides me in the right direction as term affective cover-up gear. Second is traffic, when, where and how can I avoid it. The third would have to be, the morning family check-in. How’s everyone doing and what they're going to do about it. Had I known how cold it was going to get on Sunday, I would have taken a sweater to the park. So to me, news is like what the grumpy old man said about his wife, “can’t live with her can’t kill her”.

Aristotle's and Plato's influence on how we communicate today.

For good or bad we communicate with the intention of convincing or to persuade our audience that the words we speak are indeed the truth. True to the Aristotelian rhetoric, justification of the knowledge base of the speakers is greatly desired. Compare these two examples; if Yoichiro Nambu, a 2008 Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, or Pee Wee Herman, beloved TV show host of “Pee Wee’s Play House” during the 1980’s, managed to get on national television and said “the world will come to an end in 11 days”, who are you most likely to believe?

The first thing that would jump out at you might be, because it would for me, is ethos. Ethos is our appeal to the credibility of the speaker. Here we are faced on one hand, with a TV personality that is synonymous with wacky, cartoony, and borderline delusional characteristics, running around in his red shoes, pale skin and cowlick screaming to the top of lungs “it’ll all be over in 11 days ha ha”. Hum, questionable? On the other hand we are presented with a physicist in a white lab coat with glasses speaking in English with a very heavy Japanese accent preaching “11 days till the end of existence on earth”. Don’t know about you but when I see a lab coat, I think genius. Sure you could go online and Google him to find out more about him, but he’s wearing a lab coat.

The next two parts of the art of discourse play a much more personal and tighter role in rhetoric. Logos is an individual’s attraction to the message based on logic or reason, and pathos is the attraction based on emotion related to the message itself. I my opinion, the first of the two that I would engage in would be pathos. The reason being is because Pee Wee Herman telling us that we’re going to die would probably make me laugh after thinking about what kind and how many drugs he’s on. Given that, I wouldn’t make it past the pathos phase because I would disregard the message completely. Now a physicist in a white lab coat with glasses on, speaking in English with a very heavy Japanese accent preaching “11 days till the end of existence on earth”, might make me soil myself just a little, not that much…..yet.

In Pee Wee Hermans' case, since the emotion generated wasn’t taken seriously, I wouldn’t go on to the logos portion of the rhetoric. But, big butt, in the case of the physicist in a white lab coat with glasses on speaking in English with a very heavy Japanese accent preaching “11 days till the end of existence on earth”, would push me into logos because of its plausibility. In comparison, Plato, to whom Aristotle was a student of, believed largely in dialect as leverage to the art of persuasion. The idea is that if we use different words from the norm (big words, words with different pronunciation or in another language) our story can be just that much more persuasive and compelling. One last example is, I’m just student doing an assignment, do you believe anything I've written on this blog?

Why do we write things down?

If we take a look at history and the evolution of humans as a culture and civilization, guaranteeing our survival through procreation would be at the top of my list. Look mom no hands. Hundreds of thousands of years of wondering who we are and why we're here might have been the very questions our ancestors where thinking about, till one day someone decided to apply color pigments to the inside of a cave wall.

By definition, the modern practice of history begins with written records. Dating back to Ancient Mesopotamian, about 4000 years ago, the form of writing used was with round-stylus and sharp-stylus. Over hundreds of years, Chinese and Egyptian civilizations developed its own language, giving way to the more traditional form of an alphabet that we use today. Again, I guess what we were seeking by recording events and legends were to capture life in the moment, so that those to come can know what our interaction with the world and what was taking place. Knowing is half the battle. We write things down so that we don’t forget, so that we may look to the past for answer. Sometimes, not always, I take notes so that I can study for an exam or to send the ones I love a message on their birthday.

Writings things down gives not only man kind as a whole but we as individuals the opportunity to leave a mark in history. Take this blog for example. Yes, it is a part of an educational program but, I will be leaving my footprint somewhere on this Earth in this life time or another. As digital and minuscule as that foot print may be it is now part of my legacy although I highly doubt anyone would ever care to look. So why do we write things down, I believe it’s so that we won’t forget who we are, how we got here and what we did while we were there.