What does it mean to be human in an age of electronic mob fashions?

I was intrigued by an article on Huffington Post, written by Andrea Learned (“Question External Expectations”), which questions why so many people seem blindly to do what they feel they should should over doing what they really want.

A good deal of the article is about the way the Internet is reshaping social contacts. To me, this is less important than the writer suggests. It’s easy to blame technology for things we maybe don’t want to face up to in ourselves: our sheep-like willingness to stick with the herd, rather than go it alone and state our views openly; our tendency towards finding it easier to let others do our thinking for us, rather than make the effort ourselves. Continued

Why many young people are finding themselves with credit problems before life has fully begun

Britain’s New Statesman magazine highlights an aspect of sub-prime lending that has received little or no publicity compared with plunging house prices and mortgage problems (“Drowning in debt”). Although the article is written from a UK standpoint, I feel sure that the issue it raises affect many more countries — especially the US.

Not only have student loans become more and more difficult to raise and service, many of today’s young people grew up in the atmosphere of “spend today, don’t worry about tomorrow” favored by their parents and society as a whole. Credit cards were easy to obtain and tempting to ‘max out’ to support fashionable lifestyles and purchases.

The author of the article, Stephen Armstrong, gives an example of two young people in Britain, faced with the bleak realities of a personal credit crunch: Continued

Handling more with less effort may depend on how much green you see

I don’t mean the ‘folding green’ — money — I mean the real thing: plants and green leaves. That’s the conclusion of this article, Want More Productive Employees? Try Adding a Few Plants.

The author of a survey of office workers in Texas and the Midwest, Dr. Tina Marie Cade of Texas State University, found employees who worked in offices with green plants or views of green spaces felt better about their jobs and the work they performed:

Employees who worked near live interior plants or a window view of greenery reported significantly higher job satisfaction and thought far better of their bosses and coworkers than those who were confined to windowless gloom. The plant-exposed employees also considered themselves happier in life overall, while all of the respondents who said they were “dissatisfied” with their quality of life were plant-deprived—though it remains to be seen whether happier people are simply more likely to fill their offices with plants, as opposed to the plants providing the happiness.

It seems both women and men demonstrated more innovative thinking, generating more ideas and original solutions to problems in the office environment that included flowers and plants. Continued

Is being authentic and sincere always such a good thing?

One of the mantra’s of self-help gurus today is a constant emphasis on authenticity and sincerity: being yourself, whoever that may be, rather than putting on an act. It’s interesting to hear a slightly different point of view — that ‘excessive’ sincerity can become a license for all kind of unpleasant behavior and may need to be tempered with the a kind of artificial, ritualized way of interaction to allow for some kind of stability.

That’s the suggestion from a new book called Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity reviewed by Genevieve Maitland Hudson wriitng in The Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ section “The value of insincerity”).

She writes:

. . . ritual should be understood as a space in which the inevitable imperfections, difficulties and differences of life are left behind for an “as if” world where regulation and peace are momentarily possible. Ritual does not ignore the difficulties of life as it really is; on the contrary, it accepts these difficulties, and indeed it is only necessary because of these difficulties.

So for instance, when we say “please” and “thank you” we may be acting ritually rather than sincerely. We don’t always mean it but that doesn’t matter. We don’t have to mean it. The point is that we are acting “as if” a world in which we were always properly polite to one another could exist. We are creating a common social space in which we treat one another respectfully regardless of how we are really feeling at any particular point in time.

Continued

. . . Probably Calls the Political AND Lifestyle Tunes

Here’s an interesting question from one of the blogs associated with Britain’s The Guardian newspaper. The author, Prem Sikka, asks “Who really governs?” and notes that politics is increasingly influenced by the demands of business. In his view, we can have democracy or rampant corporate power, but not both.

This is the core of his argument:

Public confidence in parliamentary democracy will continue to be eroded until the power of corporations is checked. Normal people pay a large share of their income in taxes, but the political structures are unduly influenced by corporations and their controllers. They seem to enjoy representation with little or no taxation. The choice is clear: we can have either democracy and public accountability or rampant corporate power with enormous private wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few business executives, but not both.

It’s a powerful statement. It may even be true of politics. But what about the other aspects of society and community life? Are corporations getting too big for their boots generally, not just in the political sphere? Continued

It seems the latest workplace fad in the U.S. is for “consensual romance agreements”

According to The Globe and Mail (Canada), ” companies are asking employees to sign a ‘love contract’ at the start of an office relationship. . . The agreement aims to protect a company from a potential sexual harassment lawsuit while also laying down the law regarding public displays of affection and favoritism, both of which are proscribed. At the core of the agreement is an acknowledgment by both parties that they are entering into a consensual relationship.” (”Canoodling co-workers: Sign on the dotted line”)

According to James McDonald, managing partner of the Irvine, Calif. office of employment law firm Fisher & Phillips:

“In the U.S. there have been greater numbers of sexual harassment lawsuits resulting from workplace romances. Employers are also seeing more relationships develop between employees because they spend so much time in physical proximity, or are constantly text messaging, e-mailing and instant messaging one another.”

Continued

I guess most of us have become used to the constant efforts by the media to induce mass hysteria over some minor topic. I had come to think of it as little more than marketing, on the basis that disaster stories always sell better than good news. Then I found this article by Robert Skidelsky and realized that such apocalyptic thinking has a very long history (“The apocalyptic mind”).

He says that, “classical apocalyptic thinking is certainly alive and well, especially in America, where it feeds on Protestant fundamentalism, and is mass-marketed with all the resources of modern media.” Even scientists are not immune, expressing probabilities as certainties and attacking dissent as some sort of heresy. Continued

According to The Globe and Mail (a Canadian newspaper), a growing number of parents are espousing a radical philosophy: deciding that it’s time their children got some life skills by actually living. As a result, they’re allowing far more unstructured time and more freedom for children to play, free from constant interference from adults (“The free-range child”).

Here’s how the writer expresses it:

As so-called hyperparenting continues to dominate modern childrearing with its flash cards, over-programming, hovering and handholding, a number of conscientious objectors are taking a big step back.

They are not slacker parents – they don’t celebrate 3 p.m. martinis and serve Happy Meals for dinner.

But they are returning to a parenting style in which kids’ time is filled with free play, unsupervised activities and plenty of downtime. Some call it free-range parenting.

Continued

It’s common for young people, especially young women, to claim that they “can’t do math.” Of course, it’s not true. It seems to be more a perception that math “isn’t cool” — or whatever the relevant expression is nowadays. It’s for nerds and geeks, like most intellectual pursuits. And while my guess is that this attitude is more prevalent in the US than most places, it seems to be common throughout much of the world.

That’s why this article in The Guardian “Comment is free” section intrigued me (“Geek + nerd = ?”). Ian Stewart, the writer, comments on the power of stereotypes to replace actual knowledge and how, once they are in place, they become hard to change. On the topic of geeks and nerds he writes:

The real problem, I suspect, is not confined to mathematics. The words “geek” and “nerd” were both coined in the USA, where they reflect a general tendency to despise all types of intellectual activity. Any interest other than television or sport is viewed as weird, be it collecting fossils or writing poetry. And when children encounter something difficult at school - such as mathematics - a natural defence mechanism comes into play. It is much easier to denigrate the topic, and make fun of the students who can handle it, than it is to admit to your own inadequacy.

I have to say that I view the thoughtless denigration of intellect in favor of ‘being practical’ with some alarm. Continued

Sometime, the blogosphere throws up something that’s odd, amusing and profound, all at the same time. That’s certainly the case in this article by Terence Blacker on one of the blogs of British newspaper The Independent (“Ignore the experts: here’s the secret of happiness”).

Here’s part of what he writes:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer to the question of how to be comfortable in one’s skin, to enjoy moments of fleeting contentment, is not to be found on a campus or even in the pages of the Journal of Happiness Studies but in the world of ordinary, everyday experience. When a former bra-fitter in Colchester said this week, “It’s best not to dwell on the past”, she was on the right track.

     The past for Eve Graham included being the lead singer of a group called the New Seekers, whose song “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” sold 12 million records. At one point during the 1970s, Eve and her band had five singles in the American charts. The work dried up and so, because of a legal dispute, did the royalties. Eventually, she ended up in the lingerie department of Debenhams. “I don’t earn a penny when a New Seekers record sells, and that can be irritating, but you can’t let it rule your life,” she says now.

Continued