Power

In the movie Freaks and Geeks, we all observed the power struggles at play between the different characters and conflicting groups. Power struggles or structures aren't just apparent in shows like Freaks and Geeks or movies like Mean Girls. They exist everywhere, through all our lives.

I want to mention a very interesting exercise we did in my directing class. My teacher, Ms. Gecker, placed five chairs onstage: four red ones and a black one. She then asked us to arrange the chairs in ways that would clearly give one chair power over the others. The resulting tableaus were very interesting. Many people tipped the "subservient" chairs forwards. We all immediately associated this position of the chairs with the way people used to kneel to emperors, kings, queens, etc. I thought it was very interesting that we were all able to see the chairs as people. The way the chairs were placed gave them connotations of body language. Some other people merely changed the line-up of the chairs, placing one apart from the others, with the remaining chairs "facing" towards them. It was very clear that the chair that stood apart was in power.

In our lives, we often have structures that reflect power, and we don't question them. In school, the teacher's desk is always bigger than the student desks, and it stands at the front of the room, with all the student desks facing towards it. In a courtroom, everyone faces towards the judge's table. Upon entering an office building, one usually encounters a receptionist's very prominent desk. At a restaurant, the host or hostess has a special stand near which everyone waits to be seated. Most of our tables are rectangular, and the most important figure in attendance sits at the head. We have these physical set-ups that clearly reflect power and control. What would happen if a student sat at the teacher's desk or if someone climbed over the receptionist's desk in order to speak to the person behind it?

Another thing I want to mention about the chair exercise is that people frequently put the black chair in power over the red chairs. It's interesting to note that what made this chair different also gave it power. In the show Freaks and Geeks, the ruthless Alan has so much power over Sam and the other "geeks." He's different than them, but he's also different from the other students. During the dodgeball game, another kid referred to him as a psycho. I'm interested in how Alan became that way. Did they call him a psycho, and in response, did he become what they already thought he was? Or if not, what factors about his environment turned him into the person he is?

When I was a kid, my parents would always tell me that the mean and nasty kids I encountered on the playground were just dealing with problems of their own. And in a sense, I can see why that might be true. I knew a girl who would verbally attack me on a regular basis. Finally, I found out that her father abused her. We don't always know the circumstances that make people the way they are. But I'm also frustrated by the attitude that my parents had. They wanted me to ignore those other kids on the playground, and later in life, the kids at school who also made fun of me. And while I recognize that they were probably just trying to take control over something, anything in their lives, I didn't understand why it had to be me. Why are we so fixated on power that we have to know we're superior to other people? Why do we have to control others? Why do we need power? What is so wrong with just letting everyone be?

Growing Up Online

I read a very interesting book a couple years ago: God's Debris. The book was completely fascinating, and I'll link to it at the bottom of this page. It wasn't so much a book as a thought experiment. The author, Scott Adams, gives us two characters: a deliverer of packages, and the receiver of a package: an old man who knows everything. The man who knows everything sucks the other one into an extensive conversation about life, the universe, God, etc., in a modern Socratic dialogue of sorts. He questions the delivery man incessantly - probing, thought-provoking questions about probability, free will, and God's omnipotence. In the process, he explains the universe to the package delivery man. The old man reasons that the only challenge to an omnipotent God would be to see if he could destroy himself, assuming that his omnipotence would disappear along with his destruction. And according to this old man, God did exactly that, in the Big Bang, and matter and probability (which governs our universe) were formed out of the debris. He says that our purpose in life is to put God back together, or rather, on some larger level, every single cell in our bodies is ordering us to put God back together, because every single molecule in the universe is part of God, and he's willing it to happen. How is this connected to the Internet? Well, the old man explains that the Internet is how we're coming together as one again. The Internet contains most of the knowledge in the world, and as our technological capabilities grow, so do the contents of the Internet. In the words of the old man, "Society's intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society." Now, I'm not trying to convert anyone here. I don't necessarily agree with everything the old man says, though I'm not intelligent enough to fault his logic (Scott Adams actually challenges his readers to find the flaws in the old man's arguments). But this idea that the Internet is making us collectively more knowledgeable interests me.

My parents grew up without the Internet, and for information, they turned to encyclopedias and non-fiction books. Yet I have my own computer and constant access to this worldwide knowledge database. I think that the Internet has played a huge role in shaping my mind. I have a wide range of interests, and the Internet only serves them. If I'm writing a story, and I need to do some research, the Internet is always at my disposal. It has made gaining knowledge easier for me.

But, of course, this instant gratification has made me a more impatient person. It's harder for me to read textbooks, because I always feel like I could learn more quickly online. Knowledge also isn't exactly a novelty to me anymore. My dad prizes his encyclopedia collection, which is actually kind of beautiful. He has a full set of Encyclopedia Brittanicas, bound with deep red leather and gilded with gold writing. It was his bar mitzvah present from his parents. For my bat mitzvah, my parents gave me a computer. It's much less personal, and a lot less beautiful, and in a few years, it will be obsolete. It will stop working eventually, or it will slow down and I'll switch to a new model. But my dad's books will live on, even if they are a little bit outdated.

And even though the Internet makes gaining knowledge easier, it is also redefining how we connect to other people. I think it's partially taking the genuineness out of life. It's so easy to create a facade online, to make yourself out to be another person. And video chat has made it so much easier to stay at home, instead of actually going to meet your friends. I have often imagined a bleak future, in which we become affixed to our screens, so much so that "having someone over" means transmitting an image of the rooms of your house to screens that cover the walls of theirs, and then talking through video chat and enjoying coffee made by standardized machines, or something along those lines. But that's a very negative outlook. I prefer to see the Internet as enabling communication. It's not like I, personally, have sacrificed actual relationships with my friends. We still literally enjoy each other's presence. But mediums like Facebook or AIM have made communication easier. Since mostly everyone I know has a Facebook account, it's much easier to talk over group message than it is to conference call or hang out with people who live far away. I have many friends who live in Colorado, and Facebook has kept me in contact with them.

I'm not going to deny that I'm a different person over Facebook. I'm bolder, and I say things that I wouldn't necessarily say in public. I've had several fights with friends over Facebook, just because I can go into a long rant without anyone to interrupt me.

My opinion on technology is that it has the capability to enrich our society with knowledge, but also the ability to distort who we are and make us more impatient, irritable, and disconnected from humanity. Right now, it can pretty much go either way. Technology can either pull us apart or bring us together, and how we react to it will determine which way it goes.


God's Debris:
http://nowscape.com/godsdebris.pdf

About Me

Who am I? This question is always so hard to answer. If the question was "what am I?" I'd have this down. I'm a living, breathing organism. A human, of the female variety. When it comes down to who I am, though, I'm usually stumped. I guess the best answer is that I'm still figuring out who I am. I'm still searching for my place within the world.

But, of course, I can provide some facts about my interests and activities. I'm not sure that they define who I am, but they do determine who I spend time with, which I suppose shapes my identity in turn. I love theater. I audition as much as possible, and many of my friends are also involved in theater. I also enjoy writing. I have written several plays, one of which was performed as part of the 2008 one acts. I also write poetry and the occasional short story. Currently, I compete on the Speech and Drama team. I've competed in the categories of Humorous Interpretation and Impromptu Speaking. But the thing is, I don't really think that my activities determine who I am. I think that I choose my activities because of who I am. I choose theater because I love the people, I love performing, and I love affecting the audience. I choose Speech and Drama, again, because of the people, and also because I'm very competitive. And I write because writing helps me understand the world better and helps me express myself. But why am I this way? What makes me a performer, and introverted, and competitive? I think that's a part of why I want to learn about sociology: to better understand myself.

The biggest influences in my life are probably my parents. They've put pressure on me since I was a kid. They want me to succeed, both as a professional one day and also as a person. They were also raised very differently than any of my friends' parents. My mother is South African, and my dad is Australian. My father was raised as an Orthodox Jew, and my mother grew up with apartheid. My father came to America to get his master's degree in architecture, and my mother came to find opportunities, to escape apartheid, and to be closer to her family, which moved years before her. Their cultures are very different than American culture. Their parents were very strict, and they both grew up surrounded by religion. Both attended Jewish schools until college. They have a very different perspective of what hard work is, because they were held to very high standards as teenagers. They have tried to raise me by their standards. Sometimes I hate it, and sometimes I'm grateful. I hate that they want religion to be such a major part of my life, because I feel like I've never had a choice about being Jewish. I was never given a chance to determine my own beliefs. Yet I also think they've made me a better person and taught me the value of hard work and compassion.

My primary goal in life is to leave a mark. I want to be a positive presence in the lives of others, through my writing, performance, and kindness. I've been so affected by books I've read or plays and movies that I've seen, and I want to affect other people. I also want to be a good person and overcome the negative impulses that I think everyone has: impulses to hurt other people emotionally, for example. I also want to become a person conscious of the world around me. I don't want to be oblivious. I want to engage.