OK, so thoughts on what happens after a big disaster. From all the footage I’ve seen, all the books I’ve read, and the actual events that have happened in my lifetime, I have come to a conclusion on what happens after a major tragedy. What happens is as follows:

1. People try to downplay the event as the event happens. For example, if you listen to many of the audio recordings of people on the phone or on the radio as the event is happening, they sound calm, almost serene. There is rarely any shouting, screaming, or pandemonium. That comes
2. afterwards, as soon as the disaster is over. Often, unnecessary precautions are taken, such as stuffing one's shirt with as much money as possible, or trying to stuff all personal belongings into a trunk.
3. An attempt to rebuild follows, which almost always fails due to the lack of organization. This often happens in the hours following the disaster.
4. Anarchy follows, usually with those who should be enforcing the law extenuating the confusion. In the Frisco Fire, that would have been the police and the impromptu militia looting stores and shooting innocent people.
5. Eventually, a leader figure will emerge (the president, mayor, head of the police force, ruthless dictator, etc.) and begin to sort methodically through the confusion. This is around the time that foreign aid arrives, and slowly but surely the city and inhabitants will rebuild.

Oddly, major disasters seem to happen when people are the most confident that they either won't happen, or that they will have little or no effect on the people. Immediately after the SF Earthquake and fire, SF inhabitants were very cautious about fires. Buildings were build above and beyond the specs for earthquake-proof buildings. I distinctly remember both of my parents attaching all large pieces of furniture (e.g. bookcases, headboards, tall cabinets) to the walls with screws. The idea was that should we experience an earthquake, we wouldn't be crushed by falling bookshelves or cabinets. Rooms were carefully organized so that no one could stand under the chandelier. And we had a annually updated "emergency plan" should something happen.

Today I seriously doubt many people in the bay area have a similar plan, although most are convinced that should there be an earthquake, they will be just fine. The worst always happens to those who least expect it.

Thoughts on a Paper, Episode V

Hey, Everybody!

Sorry I've been so far behind on my posts, but the week before finals has been brutal. I'm totally finished with my inquiry contract paper, all I have left is to fix something in the bibliography. I think it turned out pretty well, especially given the amount of time I had to spend on it. It's a full seven pages long, and one of the densest things I've ever written. You know those really boring research papers that no one really wants to read? It's one of those. Wahoo.

Something interesting that was pointed out to me but I didn't have the sources to put it into the paper:

1980. The majority of televisions in the US have about four channels.
2008. The majority have on the scale of seventy. If you have cable or satellite you might have a few hundred.

Kinda scary, huh? Originally, when the World Wide Web first spawned off of the ARPAnet, there were a couple hundred websites. People could buy pamphlets of IP addresses (the behind-the-scenes numbers that URLs translate into. EG, Google.com = 209.85.171.100). URLs, or the text you put into the address bar of Safari or Firefox (please, not Internet Explorer), were only made popular when the number of websites got so big that it was impossible to memorize IP addresses the way you memorize phone numbers.

Today there are significantly more websites on the World Wide Web than there are human beings on earth. Makes this blog seem kind of insignificant, huh?

Thoughts on a Paper, Episode IV

More and More Sources!

Greetings, user! I come to you today with a plethora, no, a glut of exciting and stimulating information to feed your gray matter!

…Not really. But I do have a lot of interesting stuff.

First of all, in this article, the author mentioned a reoccurring motif that I've found. Goldfish's attention span. Apparently it is 10 seconds long. Not so exciting. But what is exciting is that American children (12 and under) see more than 40,000 TV commercials per year! That's crazy, man! Ten years ago advertising agencies spent about 6 billion dollars advertising to children. Today they spend over twice that. That's a lotta ads. This article was the first to suggest major changes to solve this problem. It mentioned how a lot of european countries have created legislature about advertising to children. "Greece bans toy advertisements on TV between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m.; Sweden bans all TV advertising aimed at children under 12; and Denmark, Finland, and Norway don’t allow sponsorship of any children’s programs. Canada’s Broadcasting Code, which severely restricts children’s advertising, bans ads implying that a product will make a child happier or more popular." How awesome is that? I think that the US should try this out. Cooper raised an interesting point in this article as well. Adults understand what a commercial is: a sales pitch. Children don't. The APA (American Psychological Association) reports that "children under the age of 8 can't grasp the notion that commercials have a purpose other than entertainment, and they completely believe what they see and hear."

Dude? Are you still paying attention to me? This article gives a really good definition of "Attention Span", and raises the point that perhaps TV and the web aren't the cause of our inattentiveness, but rather, the result. He points out that TVs and movies use multiple angles because we'd get bored if they didn't.

Hey… I think I've heard that somewhere before. Where...?

Ah, here. This book , which has been sitting on my shelf for the past two years not only conveniently solves my lack of a non--electronic source, but also gives some interesting history to modern cinema editing. On page 121, it talks about how…

Wait. First you need to know a little something about editing.

Editing 101

Wide shot: feet to above head

Medium Shot: waist to top of head

Close up: Collar bone to forehead

Ok. So when editing first became a profession and stopped being a chore, directors (and studios, by proxy) had very little confidence in their audience. They believed that if the film cut from a wide shot to a close up, audiences would get confused. They wouldn't spatially understand what just happened. Take, for instance, this hypothetical scene pitch.

Shot 1: Show a helicopter shot of downtown Chicago
Shot 2: Show the exterior of a busy office high rise
Shot 3: Show the busy lobby
Shot 4: We see people entering the elevator
Shot 5: Close up of a woman wearing a powersuit, checking her watch.

OK? Now take out shots 2-4. Doesn't quite make so much sense, does it? But this is changing. Movies now switch from shot 1 to shot 3, or shot 2 to shot 5. The last movie I saw in theaters (HSM3), began with an extreme close up (chin to eyebrows), and ended the scene with an extremely wide shot (an entire set or location) of the gym.

If you were to watch a film that didn't cut from angle to angle much, you'd get bored. But would you get bored if you watched a film without the mandatory explosions or car chase sequences?

Lastly, a final fact.

"In a study of 2,600 children ages 1 to 3, researchers found that the more television the little people watch the more likely they are to suffer from attention-span deficit by the age of 7."

Thoughts on a Paper, Episode III

Hello, Slaves to the Internet!

First of all, a couple of house cleaning things. One, I apologize for not posting the last couple of days. I've been really busy. Hopefully I'll have less homework this week. Secondly, I realize now (a week too late) that I neglected to provide a link in Episode I. Here's the link:

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

OK. Now to business.

I've spent the last two and a half hours doing research for this paper. I'll give you a quick run-down of the sources and what I've learned.

First of all, the article that rox my sox. Is Google Making Us Stupid, by Nicholas Carr. Carr wrote this article for The Atlantic when he realized that his attention span-- especially when he's reading a long book or poem-- is totally shot. He blames it on the Internet. Carr raises some interesting questions, ones that I hope to answer over the next... good gosh, two months!

• Do hyperlinks drive us to other sites, keeping us from finishing the current thought?
• Do students go online to avoid having to "read in the traditional sense" for research projects? (I know I do!)
• Maryanne Wolf says "We are how we read". If we are what we eat, have we become consumers of knowledge? Is information now a commodity?
• When Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter because he was going blind his writing changed. His writing style changed dramatically, and he stated that "our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts". Do we think in txt mssge and iChat speak?
• Lastly, Carr points out that data mining companies like Google and Yahoo! benefit from our jumping from site to site (it's how they make money. The longer we read one article, the more money they loose). Does that mean that our decrease in attention span is intentional?

In an article called Appetite for Distraction, Angelica Candelaria pointed out that the change in the way we think is reflected in modern cinema (something I'm very interested in). Movies no longer have in-depth character development, instead focusing on pretty visual effects and complex action sequences. American Theaters no longer host foreign films, because we don't have the patience to read subtitles.

Candelaria is the first so far to give possible solutions. She mentions that you should decrease your overall time on the internet, and when you are doing research, you should print out lengthy articles and read them off-line (something I'm doing with this project). She also gives some rather odd solutions, such as improving your diet and practice memory games to increase your memory, but she does raise some good points.

Turning into Digital Goldfish, from BBC News Online, doesn't have a whole lot, but it does have an interesting factoid: You spend an average of less than 60 seconds per website when you're browsing. Scary, huh?

Is TV Evil?, by Kevin Drum, is more of a rant than anything else, does have an interesting anecdote. The author's mother was a fourth grade teacher, and she found that when she first started teaching in the 1970s, the average attention span for a 4th grader was about 30 minutes. Any longer and the kids would get distracted. When the article was published, the average attention span had dropped to under 15 minutes.

Lastly, Informing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, the same dude who came up with the concept of Future Schlack, has some really interesting facts in it. Did you know that in America there are...

• 2.6 x 10⁵ billboards
• 11,520 newspapers
• 11,556 periodicals
• 27 x 10⁴ video stores
• 3.62 x 10⁸ TV sets
• 4 x 10⁸ radios
• 4 x 10⁴ books published every year (3 x 10⁵ world-wide)
• 6 x 10¹⁰ pieces of advertising-oriented junk mail sent per day?(just for reference, that's almost ten times the population of Earth!)

Good golly, Miss Molly!

Thoughts on a Paper, Episode II

Welcome back, Faithful Internet fiends!

     > I'm pleased to announce to y'all that I believe that I'm finished with my proposal. Feel free to read it here.

     > So what topic did I choose? I chose to talk about how the media and the ease of access to information is shortening the attention span of youth in America, and decreasing their intelligence.

     > Sound exciting? Oh yeah! I can't wait to start researching.

     > Over and out.

Thoughts on a Paper, Episode I

Hello, Internet!

      > Tonight's assignment is all about my up coming Inquiry Contract paper, and my progress on it for the day. This is episode one, season one of said posts. This Thursday I have to turn in a two page proposal for a topic. So tonight, sit back and relax, as I tell you my thoughts on THE TOPIC TO END ALL TOPICS.

      > So my first thought is my old crutch. Gay Marriage. But common, that's been said and done way too many times. So therefore, I'm going to choose a totally divergent topic. Now, what shall that be...?

      > Aha! I have an idea. So I was reading this fascinating article a while ago about how Google is taking away our ability to concentrate for a long period of time. Go ahead. Click on the link. I'll bet that your attention span has already been decreased long enough to keep you from reading the entire article. Scary, huh?

      > In fact, come to think of it, I was reading an article a while ago (I have no memory of where, what, or when) that was about a study conducted a number of years ago. In 1990, a bunch of kids were asked to sit still and do nothing for as long as they could. If I remember correctly, the 7 year olds could sit still for 7 to 10 minutes, at which point they would become distracted or give up. The same experiment was conducted again in 2000, and the results were rather depressing. Only a few of the 7 year olds were able to make it past two minutes.

      > Why does this happen? Well, I can't say for certain yet, because I haven't actually done any research yet, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with TV, videogames, and the immediate access to just about everything that the average American child has today. How do we fix it? Not a clue. But that's where the controversy comes in.

      > LaMags gave me an interesting article to look at. I haven't looked at it yet, but here's the link to it. Go read it, and I'll read it with you.

      > Ok, read and done. So now I have a choice to make. I have come up with two topics:

• How the media and technology is decreasing the attention span of youth in America, and what can be done to prevent it?
• How America is suffering from "Future Schlock", and what can be done to prevent it?

     > Sound good? With any luck, I'll be able to make a decision by tomorrow. Will I? Find out in Episode II of "THOUGHTS ON A PAPER", tomorrow at six.

Re-Evolution

Good Day, World Wide Web!

Sorry if last night's post was a little too abstract. I'll try to make this post a bit less wishy-washy.

Out of all the stories that I've written about up to this point, this one was the most emotionally affecting to me. I like to believe that people can change, especially for the better, and this piece really affirmed that in my mind.

Misunderstanding is a beast of a problem. Despite the fact that I can talk to someone on the other side of the world for fifty cents a minute, I don't really communicate that much. I've never been to a board meeting. I don't participate in panel discussions. I don't go to conventions, and I'm virtually clueless when it comes to local politics. The purpose of communication is so that I can convey some concept to you, and you will receive it, process it, and comprehend it.

Imagine working in a factory. Your job is to pick up a piece of cardboard as it comes down the conveyor belt (the cardboard being the analogy--vocab word--to the concept that is being communicated), fold it in half, and put it on a different conveyor belt, which carries it to another part of the factory. Simple communication. Receive, process, and reciprocate. Nothing too new.

But when there's a kerfuffle in some point of this process, communication fails. You don't get what I'm talking about. You're missing the point. You're not seeing my side of the problem. You just don't understand. That, my digital followers, is why Misunderstanding is such a beast. You don't understand me.

What happens in C. P. Ellis's life is that he is raised much as I am. No real local communication. Exclusion (His case is exponentially more extreme than mine, however), and eventually, desperation. When Ellis gets involved locally, he begins to communicate. He goes to board meetings. He goes to panel discussions. He makes himself heard, and he listens to other people. He hobnobs.

What he experiences is that the people who don't get around much, the people who are disgusted by shaking his hands, are the very people who are against making the community a better place for low-wage people. Those whose causes are parallel to his are the people that are honored to shake his hand. The people he speaks out against, hates, are some of the people who appreciate him the most. Because he gives his opinion. He isn't so incredibly ingrained in his views that he won't leave room for differences. And this is, in the end, what changes him.

Can we take this solution to a grand scale? Yes... and no. If every single person in America suddenly became as pro-active about co-mingling and being pro-active in bettering the groups they belong to (in this case, Ellis is pro-active for low-income citizens), then I believe that people would be forced to be more open minded. They'd meed people they never would have met. They would encounter viewpoints different from their own. They'd be forced to re-evaluate their own beliefs. Which is good.

The no part is in the practicality of this. First of all, there's no way to get three hundred million people to do this, at least, not all at once. And second, if everyone spoke out, no one would be able to hear each other. Some sort of middle ground would be nice, but I'm too tired to take the mental leap to figure out what that'd be.

Good night.