A Technological Rant (A Reflection on American Studies Day)

Last week at American Studies Day, I, as well as my peers Gavin Taves, Annie Soler,and Parker Nixon, led a student panel on the topic of Technology. We struggled a lot during our limited preparation time with how we could present the widespread topic in only a 40-minute time slot, and ultimately we ended up deciding to present our students with a simple question. Since this is the way most of our time in American Studies is structured (and we all know we can talk for hours on a single prompt), we figured it would spark a good discussion and we would end up learning as much from our students' opinions as they did from our thrown-together presentation. Thankfully, it worked. The question that we presented them with was this:

At what point, if any, does technology stop being beneficial to society and start limiting us?

While at first, it seemed a hard question to answer, we ended up getting some really great opinions and new outlooks from students in our discussion. Ultimately, the conclusion that we came to as a group was that in the space of monetarily-driven America, technology has been too focused on moving forward and creating new, bigger, better products, rather than focusing on covering the tracks of detriment that technology leaves behind socially, and setting limits on technological advances.

One particular example that we discussed was communication via technology. While it may seem like a great idea to be able to keep in touch with friends and family 24/7 through devices like cell phones and the internet, it seems to have been forgotten that distance makes the heart grow fonder. An excess of technology in communications has superconnected Americans, often to the point of withdrawal. In a world where we're constantly bombarded with overwhelming amounts of technology, it's not difficult to sometimes want to retract back into the ways of the past. Connecting this back to my point of social communications, I believe that the accessibility of conversation has made Americans more socially withdrawn. Conversations that can exist at any time often lose their meaning as true conversation. This, in turn, limits the true social potential of Americans using technology to communicate.

I can see I've already gotten a little bit off-topic, but I'd like to take another tangent. Another topic that we covered in our discussion on AS Day was the idea of over-reliance on technology. This can be seen pretty clearly and pretty constantly, especially in the time and place we exist. Even just yesterday in class, the overwhelming ecstasy that emerged in class after we were told that we would not have to hand-write our final essays illustrates this reliance quite well. We all know how to hand-write an essay; we didn't spend so much time learning penmanship and cursive in elementary school for nothing. While typing surely provides an advantage, it's just an interesting thing to think about. Should it really make that big of a difference? Shouldn't the content of the essay be more important than the means by which it was composed? Could typing an essay be limiting to our writing skills in any way? Don't get me wrong; I'm as happy as the next student about the nature of our final exam. I'm not sure what I'm trying to prove or solve at this point, but it's just something that's been on my mind.

Overall, American Studies Day, and especially my own student panel, was a great learning experience for me. It's sometimes difficult to relate class topics to the real world, but the day itself was an amazing look at the ways in which the topics we cover in American Studies can be applied to every day life. The way that all the topics connected was incredible, and when I was presenting I really felt like I was a part of something worthwhile and applicable IRL. Good feeling.

Separated, Not Segregated

Reading yesterday in class about the possible amendments to education of ethnic studies in Arizona, I was reminded of a documentary that I recently heard about on PBS. Based on an entirely African American school in Bordentown, NJ, "A Place Out of Time: The Bordentown School" reminded me a lot of the experimental learning and ethnic studies that are being considered to take place in the state of Arizona. However, rather than eliminating ethnic studies entirely from the curriculum, and teaching students of all ethnicities that they are the same, the Bordentown School took drastic steps in the opposite direction.

The Bordentown School existed from 1886 to 1955, and provided a place for people of color to learn separate from the segregation and racism of normal schools. Just to clarify: a separate school was created for black students, to avoid segregation. So really, the school was the complete polar opposite of what the Arizona school administrations are proposing. Rather than trying to get rid of segregation in schools by simply not teaching it, the Bordentown School purposely separated African American students from white ones so that they could study their own ethnic backgrounds without the influence and awkwardness of whites in class. It was structured, voluntary segregation, and it actually worked pretty well.

However, the Bordentown School, which was technically referred to as The Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, was also institutionally racist in that its purpose laid in training African American students in low working-class occupations. When the school attempted to add more of a college preparatory curriculum, they were met with much resistance.

Referred to in a New York Times review as a "somewhat flawed experiment, " the Bordentown School certainly was a change from traditional racism, but it wasn't quite the ideal. Whether America will ever truly reach that ideal state of nonexistent racism is unknown and perhaps impossible. The cycle of racism in the United States reminds me a lot of a term that Mr. O'Connor used in class today: a cycle with accumulation. While racism in the United States will never truly return to the stages of enslavement, we do continue to cycle our beliefs about diversity and race. While the Bordentown School was a step away from racism in many ways, it also went to show that racism is an integral part of America's culture.

ADD/ADHD: Over and Under-diagnosed (JT#3)

After conducting my interview with psychiatrist Jonathan Bloomberg today, I was left pretty pleased with the entire thing. I feel as though it will help my Junior Theme a lot, considering he seems to share many similar views as I. One thing that I found shocking about his statements, however, was that he believes ADD in the United States to be vastly under-diagnosed. In a nation, and even a school where I can clearly see the over-diagnosis to be extreme, it's hard to believe that there's many people out there who don't have access to the same ADD medications that students at New Trier do.

From a personal standpoint, I know that about 50% of all of my friends are currently on medication for ADD, whether it be Adderall, Ritalin or Concerta. For a long time, I thought that this number was ridiculous; that they were just exaggerating attention-deficit and hyperactivity symptoms to receive extended time on tests and sympathy from teachers. While many people think this way, and this may seem to be an alarmingly large number of diagnosed and medicated children (it certainly was for me), it's actually quite the norm in the United States. While it's estimated that only 3-5% of the population have ADD or ADHD, the growing amount of diagnoses in recent years is remarkable (Koch). As of 2006, 4.5 million children aged 5-17 have been diagnosed with ADHD. Among these diagnoses, the main prevalence seems to be among upper class, insured, white, English-speaking boys (CDC). From these statistics, the most logical explanation for the ADD diagnosis issue seems to be a misunderstanding of the disease itself.

Contrary to the belief of many, ADD is a serious disorder that does, in fact, exist. The problem lies not within the creation of an imaginary disease to get attention or special help; rather, it lies within the exploitation of the all-encompassing symptoms of ADD/ADHD. The three main symptoms of ADD/ADHD are hyperactivity, impulsiveness and inattention (Breggin). Obviously, these three behaviors can be applied, to whatever degree, to any child with half a creative mind. Like many other psycho-pathologies, ADD doesn't have symptoms that can be measured quantitatively. And this is what makes it so easy to over-diagnose. Parents in high-income brackets who want their children to excel in accelerated high schools (NEWTRIER WHAT!?) are more likely to look for easy outs like mental illness than parents who don't have the money or resources to be insured or to seek out professional help.

And this brings me back to the point that Dr. Bloomberg brought up in our interview. ADD and ADHD certainly are real disorders, and they have a huge impact on a child's life. However, the lack of child psychiatrists in the United States (there are now only about 6,000, including Dr. Bloomberg), combined with ADD's stigma of being a nonexistent disorder, combined with the accessibility of drugs, makes it vastly misunderstood and misdiagnosed.

Day of Silence

Today was the Day of Silence at school and, while I strongly believe in the cause and I tried to commit to the event as much as possible, I found myself surprised at the amount of people not participating at all and I ended up gaining a new perspective on what I personally think the day should be about.

I started out the day with the intention of remaining silent for its entirety, but I soon found this to be a redundant and pointless aspect of the Day of Silence. I completely respect those who were able to go through the whole day without talking, and maybe this is all just an excuse for my lack of the ability to shut up, but I found myself feeling very uncomfortable and confused during the time I spent in silence. Maybe this is the point of the day: to experience the uncomfort, confusion and anger that in-the-closet or openly GLBTQ students feel every day, but personally I felt that being open with my opinions would have made a much stronger impact on those around me.

When I walked through the halls at school wearing all black and refraining from speech, I still heard people making fun of those who were choosing to participate, yelling out things like "Day of Silence is so gay!" and the like, for the sake of irony. And there was nothing I could really do about it. People at my lunch table used the word 'fag' on purpose, just to see if they could provoke me to speak. Ultimately, I ended up giving up on remaining silent just because I felt like it was not only an unrealistic representation of the suffering GLBTQ students face, but it also put me at a disadvantage in defending the cause I was supposed to be taking pride in.

Like I said, maybe my frustration with my inability to speak is exactly what the day is supposed to be about- the frustration that students feel every day when they're forced into the socially-molded niches of straight boys and straight girls. At the same time, I don't think that silencing the students in school who want to speak out against abuse is the right way to go about making a change. If we want to encourage more students to end their silence, don't we want to encourage speech?

I understand the gesture of giving up one's own ability to speak to encourage another to exercise theirs, but it all just seemed too forced to me. While I will continue to support the Day of Silence and I'll continue to try every year to keep myself quiet for a day, (it hasn't worked in the last three...) I really wish that there was something more I could do- something more vocal and more active. Something that wouldn't be so difficult for the whole school to participate in, but would still ellicit a positive response. Something that would make GLBTQ students see the amount of support that they have from the New Trier community, without having to walk through the halls and hear the voices of hundreds of students on a day when supporters are supposed to remain silent.



P.S. I don't really know how this relates to anything that we've talked about in class... Umm, Perilous Times? Freedom of Speech y'all.

The Pathetic Beginning of a Mental Outline (JT#2)

...So this paper is due in roughly two weeks, right?

Having had the past three weeks in the library to research, luckily I'm feeling pretty confident in my topic. Since it's changed a little bit since the last post I made, I'll give the blogosphere a refresher on what I'm writing about.

Q. Why does America believe in the use of psychoactive drugs in molding a nation of more "productive" citizens?

A. The American "quick-fix" mentality has become our identity, and psychoactive drugs are the quickest and most widely available "fix" for lapses in mental health that we know of.

Maybe that's not worded too well... But hopefully it makes sense. I still don't really know what we're supposed to be using the blog for in the writing process, but I'm just going to use it to organize my thoughts. So here's my pathetic beginning of a mental outline; don't judge.

I've been focusing most of my research in the past couple of weeks on antidepressants, although I'm going to talk about ADD/ADHD stimulant drugs as well. The fact that I'm still in the midst of reading Prozac Nation is probably what's causing me to focus in on this part of my essay. I know we're supposed to be working with tons of different sources and materials and fitting them together, but I'm sure my essay will still come together just fine. Either way, I think I've done a pretty good job of getting together multiple contasting sources for each of my two current desired topics. Have a look!

ANTIDEPRESSANTS:

-Prozac Nation -Elizabeth Wurtzel

-Listening to Prozac -Peter D. Kramer

-"Exit Joe Camel. Enter Joe Prozac." -Arianna Huffington

ADD/ADHD STIMULANTS:

-"The Ritalin Epidemic" -Vincent H. Miller

-"The Evolution of Play" (NPR story)

So this post ended up being a lot more pointless than I thought it would be... I'll definitely make some human progress by the time I try to post anything else up here and call it a blog. Fourth quarter stressin', that's all. Goodnight!

American Ideals in Mental Health (JT#1)

So I think that I finally know what question I want to cover for my (ahhh!) Junior Theme. While it's taken me a long time and a lot of confusion, I think I've got it at last.

Why, as a nation, do we believe that prescription drugs can alleviate our mental health problems?

Of course, I haven't run this question by Doc O'C or Mr. Bolos, and I'll probably end up changing it six more times before coming to a final final conclusion, but I like it! And I definitely feel like it's based on a true American stigma. The "American Dream" defines not only American ideals for things like what social class you shoul belong to, what kind of car you should drive, when you should marry, how many children you should have, and what kind of occupations are considered "success," but it also defines another aspect of the ideal American's life: their mental health.

After beginning to read Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, I find it clear that through Wurtzel's eyes, prescription antidepressants do much more to a person's life than just solve depression-related problems. In fact, they create just as many problems as they solve. With each drug she's placed on, Elizabeth seems to need another drug to counteract its negative side effects.

"I take two little green and white Prozac capsules when I leave his office, and dutifully resume taking a twice-daily dose of lithium, also downing twenty milligrams of Inderal each day- a beta-blocker normally used to lower blood pressure- because I need it to counteract the hand shaking and the other tremorous side effects of lithium. Taking drugs breeds more drugs" (19).

All of this, to me, begged the question why do we think that drugs will solve all of our problems? While I have no idea what the answer to this question is, I look forward to pursuing it in my Junior Theme. It's a problem that's really prevalent in America, and while I try really hard to take as few medicines as possible, it's easy to see the over-use around me. Especially when dealing with something as fragile as the human brain and its emotions, it's scary to think that over-prescription and over-use are so common.

Selling an Addiction

I recently read a pretty fantastic blog post by Maeli about possibly false advertising stemming from color scheme selection on cigarette boxes, and while at the time I found the idea a little bit ridiculous, today I came across this article about cigarette boxes and ads aimed (through color scheme and design) towards teenage girls. Thankfully the ads were pulled in 2008, but the long-lasting effects of specified advertising remain.

Called "Camel No. 9" (and meant to resemble Chanel No. 9 perfume), the cigarettes were placed in chic black boxes with pink trim, and marketed in magazines like Glamour and US Weekly. The company offered promotional gifts like berry lip balm and cell phone jewelry with cigarette purchases. Of course girls were going to be inclined to buy cigarettes that were advertised as "light & luscious" and offered them gifts as innocent as jewelry and lip balm.

The article not only reminded me of many of the "6 Weapons of Influence," but it also made me think of the discussions we had earlier in the year about advertising to children. Teenage girls may very well be just as easily influenced as young children, and when it comes to smoking cigarettes, our minds are easily swayed by those of our peers. Ads like these don't help at all in supressing cigarette addictions, and it's estimated that under the influence of these advertisements, 174,000 underage girls began smoking.

When we talked about immoral advertisements earlier in the year, I wrote a blog about the vulnerability of children. Looking back on that now, and noting how characters in children's ads seemed to go through a "drug-like withdrawal" when not supplied with their favorite products. I remember being absolutely appalled about that, and reading drug advertisements aimed at minors seems even worse. These corporations really are selling an addiction (at an illegal age too), and all they care about is the profit.