Suburbia and its culturally draining impact
As I was standing in line at the grocery store, a friend I was with started wondering aloud why people would care so much about the endless celebrity drama portrayed on tabloid covers. The gossip industry is a highly competitive and profitable one. Publishers are often willing to pay a photographer tens or even hundreds of thousands to get that one most-desired shot. After giving this some thought, I believe the popularity of tabloids, among many other cultural phenomena, are indirectly connected to the influx of suburban sprawl the United States has seen in recent decades.
Effects of physical community arrangement
Before suburbs became popular with Americans, the three main components of society - residential, commercial, and industrial sectors (thanks for engraining those in my head, SimCity) - were very close together. Sometimes, one could find all three sectors in the same building. But, as societies continued to grow, the urban areas became overcrowded and busy, and as a result, people developed a desire for a blend between rural countryside lifestyles while still maintaining easy access to cities.
The predecessor to today's suburbs were very much literal cabins in the woods, according to architecture author and novelist James Kunstler in his TED talk in 2004. Once these lone homes became popular in the 1950s, vast tracts of them were constructed and created the types of suburbs many of us live in today. While the original idea of a suburb was to live away from the city, while still close enough to it to commute, commercial and industrial sectors began to move into the suburbs to accommodate the rising number of suburban-dwellers. Demand for commercial and especially industrial sectors in urban environments fell dramatically once significant portions of a city's population moved away from the city's center, and the three main societal sectors became segregated.
Suburbs have now furthered the need to commute between locations. Before suburbs, people were naturally brought together in public spaces. When a city's population is able to live, work and play in close quarters, the need to commute is reduced and can even be eliminated. Suburb-dwellers, though, must travel anywhere from ten to thirty minutes to go anywhere significant beside their homes. A tremendous issue of isolation exists for people living in suburbs.
A vow to never be alone.
When I get home, my roommates are typically talking about such varied topics as ultimate fighting, computer programming, and escapades I can't particularly disclose in public.
This is something I spent the first 18 years of my life without.
I'm about to graduate from Northern Arizona University. My parents and American society in general told me that I needed a degree to get a good job. That's probably true, but what I've gained the most from this college experience is not an education. It's social conditioning.
Social nuances between my domestic upbringing, such as sharing a bedroom with another person, community bathrooms, and having to cook for myself, seemed a bit daunting when I first entered the undergraduate scene. Since then, like most, I've come to like these facts of living, and I recognize that they actually have helped me develop into a better person.
Today marks the start of Spring Break. Normally I would be with my family, but this year, I've had to dedicate the first half of the week-off to various production and broadcast engineering projects. My roommates have left, my girlfriend has left, and my good friends have left. Campus is virtually empty, and I'm basically alone.
What I've discovered is that cooking for one is boring. When I'm done with a long but good day of work, I don't have anyone to talk to about it when I get home. Likewise, no one is around to tell me the stories of their day. This is utterly, and completely, boring.
I don't know how I lived like this before. My typical routine before college would be to go to school, go to work, then go home and dabble online for the rest of each evening - maybe chat online with a couple of friends. What was I doing with my social life back then? Obviously, not enough.
foreveralone.jpg, courtesy of the Internet.
For the remainder of my life, be it through friends, roommates, or a wife, I genuinely hope to never be alone.
Kurt Vonnegut once said, "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." I just want to make sure my farting around is around other people.
Preservation of culture is key for lower crime
Preface: This was written for The Lumberjack newspaper and NorthernArizonaNews.com as a staff editorial. As such, it's written in such a way that it represents the opinion of the paper and not me as an individual. The included image was not published as part of this editorial.
Technological flotsam.
Never have our cultures been subjected to as many influences as they are today. Public schools have something to do with who people are, but they aren't everything. Families and friends play a fairly significant role, but not for everyone. The big cultural wave-maker for society has crept up on everyone, and its doing more harm than good.
In the '60s and '70s, over-the-air television began to take prevalence in middle-class American homes. In the '80s, television broadened its reach to areas outside of broadcast range with community access TV, now cable. In the '90s, the Internet was introduced, and speeds went from bauds to megabits. And, in the last decade, both TV and the Internet have started to merge together and find their way to our smartphones and tablets.
The last 50 years have seen an enormous spike in mass media consumption.
What else has seen an enormous spike in that time? Incarceration. In the late 1970s, 0.1 percent of the American population was incarcerated. Recently, over 0.5 percent was thrown behind bars, according to Bureau of Justice statistics.
Something had to have changed to cause this rise. The correlation between culture and crime seems to be significant, and mass media certainly affects culture.
Floods of information have been pouring through the Internet lately, and people with this new-found means of communication have caused traditional media outlets to rethink their programming to go with what's most popular and not necessarily what's most important.
Take a good look at the CNN homepage. Earlier this week, headline topics included temper-tantrum survival, iPad prices (still?), and questioning whether or not tattoos should be taboo in the workplace.
This begs the question: How much of this "news" and other information is really relevant to our everyday lives? And how much of this irrelevancy can our cultures handle?
The average American watches at least 4 hours of television per day, according to A.C. Nielsen Co. Factoring in 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours at work, and time spent online, how much time does the average American actually have to live?
The Lumberjack is certainly a form of mass media, and you, our readers, are beloved. Mass media isn't always inherently bad, but remember to take breaths while swimming in this ocean of info we all seem to be drowning in. Big, deep breaths.
America is known world-wide for being the country that has the highest rate of imprisonment. It's even gotten to the point where the government is outsourcing prison management to private companies because it can't handle the burden of nearly 2.5 million prisoners nationwide (as of 2006).
Many have been asking the question of why the incarceration rate has been climbing so rapidly, with quality of education an often cited reason for high crime rates. However, high knowledge doesn't equal high character, despite statistical improvements in education.
Student to teacher ratios have fallen from 17.4 students per teacher in the late '80s to 15.3 students per teacher, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council.
The ALEC also shows that there has been an increase in per-pupil expenditures over the last 30 years: $4,924 in '81-'82 to $9,389 in '06-'07. (Note that these are national figures and don't immediately reflect Arizona's educational budget cuts.)
Higher quality education leads to higher crime rates? Insane.
It really all comes down to deciding what information, be it from school or a screen, is important to us as individuals. Should children grow up with The Wiggles, then Miley Cyrus, then Pregnant 16-Year-Olds, then Glenn Beck? Or should their parents and family be their source of model behavior?
When one allows their reality to be crammed with information, stretched and tugged with opinions, then left hung out to dry momentarily only to be thrown back into the mix, their culture, and sometimes individuality, get buried.
And when one loses their culture and identity, their virtues and moral code can degrade along with them.
It hasn't been proven that overconsumption of media increases crime rates. But if more individuals improve their self-identity, their culture and therefore their virtues by moderating intake of media, it would lead to a generally happier population, one that doesn't have as many criminal compulsions.
Let's try to spend less time clouding our minds with barrages of information and refocus our on individuality, culture, and community. Return to local reality and teach culture and mutual respect over punishment, fear and media-encouraged isolation, for the sake of our societal sanity.
Pro-tip: If you want some real news from CNN, click on "International Edition" in the upper left. Or check out Al Jazeera English.