Beau-Robert Metcalfe

Eng313 We 4:20

5/8/2009

iLove U: An Examination of the Internet and Romance

With the increasingly prevalent influence of the internet on the social lives of human beings, an apparent effect on our interaction can only be expected. The way people use the internet can change their behavior and status, augment their gender and appearance, and even go so far as to impact their identity down to the existential level. Social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook have surpassed nearly any other form of communication among young people. Internet matchmaking services like eHarmony and Match.com have created a socially acceptable avenue for online dating and cyber-romance. The internet might be viewed as the world’s largest market. The exchange of goods, services, ideas and money is operating full force, all hours of every day, acting effectively as the world’s largest market. The information super highway is rapidly and radically changing the way in which humans interact and dictating the evolution of our romance.

One of the earliest forms of online communication was electronic mail. Rather than pay for stationary and postage to send a letter that could take days to get to the recipient, users could simply type what they needed to say, send it to an electronic address that was attached to a name, and have communication in instants. From e-mail spawned instant messaging. Instant messaging acts similar to e-mail, but in a condensed form. Text can be sent back and forth in a single window between one or more users instantly. Soon, social networking sites started popping up. Pioneering sites like Friendster first made the idea of internet profiles as messaging as a form of communication popular. The more widely used Myspace came into the playing field and drew in a large audience of young people. Myspace created an environment where teenagers didn’t need to leave the house to socialize, a convenience when a great deal of them don’t have licenses.

The easy accessibility and instant social gratification offered by Myspace appealed to the electronically-savvy minds of youth ranging from elementary school students, to college graduates. Being able to communicate constantly and instantly online with a catalogue of friends opens a range of networking possibilities and changed the typical way friends are made in social encounters. The question is, though, can authentic friends be made on the web? If we define a friend the way Webster’s dictionary does as, “a person you know well and regard with affection and trust”(Webster’s Online Dictionary), then in order for social networking sites to be effective tools for making friends, they must be able to establish affection and trust.

Both Myspace and Facebook require users to design a profile. Profiles include selected information varying from a physical description, age and interests. The profile is also supposed to feature one or more albums of photographs of yourself and friends. Provided two members have similar interests, this information could make good precedent for contact. Contact usually begins with a “friend request,” a notification is sent to the user that essentially asks whether or not they know or want to become friends with the person sending the request. They are given the option to approve or deny friendship. The process is almost like applying for a job, the “applicant” is represented by the information he or she opted to include in their profile. Like natural selection, those with strong, or in this case, interesting profiles are selected for approval. Because Myspace and Facebook are social networking sites, those with more friends establish more connection and tend to “befriend” more people.

If friendship is built on affection, how do you create a foundation online? One might imagine the process is similar to the way it’s done in real life. The messaging capability of social networks allows you to carry on conversation, which would be the same way affection is established in face-to-face encounters. A Facebook-to-Facebook conversation, though, gives participants extended time periods in which to formulate their ideas and what they’d like to say. This could be advantageous to friendship, but one wonders if this process encourages authenticity. The anonymity offered by the internet gives users the ability to artificialize themselves in a more pleasant frame. Time spent giving thought to how to present oneself gives room to “sell” yourself as an idea. Textual conversations take away the need for split-second reactions, but do most users take this time to consider true feelings, beliefs and ideas, or to present themselves in a more socially desirable light? I imagine you can find both sorts of people on the web, but if this is the case, how do you establish the trust component of the friendship definition? How does one ever know if someone they’ve met online is presenting themselves in an honest fashion, rather than a fabricated one? Perhaps this is where real-life encounters become necessary to human connection.

So if social networking sites are only effective as a precursor to meeting in person (at least in terms of making new friends) does that make social networking the friendship equivalent to online dating sites? If, in order to create a real relationship, two people need to meet in the physical word, are beliefs and ideas downplayed? If you downplay the substance of the mind, the information made available using a Myspace or Facebook profile, a certain importance is placed on the body. Humans may require a physical encounter not only for romantic relationships, but for amicable ones.

Internet dating sites and matchmaking services like eHarmony and Match.com try to take advantage of the anonymity of the internet to give shy people an outlet for meeting potential romantic partners. The very existence of such services calls to attention issues of capitalism, societal concepts of love, and the radical introduction of e-romance. Dating sites turn what used to occur by happenstance into something more defined. Again, the ambiguity the internet allows for affects authenticity and makes identity more flexible than it is in real life. At what point does a relationship with a stranger become a romantic one, and how does the internet act as a catalyst?

One of the favorite pastimes of couples is to recount their first meeting for the benefit of curious friends and family. “The time we first met” is a series of words to prelude a romantic first encounter, if the words to follow are “I was logged in and had an unread message,” the interest of the listeners may falter at least slightly. One site, eHarmony.com claims their use of scientifically based matching process is contrary to “traditional” online dating. Their site reads, “At eHarmony, our patented Compatibility Matching System® narrows the field from millions of candidates to a highly select group of singles that are compatible with you”(eHarmony.com). It would seem you can register the process by which two people connect as a trademark. To imagine that a questionnaire is capable of quantifying the content of one’s character to the extent that two people could be matched for relationship compatibility is fairly radical. The concept is extraordinarily convenient, why bother searching for romance when an online survey can provide them for you?

Some online dating services and social networking sites are free, and others require a subscription. Does paying for a service imply a more quality date? Americans are used to getting what they pay for, if corporations are capable of commodifying romance, does the name of the site act as a brand name for love? Chris Barker writes in Cultural Studies,

The Internet exists within a capitalist world driven by profit seeking and dominated by a powerful consumer culture. The concern regarding democracy is that the World Wide Wed will become a commodified sphere of entertainment and selling rather than of political discussion.(Barker 356)

Free social networking sites are paid for by advertisers. Corporations pay the site owners a sum relative to the number of users that are exposed to their ads. It is in this way that even “free” services are paid for courtesy of the capitalistic use of advertisements. Sites that attract more visitors receive more sponsorship and can improve their services to appeal to even more users, inefficient sites lose page hits and funds. Such a form of evolution is best described as memetic replication. Professor Richard Dawkins describes the process as follows, “Those varieties of a replicator that happen to be good at getting copied become more numerous at the expense of alternative replicators that are bad at getting copied. That, at its most rudimentary, is natural selection”(Dawkins 191). In this case, a site is replicated according to the number of users it generates, and the number of users it generates is expanded exponentially according to advancement of its features and therefor the spread of word-of-mouth.

The internet acts as a monstrous engine for the advancement of memes. Pages are in a constant state of purging and renewal. Instant and infinitely available access paired with the web’s unprecedented capability for replication on a massive and viral scale. The social networking meme exists in an environment that is extraordinarily conducive to replication, and because it is a networking device, it acts as a replicator for other memes that find their way into sites. Via mass posts sent to all of the user’s “friends” concepts can be introduced to any number of users, potentially thousands in a day, and replicated. The laws of natural selection are accelerated by the cyclical access, purging and reinforcing of the internet, and successful memes are given free-reign to replicate to the ends of the World Wide Web.

It appears that the so-called sphere of commodification has expanded past entertainment, and into the realm of emotion. Another factor that might inspire somebody to choose a pay service rather than a free one is the knowledge that any potential mates they discover (or have delivered to them) also had to pay for the service, and therefor have money. One of the questions on the eHarmony questionnaire engine is, “How much annual income would be ideal for your matches?” The user is then given a range of incomes from nothing to hundred thousand dollars a year. This speaks to the necessity for financial security that many people look for in relationships. In the Darwinistic tumbler of searches, it’s possible than potential suitors are screened out of the process for earning too little money. Free personals sites may not mandate including information regarding income, so users have little indication as to how much a mate is “worth.”

The notion that paying for something assures its quality is ingrained in capitalistic cultures. When you review matches on a pay site, you are blissfully aware of the fact that they all have credit cards, bank accounts, income! If these people were looking for love, though, shouldn’t they be able to overlook monetary worth and instead expect a valuable catalogue of desirable traits? Or is love not the pure and selfless act of benevolence we’ve been raised to hope for? Maybe it’s perfectly acceptable to set financial security as a precondition of love, after all, aren’t daters in the real world judging the restaurant they go to, the car they’re picked up in, the clothes their date is wearing?

Online profiles used to “sell” oneself require that a user be presented as physically appealing, a luxury not discarded by the cyberworld. Fortunately for the unfortunate, photos are able to be manipulated using software. Myspace offers an in-site program that enables you to upload and alter your photos simultaneously. Programs like Photoshop become the online equivalent to elective surgery. Rather than pay a doctor thousands of dollars to perfect your appearance with a scalpel, social networkers and online daters may select their most appealing photos and adjust the contrast, crop and filter their way into beauty. In her cultural studies essay on Postmodern Plasticity, Susan Bordo quotes Fit magazine as stating, “‘Create a masterpiece, sculpt your body into a work of art, you visualize what you want to look like, and then you create that form...The challenge presents itself, to rearrange things...It’s up to you to do the chiseling. You become the master sculptress’”(Bordo 1100).

While Bordo uses the statement to support her thesis on plastic surgeries, it also speaks very well to the sculpting metaphor offered by photo altering techniques. Eliminating the appearance of unwanted fat or acne conceivably allows users to create a physically desirable persona that would attract more friends and romantic prospects than would their natural appearance. Of course this facade is only effective if the two members should never meet. Would meeting somebody with a significantly less attractive appearance than the one that was presented on his or her profile be a “deal-breaker,” can a friendship or relationship rely solely on the substance of conversation and profile information?

The information people choose to make available on their profile is just as important as the pictures they display. Their interests, books they enjoy, music they listen to and movie they watch all create an image. Woody Allen’s character in Play It Again, Sam is leaving carefully selecting books and albums in plain sight in order to impress a date. He explains his motivation with the line, “A few carefully-placed objects create the proper impression”(Play It Again, Sam). The idea is paralleled by the Myspace, Facebook and online dating service users that list the things they are interested in. Whether you choose R.L Stein as your favorite author or Charles Dickens reflects on you differently. Claiming Schindler’s List as your favorite movie rather than Wayne’s World might suggest intelligence to visitors, you give off an impression of being cultured. Whether you say you like hip-hop, country western music, rock implies a different character and appeals to a different “audience.” In this way, social networking inspires users to brand themselves, to selectively package, repackage, sculpt and mold their image.

The internet has become an enveloping force, it connects all societies, creating a global society. The ability to communicate electronically, at all times, instantly allows humans to relay information in mere moments. Social networking sites and online dating services create the potential for users to manipulate who they are and what they represent. The ability to change identities and give false perceptions dismantles the usual process by which two people get to know each other. Being able to “fall in love” electronically radicalizes the way romance operates and changes the way humans interact. The internet acts like an immense global marketplace in which the notions of love and romance are commodified and the luxuries of beauty and status can be generated artificially.

Works Cited

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies Theory and Practice. Minneapolis: Sage Publications Ltd, 2008.

Bordo, Susan. "Material Girl: The Effacements of Modern Culture." Cultural Studies. 1099-1114.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

"Friend." Webster's Online Dictionary - with Multilingual Thesaurus Translation. 10 May 2009 http://www.websters-online- dictionary.org/definition/friend>.

Play It Again, Sam. Dir. Herbert Ross. Perf. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. DVD. Paramount, 1972.

"Why eHarmony? The Science of Love." EHarmony #1 Trusted Singles Dating Site - Go Beyond "Traditional" Online Dating. 12 May 2009 http://www.eharmony.com/why>.

Response Paper

Race Relations and Powerplay: Relating Texts

“It made her furious to think that this black animal had the right to complain against her, against the behavior of a white woman.”-Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing

Racism, prejudice, and intergroup relations are hot topics addressed at length in a variety of media. Pop-culture often opens for discussion the issues of ethnocentrism with regard to the dominant forces in society and the pervasiveness of the master and slave relationship. The film Crash as written by Paul Haggis reveals and highlights a great deal of the themes brought into light by Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. The two texts tie in themes of ethnic psychology, the allocation of power between race groups, and assumed White superiority.

In the field of social psychology, much of the continuing discussion revolves around the balance of power between race groups. I think the root of a lot of racial tension and conflict stems from an ethnocentric ideology that allows one group to feel entitled to power over another. Lessing writes that two of the farm wives, Mary and her neighbor, Mrs. Slatter, have little else to talk about besides their frustrations with natives:

“...Individual natives they might like, but as a genus, they loathe them. They loathe them to the point of neurosis. They never cease complaining about their unhappy lot, having to deal with natives who are so exasperatingly indifferent to the welfare of the white man, working only to please themselves. They had no idea of the dignity of labor, no idea of improving themselves by hard work.”(Lessing 82)

This quote is a prime example of ethnocentric attribution. Ethnocentric attribution is the phenomenon where “...failure and negative behaviors exhibited by an outgroup member are more likely to be attributed to internal, dispositional causes than the same negative behavior by an ingroup member (where it is more likely to be attributed to external or situation causes)”(Brewer and Miller 83). Essentially, this means that Mary and Mrs. Slatter attribute the dismal misfortune of natives to something intrinsic, that they bring negative outcomes upon themselves, while if the roles had been switched, they would attribute the quality of their lives to something situational that couldn’t be helped. The idea also works in the reverse, allowing the women to feel they had earned anything in their lives that was better than the natives’. This point of view is exhibited by many people with high prejudice levels and is one of the keys to intergroup discrimination and the allocation of worth, and thus power, in society.

Similarly, there is an argument in Crash between a Caucasian man and an African American woman that seems to demonstrate ethnocentric attribution. The man, John Ryan, is trying to earn compassion from the woman, Shaniqua Johnson. He explains that his father built his business from the ground up, employing an all Black staff. He goes on to say that after the city decided to give preference to minority owned businesses, his father lost everything. The character is attributing his father’s success to his own dedication and hard work, and his failure to outside influences. In the same sentence, he attributes the success of the minorities to the graciousness of his father, and the preference given to them by the city as a circumstantial force that they didn’t earn. The attribution of positive and negative qualities goes far to allocate wealth and power in society, and these two examples from pop-culture stand as prime examples for a lot of the human psychology behind this balance.

There is a running observation in popular culture that examines the complex structure of the master-slave relationship. This form of interaction is observable in almost any circle of society but seems to hold the most consequence in interracial interactions. Lessing’s character, Mary Turner, is the indirect employer of several servants and farmhands. She is almost tyrannical in her approach to managing them, which causes the servants to harbor a great deal of animosity towards her. The upset in the novel occurs when the master-slave relationship is disturbed. The two parties are so set in the nature of their interactions that they’re caught off guard when the balance shifts and chaos ensues. In the case of The Grass is Singing, the upset ends in Mary’s demise. 

Paul Haggis created a character in Crash named Jean Cabot. Mrs. Cabot is a wealthy White woman, married to the District Attorney of Los Angeles. She constantly relies on the services of minorities to clean her house, change her locks and wash her clothes. They never seem to be able to satisfy her wants, and she sees them as untrustworthy and incompetent. Towards the end of the movie she is explaining to a friend that she is in a chronic state of inexplicable anger. She falls down the stairs immediately after, and finds that her affluent White friends are unwilling to help, and it’s her Mexican housekeeper that ends up taking her to the hospital. In Mrs. Cabot’s final scene, she is shown crying on the shoulder of her housekeeper, who she admits is her best friend. In this instance, the inversion of the master-slave relationship results in a better understanding of both parties but it takes a dramatic event to initiate the shift.

Often times, racism seems like a fairly cut and dry issue. Overt racism is on the downturn, but we still witness racial tension and conflict. These events are the result of deeply embedded ethnocentrism and complex social structures. Pop-culture and the media have taken upon themselves the task of examining the subtleties of these issues over the years. The evolution and nature of intergroup relationships is represented well in both Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing and Paul Haggis' Crash. The two texts critically consider the driving forces behind these radical interactions, the discovery of which is the first step to bettering them.

Works Cited

Brewer, Marilynn B. Intergroup relations. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Pub. Co., 1996.

Crash. Dir. Paul Haggis. Perf. Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock and Ludacris. DVD. Lions Gate Films, 2005.

Lessing, Doris. The Grass Is Singing. HarperCollins, 2008.

On My Contribution to the Will and Grace Presentation

It was my group’s responsibility to create a presentation that relates the TV show “Will and Grace” to the class theme of radical romance, and to use that presentation to engage the class in a scholarly discussion. My group members and I met on four separate occasions outside of class to talk about the show and how we could energize the topic. I think the work was evenly divided, and all of us managed to contribute something important and relevant to the discussion. It was my job, and I use that term loosely because we all chose topics that we were most interested in, to talk about the relationship between the characters Jack McFarland and Karen Walker. I spent hours watching the show, building an argument. The first thing to capture my attention was the extremely physical relationship the two characters had, even though Jack’s character is gay. Building off of that, I wondered why the show needed to create a sexual energy between the two, so I decided to talk about the heterosexual biases of the writers and the necessity for heteronormative themes to keep the attention of a largely heterosexual audience. I also tied my topic into Alex’s, whose was the similarly heteronormative relationship between Will and Grace. Our group went on to explore the representation of homosexuality in the media, how the series might pertain to “The History of Sexuality,” as well as other outside texts, and the way the show was perceived by a general population and their views on the issue of homosexuality. Again, I feel that the entire group pulled its own weight and came together to produce a quality and active presentation.

Responses to "The Grass is Singing" by Doris Lessing

 The African landscape seems split into several sections. Mary comes from “town,” the heavily commercialized area where the colonialists tend to settle, it is the most “Brittainized” area in the novel. Mary is extricated from the town to live with Dick on his farm. The farms are part of the expanse of African wilderness where its inhabitants are subject to all the wiles of nature and consequences thereof. Charlie Sattler views Dick’s farm as a resource to be exploited, like his own farm, when Dick fails and the farm crosses into Charlie’s hands. To Charlie, farming is to make money. To Mary farming is nothing, and she’d rather have nothing to do with it. To Dick, farming is everything.

2.      The novel centers on an implied sexual relationship between Mary and Moses before her demise. A lot of the hard feelings felt towards Mary after her death were derived from this ambiguous relationship she had with her houseboy. There was a part of the novel that discusses how desperate the white man was to keep the natives in a subservient part of their culture, lest there be an uprising that would change the structure of the society and raise costs of labor. The traditional fear of black sexuality was that the savage black men would come to steal the virtue of the white women, and because it seemed Moses has succeeded in establishing this dominance, they would both suffer for the turbulence it would bring to society.

3.      Mary’s fears of marriage seem to stem from a fear of being dominated. She was always her own woman, not too unique but always responsible for her own decisions and actions. When she forsakes her longing to self-dominance and allows Dick to become her “master” she begins to seek dominance over the natives on the farm. She lives in an angry fear that the natives would be able to establish dominance over her one day, which is exactly what happens in the end.

4.      When Mary overhears her friends saying “she’s not like that” she becomes uneasy. She suddenly scrambles to avoid being this abnormality that her friends would discuss in distaste. She decides she must get married. Because she forced herself against her own nature, because Mary was indeed “not like that,” she set herself on this track that would lead her into misery. When she finally breaks down at the end the book, she reflects on this statement and how it led her to this despair.

5.      Lessing doesn’t criticize the myth of the sexually potent black man at all. Moses establishes both mental and sexual dominance over Mary, and when she asks him to leave, he murders her.

6.      The Turner’s house is the cage in which Mary and Dick are trapped. Dick recognizes this, but seems to have learned to cope with it. Mary struggles between wanting to leave and not being able to, this confinement drives her mad with depression and insecurity.

7.      Moses could almost be seen as the personification of all of the forces that working towards Mary’s destruction. His point of view is as mute as nature’s itself. He is this momentum that Mary fights against, her dominance and will are pit against his, but he is almost more setting than character, he seems to have no thoughts or feelings of his own, but only a capacity to push.

8.      Mary is constantly drawing parallels between the marriage of her parents and her own. Her mother was trapped in an unhappy marriage where she felt her husband wasn’t supporting her or provided the life she wanted. Her father was not necessarily a mean man, but he was a drunk and a symbol of dominance and gravity in Mary’s mind. Much like her father, Moses gained dominance over Mary and became this paternal, masterful figure.,

9.      Mary would like to have economic independence, but is unable. She attempts to gain some when she enjoys a brief stint of power over the farm, but her endeavor fails. She tries to exercise some sort of economic control through Dick to change the way the farm is run, she tries to manipulate him into treating the natives the way she felt they ought to be and grow the crops she thought she should. She treats her identity in much the same way, she is defined by the things that make her miserable and by the shortcomings of those around her.

10.  Mary’s character is confined by the institutions of marriage, “slavery,” and economy. Her loveless, cold, marriage with Dick tied her to the farm she hated and life she despised. The master-slave relationship she held with the natives demanded that she struggle for dominance, a struggle in which she would ultimately fail, which would cause her destruction. The institution of economy keeps Mary in poverty, an endless cycle that even further tied her to the life she hated and relationships she loathed.

11.  Mary’s psychological breakdown occurs shortly after Moses becomes a paternal figure, a dominant one. When they had their first interaction in the field, Mary becomes physically terrified when she thought Moses was about to strike her. This display of fear made her always uneasy around him as her houseboy. When their relationship would alter to a latently sexual, “slave” dominated exchange, her psyche could bear the struggle no longer and she succumbed to all that worked against her, and broke down.

12.  For Mary, salvation would be brought through the leaving the farm. When her breakdown began, it was largely in part due to her acceptance of this fate. Her visions of living in town again were dashed, and hope was dismantled. Even in her death, she is tormented by the disdain of the people whose opinions she felt mattered more than her own identity, the opinions that would lead her to Dick’s farm.  

Ethnography 2/17/2009

Observation:

Sitting in the lobby of The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in the early evening. Nearly all of the seats are full, these people don’t seem to be here to socialize, though the crew seems pretty jovial. Most guests are busy with schoolwork, using their laptops, or reading. Nearly every seat is filled, one even by the backpack of a guest. There is only one group of people that seem to be connecting socially. One man stands in line to place his order, he is texting. He doesn’t say please, and seems like he’s in a hurry. The girl behind him is in work clothes, and very polite. One of the girls in the connecting group walks behind the counter, she must work here. Two new guests are upset by the lack of seating and leave for a “coffee shop.” An older man in plaid walks in with a little girl, the people in the connecting group seem to know him and greet him.  Two customers stand near the bar in anticipation of their order, one woman grabs a straw and unwraps it, waiting. A crowd forms around the bar, and the waiting customers eye the barista intently. The little girl from before coughs into her hand just before reaching into the napkin holder, she grabs the napkins and coughs again. A woman who has ordered four drinks places them in a carrier as they are completed, she grabs four straws but drops one. She leaves it and grabs another as she exits. The cashier always finishes each transaction by asking “For here to to go?” There doesn’t seem to be an apparent difference between the options. Another woman with an apparently large enough order to warrant a carrier makes to pry one from the stack, ignoring one already on the counter. I go outside to smoke, there are three teenagers smoking at a table smoking directly adjacent to the entrance. 

Analysis:

I didn’t notice a lot of gender related exchanges, in fact, most of my observations are fairly gender-neutral. I did detect something similar to the “master-slave” relationship we’ve been discussing, though, particularly between the customer and the merchant. I first noticed the “master-slave/customer-merchant” relationship when I purchased my own drink. When we order a drink, we are dependent upon them to fulfill it, and they are dependent on the customer to pay for it. Most customers, the rudest of them anyway, seem to assume that they are the “master” in the relationship, and it shows. The merchant seems always eager to please, to the casual observer, but it is they who to whom the customer is responsible to wait in line, pay, and again wait for their order to be completed. Being forced to wait is an act of submission, being forced to pay the price of the merchant’s asking is also submissive. The example of the woman dropping the straw and leaving it for someone else to pick up could be seen as a rebellion in the relationship, her own meager attempt at establishing dominance over the merchant by forcing them to clean up after her own laziness. The customers spend the majority of the relationship waiting for their requests to be met by the uniformed coffee artist on the other side of the bar, who will get to it in his or her own time.