Internet Censorship

Source: http://www.conservativeactionalerts.com

For my WP#3 I decided to cover the topic of internet censorship. The internet is something we all encounter on a daily basis; in fact, this class would probably not be possible in it's current condition without the internet. As a potential outlet for us to express ourselves, whether anonymously on a website or publicly on a social media site, it is not unlike newspapers or "real world" avenues. Due to that, should the world wide web be regulated?  Is it the government's place to monitor and supervise a place where people can literally say anything with little to no consequences.

The picture above describes the situation perfectly. In the picture we see many cords, notably Ethernet cords which allow a computer or device to connect to the internet, with a padlock around them. The image itself presents a strong message: the internet is not "truly" free. The viewer can initially assume the lock does not belong to whoever the cords belong to. While the lock doesn't necessarily do anything in the practical sense of the picture, the message it conveys argues that the internet is "locked up".

One of the most striking aspects of the picture is the color contrast used in it. The lock, background, and (I'm assuming) modem are all white or silver. The amount of white in the picture is overwhelming. The blue cables stand out very well against the white, possibly attracting the viewers attention. The red connector on the furthermost cable also stands out. Perhaps it is meant to signify the connecting point between the computer and the internet, or rather the author and the internet? In that case, then the white can also double as a whiteboard or paper for the author to write their feelings, beliefs, or stances.

Visual rhetoric is very important in today's society. We are attracted to it subtly and many of us do not even realize it. Are there any other aspects in this picture that you can point out?

Does America Have a True "Culture"

America has long been known as a melting pot of cultures. You can find almost any culture in the world located between Maine and California. Over time we have absorbed cultures and adapted them, but have we ever created such a culture that is truly our own? America was found by people from Europe, whether through exploration or through escape from religious persecution, and with them came their beliefs, their actions, their everyday behavior. They did not start from scratch or decide to abolish their held culture in favor of something new.

Most people would agree that if America has a culture, then it is capitalism. We owe our religious aspect to Europe, our social aspect to as well belongs to Europe, but our economic stance is purely America's. Fast food, grocery store, malls, and any other type of business in America has some sort of capitalism embedded in it.

As a little side note, I find it very interesting to hear people from other countries tell about what they think America is like. I've seen maps drawn by people from Asia where Texas, in particular, takes up the vast majority of the country, engulfing many of the great plains states. Others believe that Americans have guns strapped to them at any instance of the day, along with a big bag of Mickey D's.

But really, besides those, does America have a specific culture? Most of the states in particular have self addressed stereotypes to go along with their individual cultures (New Yorker's can't drive, it's always raining in Seattle, everyone in Alabama lives in a trailer home, Florida is full of old people, etc.). However, unlike many other countries in the world, we lack a central omnipresent culture. Do you agree? Is their a culture for America?

Sports in Culture

I have always had an interest in sports. Basketball, soccer, baseball, football, I played the field when it came to sports. Games are commonplace on the living room TV. However, while I have been an enthusiast of sports, I've also always noticed how certain sports have reigned supreme in different regions and cultures, especially in America. March Madness, which has recently unfolded, has exemplified this.

Our high school won the State 4A football championship three years in a row. Our basketball team, which I was a part of, inversely ended the season with 16 losses and 0 wins. It's no surprise that the south runs the football end of sports (the Southeastern Conference has had teams win the National Championship consecutively since 2007). And as such, the southern culture tends to glorify football season. If you need any proof, just walk around campus any Saturday in September or October. Texas A&M has no official homecoming simply because every football game in Kyle Field is homecoming. Football is just the game of the south and its presence has been dominating in our culture. Autumn Saturdays are days where we can sit down on the couch, grab a plate of hot wings, and watch football games until we pass out. When I worked at a retail shop back home, my fellow coworkers and I would notice on how busy we weren't while the Dallas Cowboys were playing. In fact, the Brookshire's down the street actually managed their work schedule around the Cowboy's playing schedule: if the Cowboys were playing, they would have less people working.

However, the further north you go the less football centered each culture becomes. Basketball instead takes its place. For example, I have a friend who goes to school at Mizzou, and from what he tells me and posts on facebook, they go crazy over basketball up there. Just a few hours north of us has a completely different perspective on the topic. And while I have been to quite a few Texas A&M basketball games, I think it is safe to say that not only do they not match the intensity of the football games, they definitely do not match the dedication put into by the sport by the northern states.

Then there's poor baseball, which doesn't have a specific region that it can call it's threshold.

Sports have always been around as a pastime and a way to escape the burdens of everyday life. Do you think that sports have a dominating effect in our culture?

Struggle of Language

When I was young my word choice was watched very carefully by my parents. Being the eldest of 3 children, my parents kept a very keen eye on me, my mother in particular. I was not allowed to say words or phrases that have since become somewhat acceptable in public. The word "butt" was a big one. According to my mother's high ideals, I was not to mutter that forsaken word while I lived under the roof of which she and my father provided. As such, it was only when I was at school, when I was only surrounded by my peers, that I could feel safe saying that word. Even then it felt like a struggle to go against my mother's wishes. As young pre-teens, we would jokingly say "I'm gonna kick your butt!" whenever we got mad at each other. We never had any plans of actually following through with out empty threats; it was just the language that we had created for ourselves. However, I still had to struggle with our new school language. I'm sure anyone can agree that "I'm gonna kick your butt!" does not convey the same message as "I'm going to kick you in the bottom!" does.

I distinctively remember having a conversation about the two languages with my father. I told him how all my friends were using less-than-polite words to get their points across. How my hollow threats fell on deaf ears because I could not be taken seriously. How I felt like an outsider. He told me to start saying those words and to embrace the other language I was hearing. But only at school, he said. He did not want to hear those words at the house.

So I learned to say "butt". Along with that came "shut up" and various other harsh sounding words. I had begun to learn the language of the playground that my mother had persisted I not engage in. I kept the two separate, being very cautious not to accidentally slip the word "butt" into a conversation in the household. This became increasingly difficult when my brother, the youngest of us three, came to the age where he found annoying me to be a favorable pastime. I could not ask him to kindly shut up. Instead, I had to politely ask him to stop talking and close his mouth. Like before, these did not convey the same messages, and instead it riled my brother up even more. I always expected telling him to shut up would actually keep him from talking. I had imagined that phrase would close the door or seal the deal. But while in the watchful eyes of my mother, I was powerless, forever doomed to be poked at and asked pointless questions by my sibling.

I've come a long way from those pre-teen days. So has my mother. Whenever I come home it has become commonplace for me to tell my brother to shut up within the first 10 minutes of my arrival. He uses words that I was never allowed to say at his age. The school language that I am now apart of, the "college language", has also changed. I've noticed that cussing is a lot more common in this college language than was ever in the school language. During a Skype video call a few weeks ago, I accidentally said "shit" in a conversation between my sister and my parents. I knew right after I said it I was not supposed to be using the college language. It didn't really phase my sister (I'm sure she was pretty used to it), but it caught both my parent's attentions. While I have not had the chance to learn two separate languages, like Spanish, French, or Russian, I have learned different variations of the English language. I've had to struggle between when to say what and what is acceptable when. And so I ask, have you had a similar experience? How have you been able to cope with it?

Narratives in Music

The art of telling a story has roots in the very earliest strands of time. Before any form of writing had been created, oral stories were dominating. We've all heard those stories: folktales, moral stories for children, old wives' tales, nursery rhymes, etc. The list goes on and on. Songs were sung, and most of these songs had a story tied to them. With the advent of written language, stories began to transfer from orally to books and newspapers. However, telling stories orally and in literature are not the only ways one can convey a story, and as technology has advanced, so has story telling. Music, in particular, is a very diverse way to tell a story, and it is one method almost anyone can have a part in.

Volbeat's third album, Guitar Gangsters & Cadillac Blood.
(source: www.metal-archives.com)

For instance, I am a big fan of a Danish rock band named Volbeat. Volbeat has released four albums with a fifth due later this spring. As like any other musical group, many, if not all their songs, tell a story. These stories are all incredibly varied, from positive topics, such as chasing after a girl, to dark situations, such as coping with suicide. In fact, espyrock.com went through a Volbeat album and elaborated on the story of each song on the album. However, one interesting aspect that made Volbeat stand out to me is that all of their albums continue a story that was created in their first album. The story follows a man who is being hunted by a killer. The killer eventually catches up to him and shoots him multiple times, leaving him in the desert to die. After the killer leaves, the man gets up, crawls to his car, and goes after the man that "killed" him. While it is not uncommon for artists to tell stories in their work (recently, Taproot released an album called The Episodes, which recalls the tale of a man who, after a long night of partying, pieces together what exactly happened the previous night) , Volbeat is extraordinary in the fact that while each song on the album tells a story, most of the stories on each album pertain to an even larger story carried on throughout each album.

But yet, one does not need words in telling a story musically. When I took high school band, we played a piece called Lincolnshire Posy. This piece, constructed in 1937 by Percy Grainger, is a 6 movement piece, with each movement reflecting on old English stories. While I will not in depth on each movement, philharmonicwinds.org does cover the basis of each movement. A very interesting listen if you like classical music, Lincolnshire Posy stands out as a beautiful piece and an excellent source for story telling.

When we think of story telling, we tend to think of oral stories, books, or movies. However, story telling is a lot more diverse than we think. Music plays a large part in society and is a subtle storytelling method. What other overlooked methods of storytelling can you think of?

The Subculture of the Internet

With the introduction of the internet came sounding changes that I don't think anyone could see coming. This world wide web of information enabled people to have access to a seemingly unlimited amount of information. For instance, my dad and I attempted to replace a headlight on his Chevy Tahoe over the Christmas break. After spending roughly 30 minutes trying to open the casing which locked the headlight in place we decided to check youtube for a demonstration. In a matter of three minutes a young man we had never met before showed us what we were doing wrong and how to fix our mistake.

Numerous times I have scoured the internet searching for help on school or recreational projects. Even last night I was on youtube looking for help in my engineering class. The internet has become a well of information that we are constantly connected to, whether in our homes, on our phones, or nowadays even in our cars. However, along with that plethora of information comes another side effect: interaction.

Through the use of the internet people from all sorts of societies are able to talk to one another and exchange ideas. People from completely different continents are able to work on projects together. I occasionally browse the website reddit.com simply because I love seeing the interaction between people of totally different cultures come together. It's a chance for strangers to show the world what exactly they are like and what they like to do, and the internet is a fun place because no matter what it is that you like to do, you can find a website with people who love doing the same thing. Through the exposure of every society on the planet and absorbing bits of each of them, the internet has become a culture all in itself. Words, such as "troll", "meme" and "pwned", all have meanings originating from the internet. The language of leet (1337) speak, which uses numbers, letters, and other ASCII characters to create words, began on the internet. A more recent example of how the internet culture has entered our own cultures is the rapid exposure of the Harlem Shake. Personally, I had never heard the song before but now I can recognize it instantaneously.

While certain sections of the internet is are very scary places, much of it is incredibly interesting. What do you think? Is there a predominant culture residing in the internet? Is it a conglomeration of others or is it unique and separate? I am interested on hearing other's views.

The Grunge Movement of the 90's: How It Affected our Culture Today

On February 1st, Sound City hit public theaters and video-on-demand. Directed by Foo Fighter's frontman Dave Grohl, this documentary of the Los Angeles studio of the same name elaborates on what my friend can only call "...dirty, greasy, old time rock and roll stories." Of all the musicians today, Grohl is certainly no stranger to these kind of stories. Grohl hit mainstream success with a little help from a band called Nirvana. During the 1990's, Nirvana was one of the leading bands in the grunge movement, a phase of heavy music which originated in Seattle. Alongside such notable bands such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana pushed grunge out into the rest of the country, radically changing our culture of music.

While looking for blogs concerning the grunge movement, I found a blog which seemed to be equally as angry as grunge itself (click here). Looking at the rhetorical devices used in this post, the first thing that sticks out to me is the diction. Ryan uses such loaded words to denounce the new bands that are taking the reigns. Overall, the tone of the post seems very, very angry. This technique, however, does a great job in mimicking the type of music is talks about. If Ryan were to be commenting on Katy Perry with this same type of tone, it would feel greatly out of place. Grunge was a type of music new to our culture; it was one that was intended to be judged, to be rejected by the majority, and to stand out. The author knows this and writes his post the same way a grunge artist was to write a song.

On the other end of the spectrum stands a more professional and less furious (click here) blog post about grunge. In this post, the author relies heavily on ethos and spends much more time telling why the grunge movement became what it was. It is much more calm and a lot more coherent. It is, in a way, much like Sound City. It is a documentary. The diction is a lot less loaded and the tone seems more informative than persuasive. There are no vulgar similies or metaphors. With the use of these device, the author conveys much more clarity and calmness in their post.

It may just be a personal bias but I truly believe grunge changed the music scene of our country. As such, I highly doubt that without the Seattle Sound music today would be the same. Music movements change our culture. We saw it happen with Elvis and Buddy Holly and again with the British Invasion, which ushered in big name bands such as The Beatles. Grunge was no different.

Technology: Is it our new culture?

After drastically losing our intramural basketball game on Thursday, I and a few members of the team (and of the organization I am a part of) decided to drown out our sorrows in pancakes at the local IHOP. While waiting on our food, we began talking how our meeting went last week and we discussed the new technique we had adopted in order to keep people involved in the meeting. Our executive board introduced live tweeting the meeting and at the end of the meeting, we would go back through the feed and showcase the tweets on our projector. It was about this time at IHOP when a friend asked me if I have a profile on Twitter, to which I replied I do not. The shock on her face was indescribable, almost to the point where I was about to ask if I had, instead, said something offensive.

Twitter is just one example of how technology has taken over our lives nowadays; it is so ingrained in our lives now that you're almost not human if you haven't embraced the new technology. That night at IHOP I had left my phone at home and, to be perfectly honest, I felt naked without it. Letters have become text messages and video chats are almost as commonplace now as phone calls. There have been times that I have called home only to be told by my parents that they want to "Skype me instead". Phones have now become our lifelines. At any moment one can find the weather across the state, have access to breaking news happening nationally, or even start a conversation with someone who is not even on the same continent with you. Society today has gotten to the point where when you apply for a job, you essentially have two resumes: the printed pieces of paper and your Facebook profile.

There's a wonderful picture floating around on the internet of the presidential family and Vice President Biden all staring into their phones during the second inauguration of Barack Obama (source: www.politicker.com). When I first saw this picture I immediately realized how much our culture has changed in recent years with the explosive growth of the smartphone. Not even the family of the most powerful man of the United States of America can escape the pull of technology. If not even someone like our president cannot put aside his cell phone for a couple of hours, are we, as members of a society that now relies on access to social media sites, expected to rely less on our phones?

I am not saying technology is bad. I am not saying that our technological culture is something we should be ashamed of. There is no need for us to go back to a time where we used a telegraph to tell people how we were doing. But instead, I ask that you look to the future. What kind of technological advances do we have in store for us in the upcoming years? Is that something we can even begin to predict? Is it a bad thing that hangouts with friends have become people sitting around together while on their phones? Technology, and especially the smartphone, has turned this culture around, but is it for the better or the worse?

Culture Defined

During my freshman year I lived in a four room apartment with two other guys, neither of which I knew beforehand. Sylvain was far more interesting than the other roommate. Sylvain was a graduate student from France who had traveled to College Station to further progress his Petroleum Engineering degree. From a first hand experience, let me just go ahead and tell you that nothing else on this planet makes you more aware of your culture than having someone from a different country live with you.

His first night in Texas was spent sitting in the passenger seat of my Toyota Tundra. We had attempted to go to Breakaway that night, I being a Christian and he being, as he said, "open-minded", but unfortunately we could not find a parking spot. We stopped to get gas, and when it was time to leave the gas station, he told me something that I will never forget. He looked over at me and jokingly told me "You know, this is the first time I have ever ridden in a truck. I've driven and rode in cars, but never a truck like this." I chuckled and replied "Well, we do have a few of them down here." And then, with a very puzzled look on his face, he asked me "Why do you people drive trucks down here? Do you have a lot of stuff to move around?" I was a little taken back by this. At that moment I began to notice all the trucks around me and how little work the bed of my own truck was getting. I had never really thought about why I had this truck. "Well, no" I said, "but occasionally I do so it's nice to have a truck. But, I mean, a lot of us don't move things around in our trucks daily. It's just something we have 'down here'."

I now realize that that, essentially, is culture. Just something we have or do "down here". Culture isn't something that can be written down and passed on to generation from generation like a book; culture is meant to be lived and experienced! We all hear stories of how in Mexico you have a time of the day when everybody goes home and takes a nap and in the United Kingdom evidently all there is to drink is tea. We all know that this is part of their culture, but we cannot truly say we understand that culture. Sylvain could (and did) tell me of different methods or reasons that he did in France, but I could not understand them without experiencing them. In turn, it's hard to exactly pinpoint what exactly our culture here is without an outside view, such as a foreign roommate. Why do put on our best button down shirt and cowboy boots and go dancing? For what reason do we strap people onto very angry bulls and time how long they can hold on to it? When on the bus, why is it really necessary to sit at least one seat away from someone? The answer to these questions is very simple. These are all just things that we do "down here".

Culture is not something that can be easily defined. It is not even a word that has various adjectives to describe it; we cannot call it green, tall, or solid as we can many other words. It is an omnipresent force which influences every aspect of a society. Art, music, food, politics, sports, education, and nearly any other part of which we call “normal” is prone to culture. In fact, to call culture a simple definition would be to under appreciate it. Culture is a mist that you must surround yourself and get lost in to completely understand the meaning of it.

Sylvain came home one day after a walk through the local park. Wide eyed, he ran into the kitchen area where I was heating up leftovers for dinner. He looked at me and, with the most bewildered look I have ever seen on a human face, he told me "Travis, I saw an armadillo today! It was in the park and it scurried under the bridge! I've never seen one before!" Laughing, I replied back to him "Yep, we have a lot of armadillos around here! They're just something we have 'down here'."

So, with this in mind, if you were to know someone from foreign soil, could you explain our culture to them? How would you do it? Could you explain why, exactly, we do what we do? It may sound simple, but to others, it is not as straight forward as you would think.