Who's in Control?

I question the Boston Bruins decision to fire their ex-general manager Peter Chiarelli.  Chiarelli has made some questionable moves in the past few years like trading one of the NHL’s top goal-scorers Tyler Seguin and the dominating defenseman Johnny Boychuck, but he also established one of the most successful hockey teams in the past decade.  I feel as though the Bruins management team were manipulated into firing Chiarelli because fans tend put the blame of missing the playoffs on Chiarelli for these questionable trades.  People overlook the success Chiarelli organized including a stanley cup win and only associate him with trades.  This could be a result of people feeling the need to point a finger at someone after missing the playoffs.  In any case the Bruins still fired Chiarelli.  How can the management also be so ignorant to fire a man who built the foundations of this hockey empire?  I guess the fans possess all the power and all management cares about is the money in the fans wallets that purchase the tickets.  Management was manipulated into firing a successful GM because they want the fans to spend their money on tickets.  Now the management’s decision is manipulating me to write this blog.  This seems to be a chain reaction manipulation.

There could be behind the scenes things that Chiarelli did that I do not know about.  He could have been the biggest asshole known to mankind and the management just refused to put up with it any longer.  The Bruins never provided any explanation to this move so I am left assuming it was because the social hysteria Chiarelli incited after the trades he made.  The fans are left judging the moves he made after they didn’t end up working out in the Bruins favor.  Anyone can make perfect decision ex post facto.  I am frustrated by both the Bruins and the Bruins fans, yet I agree with their decision to fire Chiarelli.

Manipulation Everywhere

As I was planning my mediaTED artifact, I began to really think about how prevalent manipulation techniques were outside of the writer's power. The first thing that came into my mind was, brand names. As a consumer of many different brand names, I find it really absurd at how over price some things are. For example, when I went to Target several years back, I walked by the shoe section and noticed that there were shoes that looked just like Converse. When I looked carefully at the shoe, I noticed that everything looked almost the same, except that the logo was different and placed in a different place. Along with that, the name of the Target brand shoe was Converse ONE STAR instead of Converse ALL STAR. However, the Converse All Star was retailed at $50 and the Converse One star was retailed at $35. Recollecting that moment and relating it to the course, I found it very amusing that two almost same shoes were priced so differently just for the name brand. However, by saying so I am a hypo crypt because if were to choose between the two, I would choose the Converse All Star. Due to the consumer manipulation, i think of the Converse All Star as the "real" thing, and the Converse One Star is the "fake" version. However, in reality they are just two different brands with very similar products and designs. This occurs not only in shoe brands, but also the fashion industry as a whole! Without these manipulation techniques of making people think one thing is better because its "original" brands would not be able to skyrocket their prices to form a monopoly. However, at this point this form of thinking has been basically implanted into our brains as a subconscious thought on what is "good" and what is "bad".

Women's Fitness (the manipulation you had no idea was happening)

I went to a talk on self-objectification given by Dr. Jennifer Stevens last night, and it was so eye opening. One of the fascinating things I found that came out of her research was the mass manipulation that health magazines carry out. If you look at a health magazine, for example women’s fitness, just take a moment and look at the cover.  Notice how every thing on the cover transforms health into appearance. It says how to loose fat, to get skinny and look beautiful. They manipulate us into buying into the fact that heath is determined by how much we weigh, which I am sorry is utter bullshit. Individuals are being victimized and they have no idea. I find it so frustrating that these magazines, as well as other popular magazines such as Cosmo, are presenting these horrible messages and it is having alarming effects. People begin to associate eating a certain way, and doing certain exercise not for their well-being, but in order to fit into a certain jean size. I can’t emphasize enough how health DOES NOT = weight, but the media tells us it does. Even if we don’t by one of these magazines these messages are all around us. Merely glimpsing at a slogan really quick that says “ 10 ways to fit into a bikini” resonates with us. I am all for health magazines, only if they report health in the right way. Magazines need to start captioning their main pages with slogan such as 10 foods that make you stronger, and are the ultimate fuel. Next time you buy a magazine that has a fitness section, count how many slogans and articles titles that equate health to physical appearance. You might just be surprised.

West Egg

There was a kid peeing in the middle of the street. He looked like one of those naked angel statue people have in the lawn in front of their million dollar vacation home in East Egg. I don’t know if people actually do that, but for the sake of analogy, let’s assume people actually hire architects who are too suspiciously excited to carve sculptures of a naked child out of marbles to carve sculptures of a naked child out of marbles.

In all honesty the incident would have been completely trivial. I mean the traffic was a mess per usual. And there he was in the middle of the road peeing. But I was in a rush for cram school so I didn’t give it much thought. But for the following reasons for which I have spent a long enough time on the toilet today thinking of, the image stuck with me longer than my previous ex. Damn.

Anyway, the kid wasn’t exposed to social taboos. It could just be that his parents didn’t feel the need to teach him about the potential lack of sanitation should one proceed to attend nature’s call in the presence of incoming traffic, which looks something like this.

And maybe, just maybe precisely because of this artificial perception of innocence that enables architects of ancient time to fulfill their desire to carve sculptures of a naked child out of marbles. I mean they do carve adult sculptures too. But if you are allowed to carve naked men and women why stop there right? Go go artistic freedom.

Just to go along with that (and run with it), imagine a scenario where instead of a child, we have a man or a woman peeing in the middle of the street. In this day and age, were that to happen, cyber-backlash and cyber-backlashing backlash woudn’t stop for a while. I mean it wouldn’t be as serious as Ferguson, but you get the idea. It’s like an unsuspecting group of people walking into the theater to see a Stan Brakhage's film. Next thing you know people start to wonder why there are toilets in the first place since natural bodily functions are just that: natural and thus require no censor.

Now that I’ve finished this brain dump (and the other dump), I realized I never actually have this deep of a conversation with my ex. Funny how life works. And yes I just took probably one of the better shit of my life this semester. It feels so good to let go. [Insert jokes about ex here]

A rant about Accepted Students Day

Accepted Students Day leaves much to talk about when it comes to manipulation. The entire day is an act to try and convince/manipulate a bunch of High School seniors to attend Hamilton. The food in Commons and McEwen is way better than it ever is, some Professors try to be on their A game, all the best tour guides are on duty, and all the important administrators come out of the woodwork to act like they actually have relationships with the students. Typically President Stewart pays off Mother Nature to make the weather nice but I guess that didn’t work out this year. Although I believe the spirit of the day accurately represents the Hamilton experience (a small, close, and friendly community), the entire show is so overblown.

Then midday there’s an event that blows it all up. The streakers come out to play and show Hamilton’s true colors. As all the accepted students walk across campus after the President’s opening remarks, the streakers come running the opposite way. It is glorious. What I find encouraging is that the school could very easily stop this. They could have the opening remarks in the field house, thus removing the need to walk across campus or station Campo on Martin’s Way to catch streakers (That would probably be way over the top actually). My point is that they don’t change anything. I like to think they secretly like it. They know they’re playing this elaborate game to woo potential students, but like that the parents get a little shock value and the students get a little taste of the real Hamilton.

Illusion of choice

Today I encountered an illusion of choice. For bio lab this week we went out into the glen to measure trees and collect leaves and dirt. We all met in front of the glen before we dispersed into two different sections of the glen. My professor said to us that there were going to be two groups, a shorter-walk group and a longer-walk group, and that we could choose which we would prefer. Then, he said that also there would be different professors leading each group, so we could also factor that into our decision. I was prepared to pick the group with the shorter walk because I wanted lab to last as short as possible. But then my professor told us that since the class was already basically split evenly, he would just split that into two groups. I got stuck on the longer walk group (#bummed) (…not really, it wasn’t actually a long walk). Sarah was in my group and we got a little bit excited because we realized that it related to our class and the illusion of choice. We then proceeded to spend the next two hours measuring and sticking nails into trees. The moral of this post is related to how in life, we are often given a choice or an illusion of choice but then it is taken away from us.

Manipulation Through Beauty

During class on Friday I related a lot of Kylies mediated artifact. There are so many influences on us to be pretty and skinny and perfect. There are so many manipulative things around us telling us to look a certain way, when we have no control over that. Recently in Bio we have been talking about the microbiome in our stomach. If you were born with a certain microbiome, you’re going to absorb more nutrients from you food than others, and therefore be fatter. Our bodies naturally want to look a certain way and we have no control over it. But people will starve themselves to look like how society wants them to.

            The thing that hits home the most for me when it comes to trying to be beautiful is hair. Interesting fact, curly hair is the dominant gene. You’d have no idea when you looked at girls today. I guess it’s just the way style trends go but someone out there said that right now, straight hair is in. So any girl who doesn’t have pin straight perfect hair, straightens it. Girls have been so manipulated to think that they’re not pretty and they have to change their hair to look prettier. It’s crazy how many people have said to me, you look better with straight hair. It’s the most back handed compliment I’ve ever received. It all comes back to what Kylie was saying, there is a definition of pretty and we’re supposed to change ourselves to fit that profile. Unless magazines, TV, movies, and almost everything around us drastically change, this is going to continue to be a problem for a long time.

Manipulation in the SCCT Fishbowl

During my now constant quest to notice and analyze manipulation around me, I found myself noticing manipulation in the use of signs in the science center fishbowl. Since most science theses are yearlong, most of the science majors are now writing/finishing their theses, and due to the nature of some projects, they need to use the computers in the fishbowl to accomplish this. Some of the senior projects require using the computers for long periods of time to crunch numbers to determine viability of protein folding patterns or binding sites. For these applications, students will often put a sign on the computer that says, "experiment in progress" in order to keep other people from using the computer and messing up their data acquisition. Others, however, just need to use the computers for typing their papers or for briefly sending data off to the local supercomputer for analysis.

I found out today from one of my friends that someone who is using the computers for the latter reason has been using an, "experiment in progress" sign despite the fact that it is not actually true. This manipulation was undergone simply because the student didn't want anyone else messing with their computer even though they weren't using it themselves. This made me think about the fact that personally, I often don't question the validity of signage. I think that this is probably because with a sign rather than a person, there is nothing to argue with. You can't carry on a conversation with a sign, and therefore I at least tend to trust them. In this case, a sign was telling me a blatant lie, but I had no grounds to disagree, and therefore took its truthfulness for granted.

escape

This class has allowed me recognize manipulations that face me every single day, from when I wake up and get dressed to when I floss before I go to bed. Now I am aware, but where do I go from there? Is there anywhere to avoid manipulations and live life simply for myself, and not be compressed by outside societal and familial factors? Would going to the wilderness and feeling the naked earth under my bare feet save me?

I have come to the realization that there is no way to escape the confines of societal manipulations. In fact, there are very few people who live free from manipulations. I guess you could argue that Timothy Treadwell, better known as Grizzly Man, defied expectations of society for his duration in Alaska. However, as seen in the documentary, it was highly likely that he had ulterior motives for his journeys, such as fame and approval. In Environment and the Society, we learned about “uncontacted tribes”. These groups of people live completely separate from the luxuries we have today. No cars, no oil, no electricity, no plumbing…the list goes on. These groups are not inhibited by the structure of modern society. They have not been contacted by the outside world. However, lately, oil and logging companies have started infringing on their communities in aim of exploiting their resources. However, were these people barren to manipulations before these companies started closing in?

It can be argued that in any society, there are manipulations. So, does that mean the only way to escape manipulation would be to be completely isolated? Well that sounds awfully lonely.

Here is a website with information about uncontacted tribes if anyone is interested…

http://www.uncontactedtribes.org

Pick a Class, Any Class

A huge selling point for Hamilton is that you can take any class you want because the student body is small, and the curriculum is open. However, I've found this "choice" to be a manipulation, especially today. This may be due to the fact that I had an 11:15 registration time, but so many of the really cool classes I wanted to take only had a select number of seats for rising sophomores, or were capped at 20 in order to keep the small class feel. I completely understand the reasoning behind capping classes, as that is a very important characteristic of a small school. However, I found that it tied back to our discussion in class about how we are given choice, but we are also given parameters. These parameters are based on our class year, previous classes taken, and a randomly assigned class registration time. Even though we are told to explore all the classes we want, our choices are limited due to availability. It's a small school with small classes, but a large school has large classes; it's all relative.

Its my Roommate's Birthday

Birthdays parties are weird. They are humanity’s manipulation of a natural biological process into a social event. Birthdays are also a bit narcissistic—a day dedicated to the celebration of one’s emergence and existence. Its a completely arbitrary, man made invention which i guess is designed to make us feel worthy and admired. They're used to mark another year of age, which is yet another form of manipulation. Aging is another biological process of which we mediate with numbers. Socially, people are constantly judged and defined by the number of years they have been on this earth. We use age as an indicator of ability by having laws restricting people of certain ages from driving, voting, drinking, etc. Age, however, is truly just a number of which society manipulates us to think of as a defining characteristic. This also relates to time in general of which we discussed is actually meaningless. These indicators of age and time still seem to be necessary for society’s progress. It normalizes the billions of people on earth, giving them a common scale to base their lives around. There are stages people must be in at certain ages which adds up to a sort of formula for an average humans life: childhood, school, college, work, family, the end. Even though these scales of time are manmade and manipulative, they force people to think of time and lives linearly, which instills a sort of pressure for progress, ultimately driving the force of civilization.

Self-Manipulation

We've talked a lot about how we are manipulated in our everyday lives just by our surroundings and the society we live in. But I also think that we often choose to manipulate ourselves. Even though the word ‘manipulation’ seems to have a bad connotation, I think it can definitely be useful.

            One of my friends here says that sometimes when she is writing a paper she sets the clock on her computer ahead by two hours. That way when she looks at the clock she thinks it’s much later than it really is, making her work that much harder. Even though she knows that it’s actually two hours earlier, this self-manipulation of time makes her more determined to get the work done. I can think of many times throughout the day that I manipulate myself. To get myself to exercise I try to view running as a study break, rather than something I have to do. This way I make it into something I should enjoy and look forward to rather than dread. It doesn’t always work… but it definitely helps. Even while I’m running, if I’m really tired I’ll tell myself that I’ll get to walk if I reach some landmark (mailbox, telephone pole, driveway, etc.) up ahead. But then when I get to that landmark I’ll tell myself I can make it to the next one and the next one, until I end up forcing myself to run much further. In all of these examples we are aware of how we are manipulating ourselves, but it doesn’t lessen the ‘good’ that comes out of it. These daily manipulations can be helpful.