It’s Not Just Elon Musk Making Us Sadder

Crowd ready to listen to Dr. Travis Lacy speak. I helped carry in extra chairs, and yes, I wore my mask. Most popular event of this year's MMU Fall Faculty Series.

Dr. Travis Lacy, assistant professor of religious studies, speaks.

"So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds and be staid."

Quote from "Choose Something Like a Star" by Robert Frost, quoted by in a presentation by Dr. Travis Lacy.

I live in the modern world, too, even if I learned to keyboard on a manual typewriter and didn’t own my first computer until the 1980s were almost the 1990s. So, like many who live now on the planet, I exist in a zone that includes both the actual reality around me and the virtual reality that beckons like a siren.

Does social media make me sadder? Probably. Am I addicted to what Dr. Travis Lacy, assistant professor of religious studies at Mount Mercy University, noted is a “hit of dopamine” we get from “likes” on social media?

I’m not sure that something that is habitual is an actual addiction, in a psychological or medical sense, but it’s something like that. And yes—I write three blogs that have fairly low readership, but if someone responds to what I write, or even just likes the link or image that I post on Facebook, it does make me feel better.

Of course, I think there is more going on. I think writing, for me, is more than just a habit or a means to get the next hit of positive brain chemistry—it’s the muscle I used for years to earn my living and that now I do for the pleasure of creation. It’s brain therapy, too—it keeps my most important organ, the one between my ears, a bit more in tone.

Ironically, to me, thus what I post on social media is partly the antidote to social media—I am ruminating on my life, processing my experience, connecting, in an introvert’s lonely way, to reality. Not just running from it. Author (and social media creator) John Green recently talked about the value of creating online:

But I do use my smart phone to “kill time,” as Lacy called it. Dr. Lacy spoke Nov. 15, giving the final presentation in a fall faculty series at Mount Mercy University on “Humans and Machines” in a provocative discourse that he entitled “Scrolling is Unpaid Labor.” The thing that we do when we feel private and alone on our phones or tablets is not as alone as we think—it’s an act that is recorded, watched and commodified.

Our attention is a product that we produce. And advertisers pay, according to data cited by Dr. Lacy, more than $500 billion a year to catch some of that digital audience's attention. Oddly, as he noted, online ads are weirdly different from classic advertising, in that most of us don’t recall much of those ads we see on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube—and an impression that funds the marketing marketplace of cyber commerce is defined as half of a screen being on our device or at least a second.

Dr. Travis Lacy makes a point.

True, ads exist to motivate consumers. True, that is not a new concept, in our culture, as the main system that funds American media—both news and entertainment—has historically been ads. But what feels weird is the brief snippet of eyeball attention that somehow seems so disconnected from an act in the real world would be so valued.

Then again, consumers tend to define themselves as immune to ads in a way that advertisers know they’re not. If online attention were completely divorced from actual commerce, it would wither. It’s not withering.

Yet, the way social media is constructed, it’s almost insidiously rewarded for making us sad. As Dr. Lacy noted, an addict is most vulnerable when the pain of their real life demands some balm. Whether whiskey or the Meta-verse, whatever drug we turn to when we’re down can give us a brief relief, but often leaves us hollow in the long run, more divorced from our lives, more troubled in our souls.

Book title from my notes, propped against my computer screen as I write this post. "Iber Pumpon Makes You Stupid?" How dare Iber Pumpon.

I’m not trying to recreate Dr. Lacy’s whole message here. I’ve skipped Karl Marx and his insight into labor. And I wrote down the title of a book Dr. Lacy cited, because it sounded like something I would want to read, but my handwriting is so bad that I can’t make it out. “Something Something Makes You Stupid” states the illegible ink squiggles, on my notebook’s page. The something-something in my notes looks like “Iber pumpon,” which seems a bit unlikely as a book title.

Update Nov. 20: Thanks to Dr. Lacy (and Dr. Joy Ochs) for noting the title of the book in question. It's “How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid,” by Franck Frommer. Iber Pumpon seems more like a prescription drug name than the name of slide-making software.

I tell my communication students that the act of hand writing notes helps fix memory, and I believe there is some truth there. Still, it can fail. It may help if the squiggles themselves aren’t made by an old southpaw whose handwriting was always iffy (a consistent D grade on my paper report cards in elementary school), and whose crippled index finger and arthritic hands aren’t improving his finger dexterity.

Above and below, others making notations during Dr. Lacy's speech. May their notes be more legible than mine.

Nonetheless, while I was sitting in that room, listening to Dr. Lacy read a long script (not as bad as it sounds, speech students, as I say in class, you should learn to deliver from an outline so you can engage an audience, but if you’re experienced, you can learn to read a script and still be engaging, and Dr. Lacy has achieved that higher level of speech competence), I was connected. I was not “killing” time, but inhabiting it, living in it, enjoying it at the slower pace that the unfolding world can provide.

I don’t hate social media. I understand it’s a force that can, and often does, isolate us and make us sadder. But we each construct our own social media—my Google is not yours—and can, I believe, learn to use it to also inhabit the real world in a more healthy way. Used in reasonable doses, it’s like red wine. It would hurt us if we use it too much, but modest use is not only OK; it can even improve us.

Above and below, people listening to Dr. Lacy, not killing time on social media, but inhabiting time.

Maybe by listening to each other. Maybe by making images, writing essays and then sharing our actual creative work.

Even if it’s unpaid labor. Because creating a full thing that you’re engaged in and care about is not labor that alienates you, it connects and grounds you.

Now, turn off your phone and go take a walk.

Key audience members, connected in reality to the speaker. And maybe social media just made you a little happier.

How We Frame Memories of 9/11

Plumes of smoke from The World Trade Center twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. From Wikimedia Commons via flickr poster Michael Foran.

Today is Sept. 4, which means the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States is one week from today.

The 9/11 events were so big that “9/11” is all one has to say and everyone knows you don’t mean any Sept. 11—you mean that Sept. 11.

The world didn’t exactly change 20 years ago. The forces that attacked my country that day had been at work for some time—indeed, there had previous bombing attempts to destroy the World Trade Center. But that September day, sunny and beautiful in Iowa, at least in my memory, was still a pivotal day.

From the FBI's web site, FBI.gov, a timeline of Sept. 11, 2001.

I have a little trouble picturing myself at 43. I was already greying—did I still have some dark hair? A man in his 60s has a little trouble picturing the world of the 40-something year old. Much in my life has remained the same, and much has changed.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I had a son in elementary school. My oldest daughter was nearing the end of high school, but was adjusting to a large public school—Linn Mar High School—after her first two years of secondary education had been at a tiny Catholic High School—St. Mary’s in Storm Lake, Iowa.

We had just bought a house in Cedar Rapids. The next year would be financially a little dicey for us, as we owned two houses. But both my wife and I had jobs, she at the birth center at Mercy Medical Center (where she would become the nurse manager in a few years), me at the start of a new career. I was fresh out of the world of journalism and into the world of academia, less than a month into my new job teaching at what was then Mount Mercy College.

A hole in the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001. Defense Department image by Cpl. Jason Ingersoll, USMC, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

That Tuesday, I was buying tires for our van. I was at a tire shop near Lindale Mall that morning, and it was a very strange morning. Very few people were out, and I was the only customer at what would usually be a busy shop. I think six guys were working on replacing my tires, each taking 2-minute shifts or so before they traded off—the rest to join me in the customer lounge, watching TV. Special report from New York, a plane has struck the World Trade Center. Then, another. The Pentagon. A planned second attack on Washington, D.C., ending with a crashed plane in Pennsylvania.

I can’t recall a lot from that day other than the sense of shock. I was teaching a class that fall that I’m teaching this semester, too—CO 280, Writing for Public Relations. It was an afternoon class, I think, and I scrapped my lesson plan.

We rearranged the room in a big circle. And the students and I just talked about it, the big news of the day.

My wife and I visited the Newseum in Washington, D.C. during spring break, March, 2015. This is a ruined TV tower that been atop the World Trade Center on display at that museum.

And here we are, almost 20 years later. Two decade of grappling with new realities, of questioning what freedom means, of foreign wars and increasing polarization at home. The internet existed in 2001, but way back then we didn’t carry it around in our pockets and we still watched big events on a chunky, square TV in the customer lounge of a tire shop.

I am just starting to look into it, but I don’t think our current era of struggling with fakery on social media is unrelated to 9/11. That day shook America to its core, and became one of those improbable, shocking events around which wild conspiracy theories swirl.

Another image from that 2015 visit to the Newseum. A wall of headlines reporting 9/11 attacks, from an era when news media mattered more than social media.

Partly, of course, because it was the result of a shadowy conspiracy, and unpacking it is a process historians will be tied up with for decades.

What does it all mean? A lot, and I’m glad that Mount Mercy University will spend some time grappling with this key world event.

Every year, faculty at MMU designated a topic for a series of public discussions—the Fall Faculty Series. I am proud to have helped start this with our first series in 2014 being on the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I.

This year, the Series has a very simple title: 9/11: Twenty Years Later.” Five faculty members, including me, will give free, public Wednesday talks, all of which will start at 6 p.m., and all of which will take place in Flaherty Community Room in Basile Hall.

Logo of 2021 Fall Faculty Series at Mount Mercy University.

Here is the schedule, the topics and the speakers:

• Sept. 29, Precursor Events: At War before 9/11, James Jacobs, associate professor of computer science.
• Oct. 6, Conspiracy, Myth, and Misinformation, Joe Sheller, associate professor of communication & MMU Times advisor.
• Oct. 27, Heroism and Sacrifice after the Attack, Norma Linda Mattingly, associate professor of education.
• Nov. 9, Fear and Trauma after 9/11, Dennis Dew, associate professor of psychology.
• December 1, Reflections of a Muslim-American Immigrant, Ayman Amer | associate professor of economics.
  

Hope to See You at A Sustainability Event

Mount Mercy University has announced its Fall Faculty Series for 2018, and posted its list of events on the MMU web site..

It’s a bit smaller than some past series, with just seven faculty or staff presentations listed. That may be a good thing—an issue in previous series (which I coordinated in 2014, 2015 and 2016) was the tendency for the list of events to grow and grow. Maybe having fewer events will make each stand out a bit more—I hope so, anyway.

The series begins soon, on Aug. 29, with an overview by Dr. Joy Ochs, an English professor who now coordinates the series, and who has been very active in environmental issues. She was important in MMU obtaining a large grant that funds a more robust sustainability effort on campus. For a full list of events in this fall’s series, click here.

“Sustainability” is a key issue—maybe more now then ever. Not only does the Earth continue to heat due to human emitted gasses, but our current political leadership seems determined to exacerbate environmental problems as much as possible.

Anyway, one aspect of the issue is that big environmental controversies are not always covered well by media. Partly that’s because it’s not easy for a non-scientific journalist to understand and translate science. Scientists themselves are not always good at stepping out of the lab and communicating with the public.

As for the news media: Big science involves long-term trends that don’t always translate into daily dramas the way an Omarosa book does. And scientific concepts are sometimes resisted by the public and journalists (the newspaper that the Franklins ran in Boston early in the 18th century, for example, campaigned against smallpox vaccinations—the first health advice given in early American media was totally against science).

I’ll be exploring the interesting and twisted history of media coverage of global warming on Oct. 11 in a presentation called “Hot Story: How the Media Struggles to Cover Climate Change.”

There are many other interesting presentations planned. The fall series is one of my favorite things at MMU—it’s a chance for faculty to engage with students they don’t normally see, as well as to bring in any members of the public who are interested in a topic. Each series leads, I hope, to big conversations on important topics.

And this year’s topic is about as big and important as it can get. I hope to see you at some of these faculty forums!

The President of Fake News

MMU series logo

During a press conference this week, the embattled president answered a query from a CNN reporter by asserting: “You’re fake news.”

Fake news—it’s not a term The Donald invented. According to a dictionary reference cited by the Huffington Post, the term fake news became popular late in the 19th century—which is not exactly a shock. That was a time of yellow journalism, of sensationalism in the news media, and some writers  then decried the trend and hoped the public would grow weary of the hype—of the false narratives, of the fake news.

The Telegraph, a national newspaper in Great Britain, posted an interesting analysis of the roots of the term fake news and its use by Donald Trump. I’m exploring the term “fake news,” its modern use and origins, as part of a presentation I’ll do in early September at Mount Mercy University. This year’s Fall Faculty Series is about our current era of divided politics. Entitled “Divided We Fall: Finding Common Ground in a Fractured Age,” the whole series seems suddenly more relevant.

The idea of a fall series itself is relatively young—the first one took place in fall 2014 and covered the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. Since then, each fall the faculty at MMU has presented a series of public lectures by MMU professors and guest speakers on various big topics. We covered the legacy of the Vietnam War in 2015 and the debate over immigration in 2016.

I coordinated those first three series. Now, the series is under the leadership of Dr. Joy Ochs, professor of English and immediate past chair of the faculty. So this year, I get to watch rather than getting caught up in all of the details of putting on the series. That’s good news, not fake news, to me

On Sept. 7, I am taking on the topic “Fake News and the Free Press,” a rumination that will cover the president’s use of that pejorative term vs the traditional role of the press as a vital part of our democracy.

I am looking forward to this fall’s faculty series. I hope you’ll come hear me try to illuminate and explore the idea of fake news and what it means, and that you’ll also come to our many other speakers. We’re covering important topics that need to be talked about in our country now.

No faking.

The Value of Video

These days we can see for ourselves. Lets roll the tape.

Except, of course, there is no “tape,” which is one of the reasons video has become so common. When you can store data in temporary digital files in a re-writable medium, well, it's cheap to do. No tape to buy or consume. Let’s click the video.

An obvious impact of this new reality is the “body camera” solution some are pushing to try to reform policing in response to recent shootings. Maybe that would help.

And there is the Fall Faculty Series at Mount Mercy. If you missed a program, the staff at Busse Library has been recording the programs and is posting the videos on YouTube.

Here are links to the first two programs:

Sept. 7, “We are All Immigrants” by History Professor Allison McNeese.

Sept. 13, “The First Americans” by Criminal Justice Professor Deb Brydon.

At a later series event, I shot some video myself with my Nikon SLR. It was at Tuesday night’s music program in the Chapel of Mercy—not the full program, but I hope to use some audio for a Mercy Week slide show. We’ll see—editing time is at a premium for me right now.

The Fall Faculty Series at Mount Mercy, "Building Walls, Building Bridges: The U.S. as an Immigrant Nation" has been very successful so far. No TV coverage yet, but at least there is the library video. The next event is Sept. 29 when Mohammad Chaichian, a sociology professor, will speak about border walls, based on a book he wrote on that topic.

Please come--the events are free and public. You kind find them all here.

Anyway, while the spread of video and the capacity of almost any cell phone to record it gives us more eyes on the world, it’s important to recall that those eyes only see isolated snippets form one point of view, not necessarily a full picture.

For example, I have students that are required to attend cultural events, and one asked if she could instead just view the video. Well, no. It's not the same experience as being there. You see and hear better with your own senses, you can react and interact. So I am glad the library is recording these events, but YouTube is not yet "being there."

And video can be edited these days, so if you see it online, you still need to do a little investigating to ensure what you think you see is actually what’s there.

Still, video can be an interesting new tool. The other day I was watching a Monticello City Council meeting. I’m interested in monarch butterflies, and, promoted by a story in The Gazette about Monticello’s efforts to get a resident to remove milkweed, I’m hoping to spark some milkweed planting at Mount Mercy University, where I teach.

It was both odd and strange to be at my home office, sitting in front of a computer, on Vimeo, seeing a city council meeting in a nearby Iowa town. This will never be a high-rated show. One city council member in particular quickly got on my nerves. “So you’re not serious?” he asked the milkweed-planting resident when the council members plan to have the city plant milkweed instead of the resident wasn’t immediately accepted.

Blah. Sometimes video shows you irritating jerks you would rather not see nor hear. But maybe that is part of the value of video. I not only read about the meeting, I saw it myself.

And, for the record, a resident who has planted so much milkweed that his property is a recognized monarch migratory way stop is clearly “serious.” Sure, it would be good for the city of Monticello to plant milkweed, but why that has to be a quid pro quo to destroy a private  monarch way station is a bit beyond me.

Well. I reacted a bit emotionally to that meeting—because I saw it.

One more impact of video.

Struggling to Name That Series

Images on this post from National Park Service.

At Mount Mercy University, we’re getting a minor lesson in the importance of names. In an earlier post, I wrote of my disdain for the president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland—and recently, a fellow faculty member at my university posted a link to a news story reporting that the embattled president of Mount St. Mary’s has been drowned and shot with a Glock. Or something like that.

Right away, one of his Facebook friends posted: “Oh No! I had no idea this was going on at your university.” (That’s a paraphrase, by the way, despite the punctuation for effect.)

Well, it was neither my friend’s university nor mine. Although both the Maryland university where the controversy rages and the Iowa university where I teach are Catholic and use the word “Mount” in their name, they are totally different schools—different places, different cultures, different presidents and differing in attitude, apparently, about the appropriateness of drowning or shooting freshman bunnies.

It was ironic to me that, when looking up news stories about the Maryland University while I was working on the earlier post, the ads that Google placed on my page were for Mount Mercy University, my school. Maybe name confusion isn’t that surprising.

Anyway, the school that I do teach at, MMU, has an annual Fall Faculty Series that I volunteered to coordinate. This is our third series: The first in 2014 was about the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I; the second in 2015 was about the 50th and 40th anniversaries of the first big U.S. troop surge in Vietnam, and the end of that war.

You can partly thank Donald Trump, or Drumpf as I prefer to think of him (thank you, John Oliver): In this current election year, immigration is a hot topic. We are planning a series of panels and presentations on the cultural meaning of immigration—how people of the U.S. have responded to the reality that most of us are descendants of immigrations, and yet as a culture we often don’t welcome new outsiders.

“Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses … as long as they aren’t Muslim and we know exactly what’s going on,” or something like that.

Anyway, the Sisters of Mercy, who founded MMU and have nothing to do with that other Mount on the East Coast, identify “immigration” as one of their critical social concerns.

Although I’m sure our series will reference the current heated political debate, that’s not really the point. We want to think a bit more about what immigration has meant and does mean in American culture.

And to do that, we need to name this thing.

At the first planning meeting, those who attended wanted to talk first about the vision of the series, which is, I think, a good discussion to have.

Here is my stab at a vision statement for the series: “The United States has always been a land that drew people from many cultures and countries. During waves of immigration in the 19th Century the idea of America as the ‘melting pot’ formed, but this metaphor implies giving up a cultural heritage for a new identity. For some groups and people, it’s not that easy to assimilate, and some suggest a mosaic or a salad—many distinct parts making a whole—as more inclusive symbols of the U.S.A. And there are those who lived here before the settlers, pioneers and slaves flooded onto these shores—Native Americans didn’t have to go anywhere for an immigrant nation to overtake their lands. What does immigration mean? What is the journey narrative of the peoples of the U.S.A., and how do we respond to and understand immigration? The 2016 Mount Mercy University Fall Faculty Series will examine these questions about the American experience.”

There is nothing official about that vision statement—it’s just my current thinking, my personal draft. I post it here mostly so you, dear blog reader, can understand when I ask you to “name that series” just what the series is.

Anyway, faculty, students and staff at the first meeting did have some ideas for names. What do you think? What should we call this series? Some of our initial ideas:

• “Who are the Americans? The U.S. Immigration Experience.”
• “Immigration America: Shunning or Embracing the Huddled Masses.”
• “I am America: U.S. Immigration Experience.”
• “U.S.A.: Immigrant Melting Pot or Mosaic?”
• “Strangers to our Shores: The U.S. Immigration Story.”
• “Building Walls And Building Bridges: The U.S. Immigration Experience.”

I’m not sure that’s an all-inclusive list, and at this point I welcome new ideas. But, I would like to get a name for this series soon.

Please chime in, as long as your ideas have neither bunnies nor Glocks in them.

The Opening of the Wall

Dr. Joe Nguyen at the opening ceremony.

Thursday night was an emotional one at MMU. The Moving Wall came to campus in the morning, and a rainstorm pelted down on the workers as they were midway through installation.

They powered through. They were men and women on a mission.

Later, after skies had cleared, I took part in the afternoon opening ceremony. It was very poignant. In particular, I felt a chill as an MMU student, a veteran, read the names of Linn County’s own who are on the wall—who died in the Vietnam War.

She chocked up a bit reading the names. I felt the same just listening.

Following the opening ceremony, that evening there was a panel discussion in Flaherty where Professor Joe Nguyen asked a panel of veterans some questions about their Vietnam experience.

Flaherty was packed for the veteran's panel. Joe Nguyen leads discussion.

There were three American veterans, and three from South Vietnam’s armed forces. One of those Vietnamese veterans, dressed in a crisp white naval uniform, was Joe Nguyen’s father. To say there was a charge of emotion in the room several times would be to understate it. I’ve never seen a room so packed that was, at times, so quiet and attentive.

Most presentations in our Fall Faculty Series “Stories We Tell: Legacies of the Vietnam War” will be less than an hour. Thursday’s panel went on for 90 minutes or so, and when it ended, I think most people in the room wished we could take a break and continue. There simply wasn’t enough time to hear all the stories these men had to share.

MMU Times student reporter at event.

This is a blog about “media,” which implies a channel through which communication passes (like this blog). But you can experience a small piece of the legacy of Vietnam in an unmediated way. A travelling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the famous “Wall” in Washington DC, is set up in the lawn in front of Warde Hall, which is why we had the Thursday events.

It’s a quiet corner of campus, which feels right. Come on down and see it for yourself.

And if you missed the great programs we had Thursday, remember that there is a whole series of events that goes into November. Use media—check out the MMU web site for more details.

More photos of the real stars of Thursday night: