Archive for the 'Society' Category
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People continue to hit send on these missives with long e-mail header trains, as if, somehow, the tales within must be true for it to have mushroom clouded across the the internet.
Researchers from Ohio State University contacted 600 people after the 2008 election to discuss their exposure to rumors about the candidates on the websites, blogs and by email. The publishing findings indicate that fibbing on the internet itself is to some degree checked because the facts are out there with a quick google search. Email was more pernicious:
The more political e-mails that participants received from friends and family during the 2008 election, the more rumors they were likely to believe. And the more rumors they believed, the more political e-mails they sent.
In addition, receiving e-mails only promoted belief in rumors about the candidate whom the person opposed, the study found. And people were more likely to share e-mails as belief in rumors about the opposed candidate increased.
The filter effect at work, again. You’re more likely to believe, seek out and forward media content that parrots your own opinions; facts be damned.
Former Moveon.org Executive Director Eli Pariser gave a TEDTalk this year, ahead of the publication of his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You. He briefly discusses the impact of social networks on the media we consume and what the tech sector can do about it. It’s a short video worth a watch.
Gary Taube’s article on the potential toxicity of sugar in the NYTimes convinced me to finally watch Robert Lustig’s lecture on the hazards of sugar consumption.
This video convinced me that it’s time to try to kick the sugar habit again. In the past three days, I’ve had more energy after cutting back on processed sugar. And my next step will be to try to add more veggies into my diet.
More than 1.1 million people have viewed the 90 minute lecture, which is shocking giving the short 90-second attention span of today’s internet surfer.
As detailed in a press release on the study:
During the simulation, students in Nickols’ course on managing family resources are clustered into various family groups—two parents and two children; an older woman living alone; a single mother with two children; and a cohabiting couple, for example. Faculty members and other volunteers play the roles of community members, such as the town banker, pawn shop owner and a social services employee. During the course of the simulation, the participants must accomplish a variety of tasks, including buying groceries, paying their bills and caring for both toddlers and aging parents while subsisting on low wages and other issues, such as being unable to speak English. During the course of each 15-minute “month,” new situations are randomly interjected. In some cases, these are helpful events, such as an unemployed parent receiving a job. In other cases, the events add to the families’ difficulties, such as a family without health insurance facing illness.
The vast majority of participants (65 of 75) reported greater empathy for those living in poverty — acknowledging the difficulty in staying positive and hopeful, the challenge in finding and accessing community and government resources, and the sheer lack of time to get it all done. One respondent commented, “I think that many people would feel like they were on a treadmill, not really getting anywhere.”
What strikes me most about this research is the difficulty we all have in stepping outside our own privileges and situations to consider the lives of those around us. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert details how the human brain fills the gaps to create a complete picture much like a round of Mad Libs.
When your brain is at liberty to interpret a stimulus in more than one way, it tends to interpret it the way it wants to, which is to say that your preferences influence your interpretations of stimuli in just the same way that context, frequency and recency do (p. 172; emphasis mine).
So it’s hard to intuit the motivations and triggers behind another person’s actions or lack thereof, since we only bring our experiences and knowledge to the table. Thus it’s important to approach the grey areas of life with the caution that self-awareness can bring.
Over the past few weeks socially conservative Republicans have engaged in heated rhetoric meant to use abortion as a wedge issue during budget negotiations, particularly where Planned Parenthood funding is concerned. The predominantly aging, white male politicians railing against access to pregnancy termination services repeatedly iterated the existence of alternatives to the preventative care provided by Planned Parenthood with little regard for the actual veracity of those claims. *
I wonder how much consideration was given to the constituents in their districts that relay on these services before politicization of the funding began. Journalist Andrea Grimes decided to seek out those allegedly easily accessible alternatives. She reported on the difficulty and time commitment necessary to find basic health screenings when myriad providers don’t ever answer the phone or call back, print resources are out of date or filled with misinformation and available appointments are frequently months off despite a present need.
On the advice of a anti-abortion activist commentator on her blog, Grimes sought out other federally-funded health centers.
I am privileged to have a flexible work schedule, home phone and home internet access, so I didn’t have to take time off work to go to the public library and use a pay phone, and I didn’t have to sneak around on a conservative, religious or abusive family or partner–and started making calls. Most places I telephoned did not provide reproductive health care and instead focused on providing low-income housing, job training and addiction-recovery programs…
a clinic close-ish to my home had no receptionist and a full voicemail. Another receptionist laughed at me because I’d been given the number for the county hospital front desk and told me to call a place called Los Barrios Unidos Community Clinic. When I called Los Barrios, I got an individual’s voice mail and had to take down another number to a switchboard, after which I was transferred to another voicemail that said the women’s health care folks would get back to me in 24 hours if I left my phone number. They’ve yet to call me. Later in the morning, I finally got through to the Los Barrios clinic in Grand Prairie, which is a western suburb of Dallas. They had appointments open in May, potentially, if I could call them back the morning of April 25th. There, a pap smear would cost me as little as $30, but maybe more depending on my income.
I made my last call to a Planned Parenthood clinic in central Dallas. The receptionist there told me they could schedule me that same afternoon for a full pelvic and breast exam. It’d be about $100, but there was a sliding scale.
I managed to change someone’s mind about the relevance of Planned Parenthood in rural and other underserved areas merely by forwarding along Grimes’s blog post. She made a compelling case for Planned Parenthood’s value by acting as if one of the five million women, men and young adults who rely on those services.
There are countless other policy issues addressing people who are otherwise marginalized or less powerful, whole needs are equally important.
And without our own day-to-day lives, understanding is sometimes better realized by setting aside our own limiting beliefs and embracing different perspectives that might not come naturally.
* I’m going to give those politicos the benefit of the doubt and assume they truly believe alternative access to care is easily accessible and that secondary philosophical beliefs about the role of women and acceptable sexual expression aren’t also at work.
More prolific blogger Susan sent me this video back in October. Musical-comedy group the Axis of Awesome details how every hit song uses the same 4 chords, and they string the hits together to prove it.
At Ignite DC 6, Joseph Price spoke about the mundane postings we’ve all become conditioned to seeing on Facebook and other social networking sites. He dared to ask “Why are you doing this?”
Ignite DC is taking speaker submissions until April 25. What would you tell a rambunctious, socially lubricated crowd if you had just five minutes and 20 slides to capture your story?
It’s also not too soon to purchase tickets for the June 2 event being held in DC.
In honor of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day today, UK nonprofit partnership EQUALS released the video below in an effort to remind viewers that despite the leaps and bounds in women’s rights from suffrage to access to education, women are far from equal footing with men all around the world.
Iconic character James Bond (as currently portrayed by Daniel Craig) literally stands in a woman’s shoes as an off-screen M, voiced by Dame Judi Dench, recites a set of sobering statistics proving just how far women still have to go for true equality.
“Are we equals? Until the answer is yes, we must never stop asking.”
Here’s a recent visual aid from the U.S. National Drought Migration Center. Look at all that drought cropping up in key agricultural terrain over the last three months.
All around the world, communities are either drying out or faced with unprecedented deluges.
Eastern Europe is also experiencing dramatic weather pattern shifts that are drying out long-settled and long-farmed areas. For instance, by 2050, there may not be enough water in the Czech Republic to provide for household and farming needs, and a number of the country’s rivers are expected to run dry. Homeowners are digging four times deeper to hit groundwater in the country than just 30 years ago.
In must-read article Europe Begins to Run Short of Water, professor Michael Marek commented on the Czech Republic drought to Inter Press Service:
The Czech Republic is already seeing the effects of climate change in more frequent extreme weather events and changes in biodiversity.
“But possibly the most important change is in the increasing drying out of the landscape as drier periods get longer and are followed by bursts of intense rainfall which the dry soil cannot absorb. This has a very significant effect on underground water supplies.
Though the total amount of precipitation in the country has remained relatively consistent, rain falls less often, but in heavier storms that cause flooding but the dry ground can only take so much.
(Check out the Boston Globe’s extensive photo spread of the aftermath of the Queensland flooding.)
Scientists must kick themselves nightly for labeling climate change “global warming,” as that label has left deniers an easy avenue to mock scientists after extreme colds snaps and nickname-worthy blizzards that dump more than a foot of snow at a time. . Despite the overwhelming support of the scientific community and their conclusions that human behavior — particularly Western industrial behavior – is a root cause of climate change, American deniers hold public policy hostage, refusing to address the issue.
How much longer can we ignore a global threat when the benefits of addressing the issue include a green jobs economy, less reliance on Middle Eastern oil, a cleaner environment and less money getting into the hands of terrorists? Especially since the flip side is increasingly violent and extreme weather, shifts in climate that dramatically affect the ability to produce food in nations around the world, and dwindling fresh water supplies that could yield global military action.
Seems like the impact and cost of climate change increases exponentially while American politicians sit it out.
Here’s a chart that illlustrating the number of unemployed constituents versus wealthy households in districts represented by a Republican Senator.
Wonk Room uses this char to point out that GOP senators represent 4 times as many unemployed people as wealthy households, yet the GOP practically started a war of words against the unemployed when the Democrats were busy capitulating on the Bush tax cuts.
The attacks on the those collecting unemployment would have you believe that the unemployed are relaxing at home collecting 50% less in earnings and doing nothing to return to full time employment status. They’re just lazy folks who won’t go out and get a job. Unproductive stigma and stereotyping is not getting a country to work.
While I’d like to hope that come November 2012, residents of those states will remember the rhetoric used to dismiss the concerns of the unemployed, it’s probably not going to happen. There wasn’t much of an uproar from constituents when the verbal attacks on the employment-challenged were actively taking place.
And I have to wonder in part if it’s a matter of self-identification. With more than 15 million people unemployed (a very conservative estimate), is an element of “I can’t believe it happened to me” in play? Joe/Jane Average has been dutifully reporting to work for X years and gets laid off after a round of budget cuts that couldn’t be avoided.
When listening to your representative going off on a tangent about the employed, you’re not considering yourself a part of THAT group; afterall, you were a hardworking, tax paying citizen that fell victim to the economy.
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