Road Trip Post 4: To Minneapolis

So I've been too wrapped up in enjoying my time in Minneapolis to have time to blog about how I got here. Due to the loyalty of my readership, I feel obligated to catch people up...


Here is a view of the highway heading towards downtown Chicago.



So Will and I left Chicago bright and early for Milwaukee where we had lunch with my Great Aunt Selma. Aunt Selma is doing fabulously and it was good to talk to her about politics, old age and family. It was beneficial to be with an elderly person especially after spending the past five months almost exclusively with my college friends. I think one of the big flaws of the college life, and maybe our society in general, is how isolated age groups are.


Anyway, while on the road through Wisconsin, Will suggested we stop at the Wisconsin Dells, what he described as the "Midwestern Las Vegas with water parks instead of casinos." I think stopping at the Dells was crucial for my journey of American discovery: it is a cultural landmark and we went to the largest indoor water park in America:
Will and I connected with our inner eight grader in the park, but the park was topped by our most quintessentially American experience of the trip: our time in a steakhouse next to the water park. The booths at the steak house were set up so you had no choice but to watch one of the four large projected TV screens. The booths were equipped with dials to chose which audio from the different TV's you wanted. And in case you wanted to avoid TV, sorry, but the American Idol audio was playing loudly in the restaurant. We were fortunate enough to be there during the American Idol finale and the restaurant erupted in applause when one of the David's won. Between the four large projections of different channels (and more TV's around the room), the blaring audio and the steak it was nearly impossible to interact with the people you came to eat with. Oh, America.

Anyway we camped that night, then arrived in Minneapolis the next day. I've done a lot so far in Minneapolis and I'll spare you all the details (and the names of the different lakes) but one of our highlights so far for sure was our time at Carlton College with my friends from camp, Lydia and Drew. We were blessed with the festivities of Rotblatt, an event that involves waking up at 4:30 AM to play softball with beer in hand.

Anyway yesterday we went to the Zoo which was large and interesting and I was graced by the sight of our country's glorious national symbol:


Today, I went to Sound Stage 08, a hip-hop festival where I saw Brother Ali, Atmosphere, Aesop Rock and Dilated Peoples, among others. Brother Ali had amazing positive energy rocked the crowd. It was great to see independent music thriving.

I fly back to the San Francisco on Tuesday, and once I'm back in the bay area, I promise to look back on the trip and reflect on what I've learned about America.

Road Trip Post 3: Detroit to Chicago and... Art?

First, I need to reflect on the interconnectedness of the world we live in. The fact that I have been able to blog every night of this trip is ridiculous and part of me loves it, part of me is more than ready to go to camp and get away from it. Kind of like America. The more I see of it, the more I love it... and yet....

Anyway, today we said goodbye to Ken in East Lansing Michigan (his Mother is staying there--not to worry; we didn't abandon him). Ken will be sorely missed as the Corolla continues West.

Despite the many miles covered today, I didn't take any pictures (the scenery was fairly bland and we didn't see any major landmarks or eat any sprinkle covered doughnuts).

As I drove through South Western Michigan, we listened to the first half of a podcast my Dad sent me about the psychology of social networking websites. Two things struck me. First, it was interesting to listen to to Michael Krasny and his guests try to explain Facebook to their obviously older listeners. This really highlighted the divide our culture is facing between the plugged in and the not plugged in. (Excuse my over the top way of speaking--we're listening to Obama's victory speech in Iowa tonight and it's kind of getting to me--I'm amped up on change.)

Anyway another thing that stood out to me from the podcast was that one of the professors on the show talked about the power of loose connections coming together on a mass scale. This is what I was trying to get at in my final project with Evan. The professor seemed to be talking a lot about how this emerging phenomenon of interpersonal connections will have an effect on advertising and commerce, but I see this having positive political and cultural effects too. It really has me optimistic about what the internet is doing.

As we continued towards Chicago, we started talking about art. We covered a lot of ground in this talk and it ended up being very IB ToK (Will is also an IB diploma recipient). I'll spare you the details of my whole talk with Will, but I ended up with the idea that some art (which mostly can be defined as a trying to share one's humanity) can objectively be more effective (or better) than other art. Will also made a really good point that a very important part of art is the journey of discovery it takes you on. (This came up because I was thinking about different aesthetics in art and whether or not it is always good to be overt in one's expression). This idea that art is in many ways helping another along a journey or thought process is very powerful and I will continue to think about it.

Also, in the context of our conversation on good art, I forced Will to listen to Coldplay's "Amsterdam" in its entirety and he liked it. Score one for George's mission to spread Coldplay around the globe.

Road Trip Post 2: Toronto to Detroit: A story in pictures

I am currently bumming free wireless from an unknown source somewhere near the house I'm staying in in Detroit. Gotta love the twenty first century. Here's what we did today:

Will stayed up nearly all night last night finishing a paper and Ken has been having problems with his contacts so I did most of the driving today. Anyway we started our day in Toronto the Canadian way, at Tim Horton's. Let me tell you, we surpassed the national Canadian average of 2.3 doughnuts a day in one sitting.


The Tim Horton's we went to was the most diverse establishment any of us had ever been in. I had heard that Toronto was "the most cosmopolitan city in the world" but it was amazing to see all these people of different backgrounds together and friendly.

Anyway the doughnuts were great:
We went on to walk towards the tallest free standing tower in the world, the CN tower. Here's my attempt at an artistic picture of it:


My computer is running out of battery and we can't charge our batteries here because of the three prong issue, so I will leave you with this picture of Will reliving his childhood (a picture of him was taken here when he was 10).

Road Trip Post 1: Iron Man, Metaphysics and 400 miles

As promised, I will be blogging my thoughts on the roadtrip with Will and Ken and later my thoughts on my stay in Minneapolis.

Leaving Middlebury was definitely sad; I had my last meal in Proctor and it was especially stirring to saying goodbye to Thom who I won't see until I go to France next spring.



But our trip starting magnificently with a Verve/Jay-Z mashup blaring as we drove out of the bubble. We were graced with a rainbow (left) as we crossed Lake Champlain and made good time to Will's family friends' house in Saranac Lake.

Then we decided to go see the new movie, Iron Man. Wow. What a movie. If I had known anything about the movie before I had walked into the theater I probably wouldn't have gone in.

What really interested me about the movie was it addressed ideas of Americanism. In the first half of the movie, this weapons engineer is held captive by muslim terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan. To simplify the plot, he builds a superhero suit by engineering this new energy source and kicks some "islamofascist" ass.

This was very interesting to me because the Iron Man dominated the terrorists in very primordial ways: the terrorists' AK47 bullets bounced right off the Iron Man's suit. He beat them up with his fists. Because of his intellectual prowess and ingenuity, he was able to be more manly and primordial then the terrorists.

It was as if the film-makers were saying that through our technology and braininess we can be more manly than the animalistic terrorists. This is interesting in the context of Mark Steyn (a speaker college Republicans brought in this year)'s affirmation that what our culture lacks manliness.

In many ways, I see a social phenomenon of a Napoleonic complex going on with my wonderful neoconservative fellow citizens. From "Bring it on" to "Dead or Alive" to Mark Steyn's comments, these men are afraid of losing their manliness to terrorists. They think they can defeat terrorists by out-manning them and starting wars. Admittedly, it sounds farfetched and reactionary of me to say this, but I've been thinking a lot recently about how our cultural landscape influences our politics.

Anyway, Iron Man was terrible on every level and Will rightly compared it to Snakes on a Plane.

We slept well and the next day we went on a quick hike and had a great view of the Saranac Lake area:

We then had a pleasant six hour drive to Toronto, where we just got some Pho at a Vietnamese place, enjoyed the drinking age by having some wine with dinner and had a pretty intense metaphysical talk.

Good times. Tomorrow: on to Detroit!

Discovering America

So I'm done with classes almost--still have some wiki-editing to do. But nevertheless, it is time to load up the ipod with podcasts, pack up my room and... look for America.

Yes. Will, I and Ken (for part of the trip) are driving from Midd to Will's home in Minneapolis. Highlights along the way will include Niagara falls, Chicago, parts of Canada and god knows what else.

To the extent that I have internet access, I will blog about the trip and post pictures. I'm very excited to see a new part of America, because after all the more America you see, the more America you love.

Here is a tentative route:

Gay Marriage Ruling

Check out my thoughts here.

Free will, videogames and the impact of digitized media on our souls

For my Media Technology and Cultural Change final, I am creating a wiki with my classmates.

I am in the process of creating the page on Ian Bogost's concept of "Procedural Rhetoric." In what is mostly a fascinating book (particularly the section on videogames' effect on politics), Bogost explains that videogames can be viewed as pieces of media that argue specific points through their procedure (ie. their interactivity). I think this is a fascinating (and very true) concept. I could go on about how the fundamental assumptions video game architects make communicate a specific world view, or to connect classes, specific "social warrants"--But this post is going to stick to philosophy.

Bogost really got my brain spinning when he cited Weber and Jared Diamond's piece to argue that every behavior (including human behavior) has a logical process behind it. This may seem like a fairly innocuous claim but on a deeper level, isn't the implication of this that human beings don't have free will?

Admittedly, I am reading too much into Bogost's statement, but nevertheless the way Bogost, a scholar of digital media chimes in on such a weighty issue as free will is indicative of a larger phenomenon: digital media and the procedure that come with the software we use is changing the way we think about ourselves in fundamental ways.

I, for one, spend a ridiculously large amount of time on my computer, interacting with logical procedurality. And what is this teaching me? It is conditioning me to accept a world of direct cause and effect, of pervasive logic.

I need to note here that I do not pretend to disagree with Bogost saying that everything has a procedure behind it. I believe that everything in the physical universe has a direct cause and effect behind it (even on a quantum level, I think "randomness" is just symptomatic of processes our physicists can't explain yet).

And yet something bothers me in the way that Bogost can so casually dismiss the idea of human free will within the context of a book on videogames and digital procedurality. Is there no room for humanity in this modern way of thinking?

I can't help but use Bogost as a very intelligent example of how our society has become overly entrenched in the realm of man-made logical systems and that that has had an effect on the way we see ourselves. We are no longer free beings with souls, instead we are more complicated versions of computers with input and output systems.

And this leads me to the notion of faith. As I understand it (partly through my Intro to Philosophy class), there is no good logical way to prove that we have free will, or even to prove that we exist. Descartes comes up short. So do Hume and Kant, in my opinion. Instead what we as humans are left with, in my opinion, is the absurd, improbably and yet undeniable knowledge that we are living beings with souls.

We have free will. Not that we can explain it. You just know you have freewill. You can stand up and shout randomly. You can fall in love. Please don't tell me that my "peak experiences" in life (being overcome by the beauty of the California coastline, falling in love) have just been products of stimulus inputs. Yes, these moments were influenced by the world around me, but there was still an undeniable humanity in them. I felt alive.

So please, try not to let digital media and this hyper-logical world deprive you of your humanity.

Facebook and Social Capital

For my Media Technology and Cultural Change final, I worked with Evan on a project examining Social Capital in terms of Facebook. Does Facebook create meaningful Social Capital? Are the ties of Facebook "bridging" or "bonding" social capital? Why does this matter?

Here is a high quality version.

Or you can watch on YouTube:

George in Growth

Due to overwhelming reader feedback, I am changing the name of this blog to "George In Growth."

In other news, Jerimiah Wright is a real dumbass.

Finally, this post by my professor offers a perspective on Midd we don't hear enough about.

Connecting classes and fixing the world

As my limited readership knows, I've been pretty inspired to do new and different things this semester. I could go on about how I've had good semester with friendships and personal tranquility in my life, but I think a lot of what has inspired me, this semester has actually been my classes, as sappy as that sounds.

My classes have been so thought provoking because, to steal a term from an author I read for my Media Technology and Cultural Change class (Jenkins), there has been a certain "Convergence Culture" surrounding my classes themselves. By this I mean my classes have come together and I have been able to form opinions about the world and how I see things by combining the overarching themes of my different classes. To stretch things a little further, what my Professors have been trying to communicate to me through my classes has come together nicely and enabled me to form my own theories about how to fix the world.

I'll start with my Comparative Politics class. Although I am somewhat frustrated with the overly technical nature of Comparative and its superficiality, Professor Bleich and the material have communicated two really interesting ideas to me. First is that there are no easy answers in the social sciences and political change comes incredibly slowly. Second, is the idea that social capital and civic engagement (Putnam) is essential to a functioning democracy.

So being the political animal I am, I've thought a lot about how what America really needs is civic engagement--a change in the country's culture. This has been reinforced by my 2oth century American Culture class which has taught me (little to my surprise) that with the perils of the consumer republic, suburbanization and other cultural phenomena going way back, our culture is seriously distracted, apathetic and commercialized.

Enter Media Technology and Cultural Change. One of the many things I've learned from this class (that everyone at Middlebury should take) is that with the convergence of old and new media and the new creation of networks, there is tremendous opportunity for more civic engagement and the creation of a better democratic institutions.

But it won't be easy, and change won't necessarily come hand and hand with technological change.

And this brings me to my creative writing class. In my talks with professor Payne, I've thought a lot about a fundamental need for us humans to communicate to one another. To reach out and acknowledge our similarities in going through the struggle that is life. To a large extent, this human connection is what our culture is lacking. We are drifting apart.

So in order to solve our problems (the largest of which I believe is social disintegration ie. loneliness), we need a change in culture. In order to change our politics (poli sci class), we need to change our culture (American Studies) with the correct implementation of technology (media tech class) and with art and human connection (writing class).

I don't pretend to know how to go about changing our society organically, but I think between poetry, politics and PC's we can take some steps in the right direction.