is the bestselling memoir of James McBride, a biracial journalist, jazz saxophonist, and composer whose Jewish mother gave birth to twelve children, all of whom she raised in a housing project in Brooklyn. His mother witnessed the premature death of her first husband, a reverend, and through sheer force of will saw each of her children graduate from college. Her basic household tenets rested on the importance of academic success and the church, and many of her children moved on to earn graduate and professional degrees.…
After reading the book “Into The Wild” there are many words that come to mind when describing Christopher McCandless. To Jon Krakauer Chris McCandless was rash, but Krakauer insists that McCandless “wasn’t a nutcase, he wasn’t a sociopath, he wasn’t an outcast. McCandless was something else - although precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim perhaps”(85). The real question still remains unanswered, what precisely was McCandless? Chris McCandless ultimately should be described as a romantic. Chris was a free spirit, he was a counterculture adventurer who escaped the shackles of prescribed society and lived for the moment. He ended his relationship with endless consumption and simply went out and experienced people and places for what they really…
The most important place in Chris McCandless’s life is quite possibly the place he died, the fateful Fairbanks bus number 142. The bus is situated in a clearing in the Alaskan wilderness, surrounded by tall trees, undisturbed by the advances of modern life. While the painting is based on an actual image of bus 142, the vast emptiness of the clearing around the bus symbolizes how alienated McCandless felt by his community for his atypical beliefs. The brush growing around the bus and in the corner of the clearing represents modern views trying to invade his personal set of values. In the background, the fir trees represent all the different people in McCandless’s life and how powerful their influences on him. The bigger trees are people like Jim Gallien and Wayne Westerberg, both…
Effective listening involves more than just hearing what other people are saying. Listening errors occur and usually result in misunderstandings, missed business opportunities, premature judgments, and wasted time and money. To get the full meaning of what someone says requires energy and discipline, both of which contribute to what is known as active listening. In the article "Learn to listen, and you'll learn to sell," David Connolly explains that, "the best agents in the insurance industry talk only 20% of the time during an interview with a new prospect, and that 20% is in the form of questions." David Connolly is an independent agent, owner of Splinter Group Consulting, and executive vice president of the Cabinetmaker's Association. David…
Too much attention is given to our desire to never be alone with our own thoughts in this day and age. This in turn leads people to have no sense of self unless it is somehow justified through our social interactions. We, as people, have gone from the thought focused on in the romantic era, and best quoted by Clive Hamilton, “He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone”, to the notion that being alone means you suffer from some kind of social, or anxiety disorder; and it is this kind of thinking that fuels our addiction to social networking. Youths do not want to go a single day without updating their statuses on Facebook to alert their peers to exactly what they are doing. Adults provide young children with their first catalyst into technology by being too busy to spend time with their child and introducing them to television from the time they are in diapers. In conclusion, us, humanity, society, and even as individuals, have lost what it truly means to be just that, an individual, and I fear that if something is not done to relinquish the control electronics have on our daily lives we will end up as socially neurotic, constantly anxious, sociopaths that…
“When every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy?” (348). Orenstein has a strong argument, when we share every moment for the world to glimpse at, it strips away your personal identity. People lose their own sense of humanity and how they treat others in real life. It is analogous to the saying where people become objects and objects become people. Everyone loves the wrong object and treats others in the wrong way. A study by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan concluded that people have lost empathy, especially after the beginning of social media. Orenstein states, “Social media may not have instigated that trend, but by encouraging self-promotion over self-awareness, they may well be accelerating it” (348). The destruction of relationships will worsen as time goes on since people are slowly losing humanity traits, such as empathy, due to people being engrossed in social…
In a recent study conducted by Matthew Brashears of Cornell University, 2,000 adults were asked the number of friends whom they share a close relationship with. The average response was 2.03 and it decreased from a similar study from 1985, which received an average response of three close friends (Silard. “From Face-to-Face to Facebook”). It is proven that humans thrive on human interaction, so cutting that face-to-face off could damage humans negatively by causing them to suffer more health problems due to physical inactivity and no interaction. “People who, like the Facebook COO, claim that we have never been so connected with each other are missing a vital point: the people making all these "connections" through the Internet and social media are, in the non-virtual plane sometimes referred to as "reality," sitting alone in front of a pixelated screen.” (Silard.). Even though we are able to interact with different of people from around the world, we become isolated from the people around us. People cut off their friends and family and would rather spend time on the…
Wortham, J. (2011, May 19). Does Facebook Help or Hinder Offline Friendships?. The New York Times, p.…
The changes and advancement in technology has made a huge impact on how the way children have communicated. The “number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24% within the last four years and 87% of those are between the ages of 12 and 17 are online.”(Lenhart, 2005) “Today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to…
Today, new generations have adapted to a lifestyle where we invest the majority of our time in technology. Technology has allowed social medias such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter to control who our friends are. Malcolm Gladwell highlights whether or not these friendships are truly genuine, or inauthentic ones just kept over social media. In his essay, “Small Changes: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, Gladwell distinguishes between these two types of friendships as either “strong ties” or “weak ties”. He defines weak ties as a group of friends that we keep over social media, but don’t really exist in real life. Although weak ties come off as a negative thing, Gladwell sees strength in weak ties. Sherry Turkle, the author of the essay “Alone Together”, would disagree with Gladwell’s views on friendships kept through social media. Turkle believes very strongly in authentic relationships, and she therefore does not see technology as something that will benefit us. Turkle believes that technology makes us unable to hold authentic relationships. Personally, I disagree with Gladwell and agree with Turkle. Technology and social media have made us loose focus on who our real friends are, and people will continue down this path of inauthenticity until fake relationships, or weak ties, are all that we have left. New generations have begun to invest all of their time in the friends that they make over social media, leaving little to no time for their real friends. Weak ties, in the long run, will completely take over the time we invest in our strong ties, thus diminishing authentic relationships.…
“It is said that our most evocative sense is the sense of smell, and after the names of the villages and the numbers and the dates have grown dim in your memory, the thing you can never forget about a battlefield is the smell.” – Philip Caputo…
In Stephen Marche’s article “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” (2013) Marche suggests that over time, loneliness is becoming more prominent in today’s society. Marche develops his claim by using many published research and scholarly articles. In order to make readers aware of this growing epidemic, Marche’s purpose is to show that by using Facebook people are becoming more isolated. The target audience for this article is Facebook users and people who are interested in joining. Although Marche argues that Facebook is making people lonely, Facebook doesn’t isolate people because of the many networking features such as sending messages and writing on walls.…
In order to understand this article , the key term "friend" must be understood. There are many varying definitions of "friend" but Dailey ultimately defines "Facebook friend" as being people who you interact with most frequent. This definition is supported by Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sciology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Adams states that "friends" are not as voluntarily as they seem but rather is restricted by education, age, and background (203). Like the definition of "friend", Dailey's assertions are supported with sufficient and convincing evidence from research and studies conducted from graduate work and research from students or professors at distinguished universities. Dailey provides many logical appeals in her argument. A common logo Dailey used was the "better and worse"(140) logo presented in her argument that "because happiness spreads…
Sharing our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, gives others the sense of knowing you on a personal level and essentially creating a digital friendship with you. Thompson believes that this results in meaningful positive changes in how we interact with each other. This interaction can occur online and Thompson explains that when cruising his newsfeed, “it’s his (my) personal interest in his (my) friends that makes their newsfeeds meaningful. If you were to glance at the people he (I) follows you would just see disjointed info” (Thompson, 2013). Each individual is different and the more exposure to another person through these constant updates, can increase this sense of “social proprioception”.…
In “Will They Call Us ‘Generation Isolations’?,” Diane Schmitt explains that modern technology’s impact on people’s social interaction or lack there of seems to be a mixed bag. According to Schmitt, mobile phones and social networking websites have been some researches suggesting that there is indeed a correlation between use of Internet, video games, and MP3 palyers and reduced face-to-face interaction. For instance, in one study, about 10 percent of who spent more 5hours online had fewer social interactions. The author describes more people live isolated nowadays than the previous generation. On the other hand, the author point out that the latest technology can encourage people to have more social relations. A research tells that people…