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Technomania

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I needed to take care of a work-related issue. I’d been e-mailing the woman I was dealing with about the issue, and she’d been sending me responses every few seconds.

I needed some documents, so I decided to walk over to her office, and pick them up in person. After all, I reasoned, it would give me a chance to personally thank my helper — and it was a beautiful, early summer day.

Walking would feel good, and would get me away from the computer for a bit.

Imagine how I felt when, upon arriving at her office, my head was nearly bitten off for not asking for the documents through e-mail.

“I’m very busy dealing with all these templates,” the woman I had wanted to thank practically shouted, pointing to a computer screen with about seven programs open. “You should just ask through e-mail. I don’t have time for this!”

While I didn’t enjoy being chewed out, I left her office feeling sorry not only for myself, but the woman as well. I felt very sad.

We were both victims of the ever-widening net of modern technology that seems to be reaching further and further into every aspect of daily life. And the ultimate casualty? Human interaction and civility.

It’s not enough that we have cell phones, iPods, laptops, wi-fi Internet access and Blackberries that keep every minute of our lives scheduled, ready to review with a few touches of the fingertips.

In June, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. This miracle device, which children as young as seven (who I taught in an arts enrichment program this summer), are now saving up over $600 for the ultimate whiz-bang bells-and-whistles toy everyone’s been waiting for.

According to wikipedia.com, “iPhone’s functions include those of a camera phone and a multimedia player, in addition to text messaging and visual voice mail. It also offers Internet services including e-mail, web browsing, and local Wi-Fi connectivity. User input is accomplished via a multi-touch screen with virtual keyboard and buttons.”

Whew! That’s a mouthful.

Imagine, with the iPhone, you will never worry about having left your iPod at home, or about being away from a computer screen to check your e-mail, making it that much easier to help the folks back in the office complete a work project — even from the beaches of Maui when you’re on your honeymoon while your wife reconsiders whether she really married the right person.

Unfortunately, this really happened to my best friend on her honeymoon.

In the past twenty years, there has been a global explosion of personal use technology. It started with the Internet, which really got going when I was in high school, about fifteen years ago. At the time, I had a long distance boyfriend I’d met at debate camp. We’d been writing letters (the kind you sent through the mail, with postage that still cost 29 cents).

Within a few short years, they would become the last handwritten, signed, sealed and delivered love letters I’d ever receive. Twelve years down the road, when my future husband would write me his own love letters, they came in the form of hundreds of e-mails, often typed on the sly at work. I think we might have saved them on a disk, but I have no idea where that disk is now.

Anyhow, seeing typed words flicker on a computer screen is not nearly as romantic as holding in your hand, the yellowed love letters my grandmother still has 65 years after they were mailed by my grandfather from the European theater of World War II. I don’t know if my own future grandchildren will have as many written words beyond a few birthday or Valentine cards to preserve our own love story.

Beyond love letters, another casualty of the personal technology boom seems to be people’s attention spans.

Educational studies have shown that the rise in children’s exposure to the internet, cell phones and that old bad guy, television, have been linked with lower levels of concentration in school.

I’ll believe it, having spent the summer teaching the first generation born after the Internet and cell-phone boom this past summer. All too often, the kids in my performing arts and creative writing classes would get antsy and stop listening to their peers after a mere two minutes. It seems too many kids today are not interested in activities unless they involved making their viewpoints paramount, and featured lots of high-tech instant gratification.

Think about it.

iPods started with the premise that you should be able to take “your” favorite tunes anywhere, and only have to listen to those songs you really love.

But how many really great, quirky songs are we missing out on truly loving because the iPod has destroyed the concept of an album in favor of catchy singles that can be downloaded?

And how many times have you groaned when your cell phone rang in the middle of a really great moment with someone you love, but you feel required to take the call?

How many times have you snapped a photo with the same cell phone’s camera, but the picture that lingers in your mind is just that, a moment never photographed, but unforgettable?
I’m scared that iPods will lead us all to live in what their name implies: a personal, cocoon-like pod existence, where we’re ostensibly plugged in to everything and everyone, but have lost the human ability to truly relate to or have empathy for one another.

Technology can be great. I love my laptop and appreciate e-mail’s contributions to helping me stay connected to work and friends.

But I don’t check that e-mail everyday anymore. And sometimes, I go several days at a time with my cell phone turned off.

This drives some people insane, because for some strange reason, they feel entitled to be able to reach me anytime, anywhere, always.

But they are not. I feel better off for turning off the techno-leashes like my cell phone or T.V., tuning out and simply being for a while.

Interestingly enough, these actions make me feel more like spending time with my fellow humans.

I may even feel compelled to walk over and see you, face to face. I just hope you’ll be happy to see me, once I get there.

Jasmine Marshall Armstrong is a graduate student at Fresno State getting her master of fine arts degree in creative writing.

Fun and Games – 08/31/07

Fun and games for Friday, August 31st.
Off the Mark
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Women without restraint

Jill Fields, Ph.D., knows her undergarments.

More specifically, she gives her historical and sociological take on women’s intimate apparel.

Author of the recently published “An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality,” Fields hoped to provoke readers with the history behind an often-overlooked everyday necessity, lingerie.

With an eyebrow-raising title, the book garnered positive feedback for its take on the evolving history of women over the decades.

The Washington Post called it “a rich and nuanced understanding” about how clothes can change the “historical context of women’s lives just as much as they shape the actual contours of women’s bodies.”

Though Fields isn’t the first to write about how women view themselves, her book sets out to define the historical significance of the clothing women wear underneath it all every day.
“ [I provided] information of a lesser known topic to bring about new ways of thinking,” Fields said.

Fields, an associate history professor at California State University, Fresno, specializing in modern U.S. and Women’s History, has spent the past few years researching and writing her book.

She started her research as a graduate student at the University of Southern California, using glamour as her dissertation topic and thesis for her doctorate.

Though she loved every minute of her research, the writing portion sometimes proved difficult.

“Graduate students use big words and I tried weeding them out,” Fields said, expressing her desire to captivate as many readers as possible.

As she became further engrossed in the topic, she developed a sense of just how important every aspect of lingerie history is, even the topics that seemed mundane at first.

In her process of writing a historical view of glamour, she decided to focus on intimate apparel. To Fields it was the quest to present this most interesting subject.

“Fashion is important, along with why women dress the way they do,” Fields said, explaining that the relationship between one’s body and how their clothing shapes their identity.

To fully capture moments in history, Fields knew that illustrations would be crucial to draw readers in. Illustrations included in the book include advertisements for bras during influential movements in American history, including the civil rights movement. For example, one advertisement made a reference to all women being “made” equal thanks to a Maidenform bra.

Other inserts include pictures of restricting corsets, women who defined a moment in time and still photos of popular movie scenes. But coming to these selections was no small task.
“I had over 400 slides and only chose 75 for the book,” Fields said.

Since the completion and publication of “An Intimate Affair,” Fields is working on editing a volume on feminist art in Fresno and researching her second book on the Jewish female body in U.S. pop culture.

Field’s main goal in all of her works is to change “the ideas of femininity expressed through the body.”

Who: Jill Fields, Ph.D., author of “An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie and Sexuality”

What: Book signing

When: Saturday, Sept. 29, 2 p.m. – 4 p.m.

Where: Barnes & Noble near River Park

New music prof accepts call to rebuild orchestra

Fresno State’s music department added a new face during the summer—a master cellist, soloist, chamber musician and conductor who the department hopes will revive the long-defunct campus symphony orchestra.

Thomas Loewenheim, Ph.D., a native of both Germany and Israel who most recently taught at Indiana University in Bloomington, brings a wealth of experience as the newest instructor of string instruments.

Strings are perhaps the most crucial part of a symphony orchestra, and according to music professor Thomas Hiebert, the strings section at Fresno State has been deficient for some time.

Enter Loewenheim, who was hired, in part, to build up the orchestra.

Loewenheim came to Fresno State because he found it to have “fantastic facilities, fantastic faculty and a strong will to have an orchestra.”

Loewenheim said he had high hopes for one day conducting a university orchestra that would rival any other in the state or even the nation, but for now, the orchestra is being built from scratch.

“Hopefully people will come here because it’s the best education they can get and it’s affordable,” Loewenheim said.

Still in the process of moving in, Loewenheim’s office walls are completely bare. But prominently displayed in the room is a grand piano, although Loewenheim admits he doesn’t play it.

“The cello’s hard enough,” Loewenheim said. “It’s better for me to focus on this one instrument.”

When he conducts an orchestra, however, Loewenheim finds it necessary to focus on everything and everyone, including the audience. The aim, he said, is “to get a fantastic product of everyone doing what they’re supposed to do.”
He imagines the orchestra as a model of society, with everyone responsible for their own actions—first for their own section, then to the larger group, then to everyone in the room. Loewenheim also sees it as an opportunity to build relationships, express goodwill and build a spiritual foundation for those involved.

“Instead of blowing up others, why can’t we just believe what we want and accept others?” he said. “With the orchestra, we bring people together and learn how to work together.”

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Loewenheim moved to Israel with his family when he was very young. His musical training started early, but the cello was particularly stressed.

“It was my mom’s idea,” Loewenheim said. “She plays cello and decided I was going to play cello.”

A fan of all string instruments, Loewenheim said he liked the cello because of its wide range in pitch and because “it’s the closest instrument to the human voice.”

Lately, another of Loewenheim’s interests has been research, particularly in rediscovering pieces of music repertoire from past eras, such as forgotten concerti, chamber music and unaccompanied cello work.

“I’m the Indiana Jones of music libraries,” Loewenheim said.

Yet his heart still lies with the orchestra, in which he has starred as a cellist, soloist and conductor, among other roles over the years.

He said, “When you combine that many types of instruments harmoniously, you just don’t hear a sound like that anywhere else.”

Orchestra Info:

Auditions for University Orchestra to be held next
week in the Old Music Building for all instrument sections.

Interested individuals
should contact Thomas Loewenheim
for more information.

What is ASI?

While many students are crashing classes and begging instructors to add them to their roll sheets, a few have been checking out classes they don’t plan to add.

That’s because they’re just stopping by to introduce themselves.

They’re students who want to tell the story of what it’s like to be involved in the campus community and inform their peers about what Fresno State has to offer. And they only need a few minutes to tell students what Associated Students, Inc. (ASI) can do for them.

For incoming freshmen, or apathetic students who may not know, ASI, formally Associated Students, is Fresno State’s student government, which includes senators who represent each of the colleges or schools on campus.

“We basically bit the bullet,” ASI President J.P. Moncayo said of this semester’s tedious new method of reaching out to the student body.

Now in his second term, Moncayo said ASI realized it has to be more aggressive about communicating its message to students by outlining what they do for the campus.

Going from classroom to classroom is “the hardest way” to spread the ASI word, yet it’s a “very strong way for us to get the word out on top issues,” Moncayo said.

The visits offer information about ASI funding that’s available to campus clubs and organizations, low-cost health insurance and the phone number for the campus police department.

These start-of-the-semester presentations will continue to hit classrooms, Moncayo said, “until we exhaust it.”

So far, ASI officers have presented themselves to 800 students in this manner. They plan to increase that number to at least 2000 students over the next two weeks.

But ASI doesn’t intend to have the student body at hello. The group plans to use classroom presentations proactively to educate students on hot topics such as a possible increase in parking fees that may eventually require a student vote. From there, ASI will inform students what options they have when it comes time to vote.

“We’re gonna get our hands really dirty,” Moncayo said.

Erica Dement, ASI’s communications director, said some of the new ways they plan to increase student involvement is through Bulldog Squad, a new campus spirit group she anticipates will launch in early October.

While Dement discussed ways students can improve their campus experience by applying for positions in ASI and the Bulldog squad, she said students who aren’t members of any campus organizations can still see ASI’s impact on the campus community through scholarships they fund, the library laptop program and the Pick-a-Prof service, which allows students to rate and review professors.

She also hopes ASI’s office will be a welcoming one for the student body.

According to Moncayo, students can turn to ASI if they come across issues such as problems with professors.

“The office is a great place to start,” Moncayo said, since ASI is “more prone to know who to contact” when complaints about instructors arise.

He also hopes the ASI office will be a “good front desk for the university and student life” so students can drop by whenever they’re looking for answers.

“The problem we have on campus is students not being aware of what’s going on,” said D.J. Clovis, ASI’s director of student involvement.

He said he hopes to alleviate the “I didn’t know what was going on” mentality by creating a calendar of events to give students advance notice of events happening on campus.

Clovis’ goal is simple: he wants everyone “to be excited to be a Fresno State student.”

ASI has a central point they hope to get across to the student body.

“Every student is a member of ASI,” said Mackee Mason, ASI’s senator of athletics.

The belief is one Moncayo hopes will push students who want to see change around campus.

“My hope,” Moncayo said, “is that people who are really angry will join ASI.”

Free music: you get what you pay for

I like free music. Who doesn’t?

My unquenchable thirst for downloadable music — legal or questionably legal — took a strange turn when a friend turned me onto the archives of the United States military bands. The Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps bands all have their own websites.

As far as I could find, our friends in the Coast Guard were left out. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve been looking for a copy of their song — the catchiest of any branch — to no avail.

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