R U ready 4 Progress? ;] Wht tht txt is rly saying.

TOPIC: Progress

SOURCE: Changes in monetary growth as well as the cultural implications of money (and other manifestations of wealth) are described on pages 59-66 of RR.

RELATION: According to Robbins, “every culture has a distinct material symbol or activity that defines for its members what is most important in life, what is needed for well-being and happiness” (59), which is true for our own culture, as demonstrated in the way that obsession with new cell phones and the new forms of communication that that allows suggests a shift in the “distinct symbol or activity” our culture has come to value.

DESCRIPTION: In paying closer attention to the multitude of text messages I receive on a daily basis from an assortment of people, with whom I am associated either casually or more professionally, I figured there was more to each message than the actual content of the text. Each message I receive tends to be different than each other in the way it is formed, both in sentence structure and word choice/spelling. I can almost immediately guess the author of a text before I have read who sent it. That being said, the text messages which called my attention for purposes of observation were those which did not follow conventional standards of language composition and spelling of words. I began to notice which of my friends tended not to care that all vowels would be placed in the proper place, safely embedded in a complete sentence, marked by its initial capital letter (or any other necessary uppercase characters), and ended in some way by a mark of punctuation. These differences a few years ago might have come down to the fact that some phones possessed a more advanced technology and could therefore craft a complete sentence with more ease; however, nowadays, it seems that anyone who is texting me has an even fancier phone than me, speaking also to the state of our culture in terms of a previously luxurious item, the SmartPhone, having made its way into the standard way of things. A few years ago, this would have meant that we had all “made it” for ourselves, but today it is deemed usual. Also, in that respect, it was interesting to me to start to observe who insisted on doing what when it came to writing a text message, especially because some took great time to write eloquently when others seemed not to care about the conventions of language at all.

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: This study of the way that people write and send text messages is just a piece of a much larger anthropological case study—the use and function of language itself and the way that our different mediums of technology have affected our choices in communication. And as I took a look at the text messages and other written media of communication in my own life, it became apparent that a lot of the motivation behind crafting a well-written text message has to do with what the recipient of that message would think of the message upon reading it. I, for example, noticed that a text message from a student in one of my classes with whom I rarely speak outside of an educational setting, would take greater care not to allow errors or any hiccoughs in his/her writing (after all, we are working together in classes, aiming for that same high mark). And the same principle seemed to apply to an email from a teacher. I guarantee Professor so-and-so proofread that message before pressing SEND, and it wasn’t just because that same person is a part of the English Department. In addition, I have noticed that certain friends would not have a problem texting another one of our friends using the informal and often incorrect “text-speak” while that same friend has made a point to tell me that the messages I receive are formed with care for the very fact that I am an English major, meaning I would “know the difference”. To me, this consideration for what might “offend” others about the messages we send them—in the same way that simply sending a message at all to a person other than the one sitting across the table and demanding full attention—can be explained by the fact that our culture is what we have allowed it to become, with the responsibility to assign and ascribe meaning in order to make experience matter more to us as people and then to work to “recognize the meanings we impose on our experiences” (RR page 22).

The Monopoly Metaphor

TOPIC: Cultural Text

SOURCE: Pages 94-95 in RR discuss the process of interpretive drift and the idea that as a person becomes more closely involved with a particular activity, he tends to exhibit a drift in the way that he interprets the events associated with that activity. And page 20 discusses the way that this sort of situation can be used as a “text of significant symbols—words, gestures, drawings, natural objects—that carries meaning,” revealing important characteristics about the game/object/ritual and the people who create and involve themselves with it.

RELATION: The effect that involvement in an activity has on a person’s interpretation of that activity and the meanings that we ascribe to those events and activities can be seen in our every- day lives and in the things to which we ascribe meaning. Some of our key metaphors in society work under these same principles, just as we see in the case of sports like football and baseball (CC 310), or even board-games, like in this instance.

DESCRIPTION: I do not like the game Monopoly. And as much as I wish my Monopoly-obsessed friends would quit inviting me to play the game with them, I could not miss out on the opportunity to perform some anthropological fieldwork in a setting I knew would be so rich with American culture. The game itself, which consists of each participant’s forming monopolies over the “land” that is the game-board in hopes of causing all others to declare bankruptcy, would give me all I needed, and I delighted further in the fact that my friends in particular happen to be over-the-top competitive in everything they do, especially when it comes to board games. Upon looking closer, however, I realized that there was a sort of pattern to the way that they all seemed to compete, each of them playing a similar role to the ones that they do in our ordinary social group. For example, one friend kept trying to form alliances (with the intention to “take down” another friend, of course) while another friend simply wished to acquire a certain color of properties, regardless of value. Then there was the friend who wanted everyone to win, even if it meant sharing her money and getting yelled at by each previously mentioned player, as well as a fourth player who seemed to forget that any of us had ever been friends as soon as he placed his thimble on the board…And because these Monopoly gatherings are a regular event for these folks [“Routines are comforting; they bring order into a world in which players have little control” (CC 312)], most of them have their own good luck charms and rituals to perform, which is fun to watch, especially if that person begins to win and that trick appears “important or somehow linked to good performance” (CC 312) and therefore continues in full force in each game that follows. The best part is this: that it’s all very silly. And as it happened, I got to watch each of my friends change and become more and more driven to win in strange ways And for the most part, they seemed not to notice that it was odd, because they were still being themselves, only in a different situation that, due to routine immersion in that situation, they have come to think about very differently.

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: What each of these players has in common is their treatment of the game as a battle, much like in the way that Robbins compares American football to war. The game, which each of them has been playing since he/she was little, seems ordinary and innocent enough, but as someone not familiar with the rules of the game until much later on in life, I started to see that the cut-throat nature of the game does not stem solely from the people who play it. The game, in its very nature, promotes capitalism, competition, and dominion over others—and the game is that way because the creators made it that way to begin with, just as people choose to exaggerate or downplay those features in a modern playing of the game. And that, I think, says a lot about not only the people who play this game, but those people who made it, knowing that people would enjoy that sort of thing. And of course my friends enjoy it: It’s a metaphor for the capitalistic society in which they/we live—and thrive.