Ethics of Eating

According to assignment, I'm working on a concept map that can help me with a final project. The issue that I've started with is that of eating ethically. This concept map shows some of the issues that I am debating. It is (obviously) a work in progress, as I'm still trying to figure out how to label links appropriately and how to cover the issues, as there are even more that I'd like to add. Now let's see if it takes me anywhere...

Bottleneckers

Cross & Parker's "Hidden Power of Social Networks" really made me think. Social networks are all around us, but we (or at least I) rarely actually pay attention to them. The book was particularly centered around social networks in business settings, so it naturally made me think of work.

I used to work for Barnes & Noble, and in my years with them I was cross-trained in all of their different departments. Thus, I could cover receiving when the manager was gone, or fill in a cafe shift, work in the music department, kids department, main floor, etc. Because of this, a lot of my coworkers would come to me for information. On one of Cross & Parker's social network diagrams, I would probably have had a lot of lines coming and going. Usually I would think of this as a good thing. Who doesn't want to be a bit of an "expert," even if it is just in book selling?

However, Cross & Parker bring up an interesting point that it is not always a good thing to be centrally located. Sometimes it overloads the person who has become a network "hub," and their work performance is compromised because they end up meeting a lot of needs that aren't a part of their job description. Other times a person is centrally located because they like to dominate and control information, rather than helping it to flow freely throughout the network. Cross & Parker called these scenarios "bottlenecking," and suggested a careful analysis of these centrally located figures to ensure that they really were in healthy positions, and if they were not, to help them share their workload and information in more constructive manners.

So was I a bottleneck? Probably at least in some aspects. Although I liked to think of myself as an essential part, it may be that I was not helping as much as I thought I was. It's food for thought for a sometimes-over-achiever.

The Cartography of Concepts

I really enjoyed reading our article on underlying theory in concept maps (so Dr. Strickland and the rest of the class can now relax!). Concept maps are so familiar to me that I was really surprised to learn that they were only developed recently, in 1972. However, I was also familiar with the fact that seasons are caused by the angle of the earth's axis rather than its proximity to the sun, so it surprised me to learn that 21 Harvard grads were not. (In all fairness, a survey of 23 hardly presents a statistically significant result, plus research and selection methods were not mentioned, but still...)

Anyway, the part that I really appreciated was the discussion of the human brain not as a "...single 'vessel' to be filled, but rather a complex set of interrelated memory systems." This hearkens back to our class discussions about the internet as an extension of the human brain, and to one of my earlier blogs about how none of this is really new. However surreal the internet may seem, it is really just a different medium for the patterns our society is based on. Our brains have been using interrelated memory systems for quite some time (presumably!), so it's only logical to apply that to the way we use, store, and access information outside of them, hence web 2.0.

Connected?

Well, here goes. As a whole, "Connected" has served to make me quite connected. Within class, my negative reaction provoked me to be more interactive in discussions, bringing up my questions and difficulties. After class, I talked about it with my husband on the way home. That can't be a bad thing, right? In fact, I like that a lot.

But it still doesn't make me agree with the work as a whole. Like Lauren, I can appreciate Shaviro's approach, but I just didn't find it to be convincing. One of my problems is the voices of authority that he refers to. Foucault and Baudrillard are both highly respected philosophers, but they are both philosophers of post modernism (or, some would argue, post structuralism). Spicer is a poet that echoes their philosophies. None of this is bad (to me) on its own, but I felt that there was no balance of reference.

For example, Shaviro uses Baudrillard to say that "...the technosphere, or the mediascape, is the only 'nature' we know." Not only do I disagree with this, but because Shaviro doesn't mention any other support for this point besides Baudillard's philosophy about reality, I'm not convinced.
Similarly, when Jack Spicer says that "poems following the dictation of language" is "nonsense," or that poetry is a message that does not concern us, I find myself disagreeing and not being persuaded otherwise.

Ultimately Shaviro chose to use single voices without other examples or reference when he made his points, and he chose to reference voices from a single philosophical and historical perspective. This one-sided (in my opinion) approach was where the connection broke down. Even though he chose many different topics to discuss, I felt as though they were all presented from the same perspective, with little recognition of other perspectives. This in turn made me disagree with all of his little points, which sacrificed the effectiveness of the work as a whole.

BUT it challenged me. And that's a good thing, no matter how you look at it.