I saw a commercial today that normally would have set me off like a bomb, but I must be getting resigned because I just watched and sighed. It was for Verizon and featured a teenage boy, his dad, and the boy’s friend on a hike in the woods. The boy is schooling his dad on… Continue reading
The Power of Negative Thinking
In spite of the multiple posts I have made expressing reservations about social media, it should come as a surprise to no one that I do waste a fair amount of time noodling around on Facebook. Part of it is sheer laziness – I come home from work, eat, and just want to unplug my… Continue reading
Follow Your Dreams?
I was just sitting and mindlessly watching television, and a commercial for a health insurance company came on. It showed adults walking around the streets of a city dressed in costumes – astronaut, doctor, ballerina. The tagline of the commercial was a variation of “Be YOU. Be what you want to be.” It occurred to… Continue reading
The Tyranny of Advertising
In my last post, I talked about how I had been living without television for months. Well, it’s back now, and aside from a few guilty pleasures such as “Hoarders” and “Pawn Stars,” it hasn’t made much of a difference. However, I do think that my months without television caused a bit of culture shock… Continue reading
It’s Never Sunny on Nancy Grace
I canceled my cable TV in July 2009. Since then, my only access to television has been at the gym or at other people’s houses. Now that I am getting close to finishing my dissertation, I am thinking about getting TV again. In some ways I have missed it; there are shows I like that… Continue reading
Communication Pandemic
As an anthropologist, I have been trained to ask, and attempt to answer, questions about human behavior. As a cultural anthropologist, my methods involve participant observation to gather the data needed to start formulating an analysis. This all sounds very dry, but in layman’s terms all it really boils down to is that I am… Continue reading