Ranthropologist

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  • Questions for the Lilac Road Runner

    Questions for the Lilac Road Runner

    For the last three years or so, I have been driving to work through Valley Center, down Lilac Road and into Pala. Every day, almost without fail, when I turn onto the last leg of Lilac, I see an older man running along the road. Sometimes he is heading in my direction, and sometimes he is heading away, but he is always there. Regardless of the weather, he wears old-school running shorts (think Bill Clinton, only not so frighteningly tight and short), a loose-fitting cotton tank (the kind with the arm holes that gape almost to the waist), a baseball cap, and a pair of leather work gloves. Sometimes he is carrying the work gloves in one hand, but he is usually wearing them, whether the season is warm or cold. Sometimes, during the winter, he has a thick walrus-style mustache, but usually he is clean-shaven.

    This man fascinates me. I have never spoken to him, or even made eye-contact with him as I drive past, but I suspect he is as used to seeing me every morning as I am seeing him. I want to ask him some questions, like does he get bored running the same route every day? What’s up with the leather work gloves? Does he think I drive too fast down Lilac (it is a very curvy road, but I know it so well by now that I can navigate the curves at a high rate of speed)? Has he even noticed me at all?

    It may seem like a tangent, but this man gets me thinking about what we have any expectation to know about other people. For all I know this guy has a blog where he talks about his daily run, or his daily life, or conspiracy theories, or fruit salad recipes, or who knows? The real question is, how are our expectations of knowledge about other people’s lives being shaped by the new communicative strategies now at our fingertips? I suspect that I would be curious about the Lilac Road Runner regardless of the existence of the internet and its myriad possibilities for sharing information. But again, what are the limits? How much of this new ability to share and receive information about others is predicated on pre-existing cultural behaviors? In other words, did we already have this thirst for knowledge about others? I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. Gossip and information sharing about others is one of the most basic and key human adaptations for managing social relationships and ensuring group stability. But again, this raises even more questions, such as what responsibility do we have to manage social relationships with people we have never met, and probably never will? At what point will the benefits of information sharing become maladaptive (if ever)?

    I have no right to know anything about the life of the Lilac Road Runner, but I am curious nonetheless. I just fear that in this rapidly evolving new culture of instant information sharing, people will begin to believe that they do have the right to know. Blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, with their capability for instant updates, have the potential to create enormous changes in our social lives and in the social landscape in general. Will this ultimately be a good or a bad thing, or a combination of both? Maybe I should ask the Lilac Road Runner what he thinks.

  • Don’t Trust Jimmy Johnson

    Don’t Trust Jimmy Johnson

    My knee has been bothering me a little bit, so instead of going for a run outside today, I went to the gym to do 45 minutes on the elliptical. This was at about 11 am. I never watch television on Saturdays, especially during the day, so I was intrigued to see that several channels on the overhead monitors were showing the TV equivalent of spam, i.e., infomercials. One starred Heidi Klum. She was hawking a line of face products designed to cover wrinkles, complete with “unretouched” (but not unblurred or unlighted) before and after photos. Another one was making the preposterous claim that YOU can buy YOUR OWN PROPERTY for ONLY PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR!! Yes, that’s right, YOU could own A HOUSE LIKE THIS for only A FEW HUNDRED DOLLARS!!!!! On yet another screen, 2-TIME SUPERBOWL CHAMPION HEAD COACH JIMMY JOHNSON was selling financial kits that will allow YOU to MAKE THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IN JUST A FEW HOURS doing online stock trades. These “programs” brought many questions to my mind, not the least of which was why the hell I should trust 2-TIME SUPERBOWL CHAMPION HEAD COACH JIMMY JOHNSON to give me financial advice.

    Are there that many gullible, ignorant, naive, and/or just plain stupid people out there who fall for this stuff? I guess there must be, because the infomercials persist. It’s a sad indictment of our culture that we are caught between two conflicting mythologies: the cultural value that those who work the hardest will have the most success, and the tantalizing idea that anybody can get rich quick. Both of these propositions are absurd, but there are enough people out there who fit the myths that people believe them. This is a perfect example of confirmation bias – only acknowledging or remembering the evidence that supports your view, and ignoring the evidence that doesn’t. My personal name for this is the “plane crash theory.” You remember the planes that crash, because nobody talks about the ones that land safely. Can you imagine how boring (and not to mention long) the nightly news would be if the safe landings were reported? “We now turn to Bob Bobson for tonight’s safe landing report.” “Thanks Brian. Today, planes landed safely in Topeka, San Jose…” (Three hours later…) “Now back to you, Brian!” Obviously this can work the same way for our cultural beliefs about success and making money. The recent immigrant who works two jobs for minimum wage just to pay for a ghetto apartment that he shares with five other people might not agree that the hardest workers have the most success. But for every ten thousand hard-working, yet low income people, we have a “boot strap” story about somebody who “overcame tough beginnings” and became a millionaire. This is what we remember. And, for all the thousands of people who sign up to sell Amway or Acai berry juice or whatever and fail to get rich, there are one or two people who do succeed, and again, this is what we remember. It is all magical thinking, complicated by those correlated, but not causative, success stories. So, what’s the moral of the story? For me, I guess it’s “don’t go to the gym on Saturday mornings!”