The Gospel According to Savage

  Tonight, I went to see Dan Savage speak here at William and Mary. Before going, I hadn't made up my mind about whether I was fully supportive of him as a leader in the gay rights movement. I was aware of his alleged transphobia, and I think he does have a tendency to make bold statements without fully thinking them through. However, I also think the It Gets Better Campaign might be the best thing ever to have happened for LGBT youths. I came in with the attitude that taken in sum, the good Dan has produced in the world far outweighs the bad.

   I left with that view strongly reinforced. While he spoke tonight, it was clear that a fierce passion burned beneath his words. It's pretty incredible to see someone like him, who has to pull out the same talking points day in and day out, get so fired up and emotional about his cause, like he's bursting out with this message for the very first time. When words failed him, he swore. When he talked about suicide, his voice strained with pain. He believes what he says.

   And his message is truth: LGBT youth need help. The internet is allowing the gay community to reach out to struggling kids like never before. Because of efforts like It Gets Better, children and young adults struggling with questions about their sexuality can now get the help and guidance they need on their phones, in their rooms, in their family home - which, in so many cases, might otherwise be the most oppressive environment for them.

   I got to ask him the first question during the Q&A part of the talk. I thanked him for speaking, and asked him if It Gets Better has had any plans to work with Lady Gaga's new Born This Way Foundation, which is being launched as an effort to put an end to bullying. He said that while the board of the It Gets Better Campaign has been in communication with the board of the BTW foundation, he doesn't know exactly what will happen to the IGB Campaign. He raised the possibility that IGB could one day become a part of the BTW foundation, citing the fact that Gaga's foundation has deeper pockets thanks to her massive popularity.

   I was really pleased with that answer for two reasons. First, because Dan Savage and Gaga are arguably the two biggest figures in the anti-bullying movement, and it would be really cool to see them join forces - and fanbases - for a common cause. Second, Dan has received some criticism in the past for copyrighting and trademarking It Gets Better, a point which he touched on earlier. In his speech, he claimed that he had done so solely in order to shut down an anti-gay organization in Sweden that had appropriated the name to spread homophobic messages. His magnanimity to the idea of having IGB fuse with the BTW Foundation seems to me to implicitly back up this claim: that Dan would consider giving up control of the IGB Campaign in order for it to flourish in the best hands would contradict accusations that he trademarked the campaign's name for personal gain.

   I also want to note that Dan's words and examples throughout the night were very inclusive and suggested that he is just as keenly aware of and sympathetic to the plight of trans people - gay and straight - as he is of LGB people. His overall message was really inspiring, and I'm really glad that someone with his tenacity is there to continue the fight every day for the health of LGBT youth.

Senior Year

You remember that feeling when you opened the seventh Harry Potter book for the first time, and you were so excited, but scared almost just as much, because you knew that when you got through this last adventure, you would never start another with those same characters, those same familiar settings that you had come to identify with so strongly? That's how I feel right now, standing at the top of the slope of senior year, looking down as the sun sets on this face of the mountain, ready for one last ride, one last rush, one last chance to savor the sights that fly past so quickly, terrified of the shadows that stretch on at the base of the slope, those shadows that are close enough to see, yet far enough away that you cannot know what things hide within...

The book is already opened, our descent already begun. This time around I don't want to focus on the end; I want to take in every sight and sound and smell and spend every free second with someone else, someone new or someone known, founding and furthering friendships and convincing myself that of all things, it is the people who I will most remember, most miss, and who will have the greatest hand in shaping the memory of my senior year.

The Rise of Social Media is NOT the Death of the Human Soul

   Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, published this Op-Ed on the NYT website tonight in which he argues that the adoption of scoail media comes at the price of "a piece of ourselves:" namely, "the soul." It seems to me that a lot of people who grew up before the advent of the internet are afraid that we're somehow losing our this giant, looming technology-beast. But I really thing our souls are safe where they are.
   As an example of what humans have lost due to the progress of technology, Keller claims that we long ago lost the ability to memorize vast quantities of information due to the rise of the printing press:

Until the 15th century, people were taught to remember vast quantities of information. Feats of memory that would today qualify you as a freak — the ability to recite entire books — were not unheard of.

Then along came the Mark Zuckerberg of his day, Johannes Gutenberg. As we became accustomed to relying on the printed page, the work of remembering gradually fell into disuse. 

   First of all, it's not as if everyone in medieval Europe could just start belting out passages of their favorite epic poem on a whim. Some people could, sure. And they were called bards and they made their living doing just that. But prodigious memorization It has always been a limited skill — one that simply had a more prominent role before the rise of print and electronic means to preserve information. I also wonder why he thinks this skill has been lost. What about stage actors? They make their living doing this every day.

  But even if it were true: who cares? As he notes,

"What little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?"

  Well... exactly. As the researcher he quotes states, "We are not recording devices." Why should we try to be? 

  

   Keller proposes that a downside of having machines sort through information for us is a decreased ability to problem-solve by ourselves:

Robert Bjork, who studies memory and learning at U.C.L.A., has noticed that even very smart students, conversant in the Excel spreadsheet, don’t pick up patterns in data that would be evident if they had not let the program do so much of the work.

“Unless there is some actual problem solving and decision making, very little learning happens,” Bjork e-mailed me.

  Fine, that's legit. It seems to me that this is a problem we can get around by requiring students to work through a few problems early on, to understand the process of arriving at a particular answer. We already do the same thing in high schools across the country every single day: remember proofs, from geometry? The only reason they are taught is to show you the process of thinking through why something is true.

   Keller vaguely entertains the value of saved time and effort that is so critical to the argument:

The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.”

   Clearly, he's joking here, but in doing so he is brushing aside the important point that we do end up with a lot more free time and brain space in the end that people can put towards any pursuit - FarmVille, maybe, but maybe to read a few more books, or to put a few more hours into their career, or into their family time.

   Finally, he implies that communication through social media isn't real communication.

I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter.

   I do see the argument, and I think there are legitimate concerns here. But I don't think conversation through social media is any less real because it is online: it is bona-fide, emotion-arousing, intellect-stimulating exchange of opinion, perspective, and feeling. I even believe that love can exist through the internet.

As a kind of masochistic experiment, the other day I tweeted “#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss.” It produced a few flashes of wit (“Give a little credit to our public schools!”); a couple of earnestly obvious points (“Depends who you follow”); ... and an awful lot of nyah-nyah-nyah (“Um, wrong.” “Nuh-uh!!”). 

Almost everyone who had anything profound to say in response to my little provocation chose to say it outside Twitter.

   This is pretty unfair. If you're going to say that everything that happened within 140 characters was at best "a flash of wit," and everything interesting took longer than that to say, then you're setting a double-standard. If you're looking for a long, deep, interchange of opinions, go elsewhere. Twitter simply does not facilitate that: it's built for dissemination, not discussion. And it's really good at what it was built for.

 Reason, debate, intellect, and emotion still exist and can be expressed online; because of the restrictions of Twitter as a platform, you're simply unlikely to find it there. It's unfair to declare that social media promotes "faux" conversation because it's not transmitted in the traditional mode. As with anything else, it is healthier to focus on the possibilities created by a new status quo than to stew over the loss of the old one.

The Best Friend I've Never Met

My friend Paulo is young and tan with short, black, curly hair and smooth skin marked only by a small mole to the right of his mouth that sinks away into a dimple every time he smiles. And he smiles often. When I think of him, the feature is etched into his face: a happy, confident smile, emanating an optimistic resolve and genuine appreciation of the new experiences afforded by each passing moment. His voice is always lined with the hint of a laugh poised to burst forth at any opportunity.

After we were introduced, we spoke nearly every day for a few months and got to know each other well. He and I shared much in common: we were twenty-year -old, hardworking students, politically aware, and gay. We also shared a flair for art: I, an English major and amateur novelist; he, an architect-in-training and enthusiastic fan of pop music (and, I quickly found out, spontaneous karaoke). When I once told him I was having a hard time dealing with a recent break-up, he calmed me by likening the past relationship to the closing of a chapter in the book of my life, and reminded me cheerfully that a new chapter had already begun. He was good at communicating, which made talking easier since neither of us spoke the same language.

Paulo lived in Brazil. He spoke only Portuguese, and I only English. Language was one of two chasms between us, the other being distance. Yet the chasms seemed so minor, and the figure on the other side so clear that we nearly forgot their presence. Every night, from my stuffy dorm room in Williamsburg, Virginia, I would videochat Paulo, who answered from his childhood bedroom in São Paulo, Brazil. He would greet me in English, and I would respond in Portuguese, before we retreated to our native languages – we didn’t know how to say much else in the other’s tongue. I would do my best to decode his Portuguese before copying and pasting it into Google Translate. Usually, I would laugh upon reading the translation – whether at his playfulness or the awkward phrasing Google usually employed. Then I’d type my response, copy the translation, and paste it back into the chat window. I watched him giggle at my replies and make simple gestures on the camera to convey agreement or joking disapproval. Sometimes he would hold something up to the camera for my inspection and approval, such as a new model he had made for class. As he related to me the events of his day, he would link me to pictures of his adventures posted on Orkut – Google’s social network, little-known and even less used in the United States, but embraced more strongly in Brazil than Facebook.

With so many channels facilitating our interactions, it hardly occurred to me that we had never actually “met” in the traditional sense of the term. I’d never shaken his hand; the “air-high fives” we exchanged never met their targets. And yet, I knew him. He was a friend of mine, whom I enjoyed spending time with as much as anyone on campus. I found myself picturing him here in Williamsburg, what I would show him and who I’d introduce him to, and how we’d laughingly struggle to communicate the entire time.

The gradual discovery that I cared about him like a “real” friend and that I wanted to meet and spend time with him hit me with a funny ring. A child of the internet, I have grown up being warned by parents and professionals to be extremely careful of interacting with “strangers” on the web  – and above all, never to meet one in person. While I chatted away on AIM in middle school, dramatic news programs like 20/20 and Dateline blared horror stories in the background, telling of teens who had been abducted, raped, and killed after meeting people online. More recently, media outlets have clamored about “Craigslist Killers” – murderers who supposedly use the classified advertising site Craigslist.com to lure their victims into fatal encounters. Less extremely, we as a culture seem to carry a heavy bias against internet-forged relationships. Dating sites like Match.com and e-Harmony, along with their millions of users, are often the punchlines of jokes. We are plagued by a widespread conception that having to use a dating website to find a partner belies weakness or desperation on the part of the user. Further, a belief endures that any relationship begun online isn’t as legitimate as one forged through more traditional (and therefore “romantic”) means.

And then came Chatroulette.

The internet exploded in early 2010 over the launch of this website, created by 17-year-old Andrey Ternovskiy, a Russian high school student. The service connects webcam-enabled users to other random users, opening the way for audio, video, and textual dialogue with a stranger. Chatroulette launched with virtually no safeguards or means of flagging users for inappropriate use of the site. It immediately became a destination for horny singles and exhibitionists who would present themselves in full to other users. This phenomenon became the site’s defining characteristic, and fueled the fear-fires of overexcited media outlets for several weeks. Chatroulette became the fascination of journalists, the joke of late night comedians, the go-to activity for groups of bored and curious teenagers looking for a laugh. It had gained a reputation that it would never shake: the internet’s Sodom and Gomorrah, a place of lawless licentiousness, the domain of exhibitionists, voyeurs, and strangers.

Like many of my friends who visited for the novelty of the experience, I began to experiment with Chatroulette. I saw the concerns of the media, but I judged them to be vastly overblown. Any “danger” they declared was fictitious. The site’s reputation was clear – no one visited Chatroulette without knowing what they were getting into. What was to the media a wilderness of humanity, a threat to be feared because it brought contact with the unknown, was to me and others a new platform of communication and connection; a bridge through cyberspace to other people and other worlds. And I judged correctly: it was through Chatroulette that I had met Paulo.

Making friends online was not a new experience to me. In high school, I talked very frequently with a girl in the neighboring town whom I had met only once. After many months of instant messaging, she came to see me in a play at my school in which I played a character with a southern accent. After the show, she remarked that it was strange to hear me speak without it. Despite all of our correspondence over months, she didn’t know who I was physically. She had come to the performance so ready to “learn” my physical characteristics that her mind attached the artificial traits of my character to my actual personality. I, too, had formed an image of her that was torn apart upon our meeting, and I was forced to reanalyze her – reconstruct her, even – with the new facets I was introduced to that night. It hit me then that simple textual correspondence – even instantaneous, interactive chatting – left something missing from the conversation. It wasn’t like that with Paulo. Because of the depth through which we were able to interact online, there was a richness of experience in our conversations that made me feel that I really knew him as a whole person.

One day, Paulo IMed me, excited to tell me about a trip he had taken to a nearby city to hang out with a friend he had met online. The warning flags from my childhood were immediately raised: Who was this person he’d met? How did he know it was safe to meet them? What if the person wasn’t who they claimed to be? What if something happened to Paulo?

He insisted that he was sure the person was who they claimed to be: after meeting online, they had exchanged text messages for quite some time and had struck up a friendship not unlike our own. To Paulo, meeting this person and hanging out with them was a natural progression of the relationship. Why wouldn’t it be?

I saw his logic, but I was still concerned. “Was it a hook up?” I asked nervously. He laughed and said no, but admitted that he had hooked up with people he’d met online before.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked. I was beginning to conclude that Paulo might have been trusting and romantic to the point of naivety.

He shrugged off my question. “People do this all the time in Brazil,” he said. “We know the dangers, but we don’t let it stop us from making the most of the opportunities we have.”

Put like that, his attitude sounded more like cautious optimism than naivety. After all, does it really make sense to presume that most people online are not who they claim to be, or have sinister intentions?

Paulo wasn’t being naïve. I was being paranoid. My culture had raised me to suspect the worst of people online, and the result of that priming was constant fear, suspicion, and second-guessing. On the other side of my computer screen, I saw the mirror image of my world. Here was someone who saw the internet as a garden for creating, nurturing, and strengthening relationships. To him – and to Brazilian culture generally, as Paulo saw it – the internet was a tool, not a weapon. Like any tool, it has been and will be used for evil by a very few people, relatively speaking. Yet, their unscrupulous actions should not taint the idea of the whole. I thought about how I had found Chatroulette to be a haven of possibilities, despite what our culture had warned me about it. I began to look at the internet differently, too.

Some weeks later, Paulo told me that he would like to visit me in the US. He had never been. He was very excited about the prospect of experiencing the culture here first-hand while spending time together with me.

Despite what I had come to realize about the internet’s power to connect people; despite my sure sense of Paulo as a person and friend; despite the time I myself had spent fantasizing about exactly such a visit – when the real possibility was put before me, I balked.

I told him that Williamsburg was a strange little corner of the country to visit – he should go somewhere more exciting, like New York or Washington. But he wanted to learn through me. I pointed out that communication would be difficult without the computer between us. In a weird way, the internet that kept us so far apart was what allowed us to have a friendship at all. Smiling, he declared that he could be very expressive – and that some activities didn’t need words.

Though flattered, I still could not conceive of such a trip materializing. I would have to introduce him to all my friends, and what would I say? “This is my friend Paulo. We met online. He doesn’t speak English, but he flew here to visit me.” Whatever the reality of our relationship, everyone would see him as one thing: the Internet Hookup From Another Country. In their minds, I would suddenly be placed into the category of people desperate enough to solicit sex online – and desperate enough to fly him here to get it. How could I explain that it wasn’t like that? For all my new ideals about the great power the internet had to connect people, I was the only one who had undergone such a revelation. Very simply, I was afraid people would judge me.

Reluctantly, I conveyed all this to Paulo. I explained how our culture doesn’t look favorably upon internet-arranged meet-ups. That even though I really liked the idea of him visiting, frankly, I would be embarrassed by it. Admitting all of this to him was a painful trial. In a way, I was blocking the friendship from ever evolving. The implication was that our connection was not valid or deep enough to go any further than the two computer screens could allow. I signed off that night disappointed in myself and angry at the social circumstances that I felt had forced me into this position.

Maybe one day my undersized self-confidence will grow to fit my big ideals. For now, I’ll embrace that moment of weakness as warning sign, as a shipwreck marking treacherous waters, saying: do not pursue that route again. But the fault is not entirely my own. Our culture of deep suspicion, driven by the fearmongering media, has produced countless casualties. To think of the infinite connections that we might already have made with any other person in the world is to realize how profoundly our xenophobia has limited us. By suggesting that only physical relationships are legitimate, and that human connections filtered through fiber optic cables are not real connections at all, we suffocate ourselves. In embracing ignorance, we have cut ourselves off from a new world verdant with possibility, glinting with the promise of friendships yet undiscovered. As our generation takes its place as the drivers of public opinion and policy, we must replace our fear with the beliefs I see even now in the lines of Paulo’s smile: resolved optimism and an appreciation of the joys that life – and technology – has to offer. 

Unrealized Things

No, I don’t know what you know

And probably never will

But our goals are not the same

Our intentions different still

Take from me all my possessions

Bring with you all our friends

Mine are the unrealized things

And unconceived-of ends

You can have your banal world

As I’ll always have mine

Live and die in the realm of the mundane

I live for the divine

The Birth of a Blog

Why, hello there! My name is J.T. Fales, and you seem to have stumbled upon my blog. I am currently a junior and an English Major/Linguistics Minor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA.

I've been feeling for awhile that I am in need of a dedicated space online where I can post the scraps of poetry and prose that seem to be amassing around me in my notebooks and on my hard drive. I intend to use this blog as an outlet for my creative endeavors, with the purpose being severalfold: First, to provide a place for people to view, criticize, and comment on my work, always with the goal of being able to go back and improve upon a piece later in view of others' reactions. Second, to build a habit out of regularly producing creative content (or, in other words, force myself to write often). Third, to make me more comfortable with displaying my work to others - including, of course, complete strangers. While doing all of this, I will be creating an online portfolio where I can direct people to samples of my work.

Thank you for visiting, and I hope I'll see you here often :)