Mark Meador
Jennifer Byrne, in her recent column at PopMatters, posted an excellent piece on the “My” phenomenon that has taken hold of the Internet. The ubiquity of the word struck her as she navigated a “My UPS” page to track a package.
“Out of curiosity, I decided to do a search under the word 'My', just to see what came up. Here’s just a smattering of what I found: My T-Mobile, My New York Times, My Widgets, My Feeds, My Tupperware, My Anime, My Netscape, and My Monster.”
When Apple decided to enable its new iPhone to stay updated with changes made from your desktop, wherever you are, it called it MobileMe. The pervasive use of the word and idea of “my,” Byrne suggests, might be the result of our need to make ourselves stand out.
“Maybe, within the vastness and anonymity of the World Wide Web, there is the need for individuals to stake out their own territory, to greedily snatch their piece of the pie, and to announce it like petulant toddlers. 'That’s My Widget! That’s My Yahoo!'”
This isn't the only sign of childish behavior in our culture. Back in 2004, a new term coined by author Abigail Trafford emerged for the baby-boomers starting to approach retirement age: My Timers. The phrase, to borrow words from Byrne, is saccharine and congratulatory. Trafford describes how she came up with it in an interview with TIME:
“I went to a college reunion. It was an all-women's college, and we were all in our 30s. We were in that high-stress zone. We were trying to make it in the workplace; we were making it in our marriages; we had small children. We were just torn apart by the demands of our lives. We were trying to make everything work. I remember one classmate stood up and wailed and said, 'When is it going to be my time?'”
It seems the old adage, “with age comes wisdom,” may be wearing thin on Western society. Instead of wisdom, today's culture expects their old age to bring more youth and more freedom. But where is duty in this view? How do our obligations to friends and family fit into a me- and my-centered lifestyle? If we are constantly defining our understanding of life as license to do as we please, will we ever be pleased? These are important questions, not only for current generations but for all. If we spend all our time focusing on ourselves we will not only miss out on the importance of others, we will be blind to all things greater and transcendent.
Mark Meador is a 2008 John Jay Institute Fellow interning with the Trinity Forum.
Fodder, Global Culture, Science and Technology, Thu 26 Jun 2008
The part of philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.
George MacDonald
Redefining Democracy, Ethics, and Evangelicalism
A European Challenge to Anti-Americanism
Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion
Lives of Adventure, Fulfillment, and Service
The X-Files and the Enlightenment Myth
Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith by G. K. Chesterton.
On its 100th anniversary, this book is just as helpful and provocative as ever.
The Real Digital Revolution: Social networking is changing the marketing landscape: “Brand advertising can’t stretch the truth anymore or try and gild the lily. Because if it does, we’re going to find out about it, find out that you’ve been lying to us all along about extras that don’t work and specials that aren’t special. And our reaction is not going to be pretty.” (Alan Wolk, AdWeek; h/t: Ryan Moede • 2008 08 27)
Après Lewis: ‘As it turns out, Tim Keller’s “The Reason for God” (2008), the book recommended by my friend, is the best of the “Mere Christianity” wannabes. Mr. Keller argues that the usual objections to Christianity—that it is a straitjacket, that there cannot be just one true religion—are themselves the product of a particular (secular Western) point of view. He then builds an affirmative case for Christianity, suggesting that the Big Bang and our appreciation of beauty are clues pointing to God and that Christ’s resurrection was so unlikely both to Greeks and Romans (who viewed the material world as weak and corrupt) and to Jews (who expected any resurrection to come at the end of time) that it cannot be dismissed as the clever marketing strategy of a new religion. If this sounds a little like N.T. Wright, it isn’t accidental: Mr. Keller draws liberally from him, as well as Lewis, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (a professor at Notre Dame) and others. “The Reason for God” is as sensible and winsome as one would expect from the pastor of a latticework of churches that draw more than 5,000 attendees in New York City every Sunday, most of them young, single, urban professionals. But it too is no “Mere Christianity.” It does not have the original arguments or the magical prose of Lewis’s classic.’ (David Skeel, Wall Street Journal • 2008 08 15)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: the line within: ‘Solzhenitsyn was far from endorsing the thesis of the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt had expounded it. Nor did he see totalitarianism as the ultimate source of the evil that it promotes. Rather totalitarian government is the great mistake, made for whatever noble or ignoble purpose, of putting the final goal before the present dilemma. It is this which gives evil intentions the same chance as good ones, which enables the criminal and the psychopath to compete on a level with the saint and the hero. Yet even in totalitarianism the evil belongs to the human beings, and not to the system. This is the remarkable message that Solzhenitsyn, crawling from the death-machine, carried pressed to his heart.’ (Senior Fellow Roger Scruton, in openDemocracy • 2008 08 11)
Atheism and Evil: Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance. Few atheists seem to be as rigorously honest as Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned that if God is dead, it is wishful thinking to hold that reason alone can confer “meaning” on life. Reason has been outmoded by chance. (Michael Novak, First Things: On the Square • 2008 07 29)
• Christopher Nolan’s Achievement: The Dark Knight (2008 07 22)
• Unplanned Parenthood (2008 07 21)
• What makes a supervillain? (2008 07 19)
• Pope’s Speech at Barangaroo (2008 07 17)
• Hollywood’s Hero Deficit (2008 07 17)
Brain, Mind and Soul in the Theological Psychology of Donald Mackay, 1922-1987: The Intellectual Legacy of a Brain Physicist by David Norman.
