The Writing on the Wall

I think just about every week Megan tells me that she is disappointed that I haven't posted anything new in several months. I tell her it's largely her fault because she moved in with me, and now I get to talk to her about my thoughts each night rather than post them on the interweb. Regardless, I suppose there may be a few of you who still have this blog saved in some RSS/blog program, so I've decided to repost a comment I made on the AAG LinkedIn page the other day, responding to a comment about the importance of Geography and it's steady decline in our universities. Don't worry that this is reposted out of context, there really wasn't much to take from the rest of the discussion.

"First, I have to agree with Rick Marshall. I truly believe geography and/or geographic concepts are now more prevalent in our everyday lives, however I would suggest that it is this prevalence that has made "geography" as a discipline less significant in the minds of the future generation. As a young professional Geographer I can tell you that one of the things that attracted me to this discipline was its ease of application to my life. I grew up with the internet so the significance of place (and the differences that are associated with different places) became apparent to me at an early age. I could see the world from the corner of my house. While this helped my understanding of spatial distribution at a young age, it also taught me that distance (and therefore space) was not a significant obstacle to exploration or understanding. Technology has made the world smaller, and more accessible, to the people who can access the network. While it may be interesting to discuss how technology has changed our perception of space and time, the problem may be that it has also taken away the significance of "place". The functional world is becoming digital. Whether I am in D.C. or Bangkok I can access the same virtual spaces, the same communication tools, the same information sources, and talk to the same people... and I can do this no matter where they are. As a result, some have suggested then that there is now a new, virtual geography for geographers to explore, but the problems/complexities of this new geography are no longer specialized. Since just about everyone in the developed world now interacts, to at least some degree, with this virtual environment, the problems which were originally left to the professional geographers are now being negotiated by all of its users. It's not a specialized discipline when everyone does it, and while I know this is not a new threat to the discipline it may become a more significant threat by the fact that technology is simultaneously making traditional geography less significant while also allowing users to create the new geography themselves in a virtual environment. There is no need to study geography as a formal academic discipline when the world it looks at is outdated, and the new virtual geography is known and understood at a very young age.

We are going to have to confront these problems if we wish to to continue as a formal, respected discipline, and to recruit a future generation of geographers to follow in our footsteps."

Let me follow-up by saying that I hope I am wrong about the direction my chosen discipline is heading, although I cannot deny what I am seeing this current wave of technology do to our culture. Although I think it is great that people have almost instant access to information to make informed decisions, I also cannot deny that it has had a negative affect on human attention spans, average memory response times, the social politics of (and psychological health associated with) human interaction, and the psychological and emotional stress that results from the lack of "instance gratification" in areas of our life not controlled by electronic stimulation. Moreover, our senses our being dulled because we only have one primary type of stimulation in our lives now, and that is electronic. Yes, we can see, explore, and interact with real world entities through the use of these electronics, however the direct physical and psychological interaction that we are experiencing is only with the electronic device and the soft glow of it's LCD touch screen. We are not digital entities. We are living, breathing, emotional entities that have evolved from a natural environment, not a virtual one, and all of our biological and chemical devices that have genetically evolved to give us a full life of diverse experiences are being truncated by our consumeristic desires to have more, and to have it faster. Perhaps we don't notice the change anymore because everyone is changing together, and it is changing at such a rate that a single generation cannot observe the effects that its technology had on them before a new technology takes over and no one can identify what tool had what impact on it's user group.

Before I venture too far down that road I should say that I am not against all technology. Many technologies have dramatically improved our lives by helping us maintain a clean, safe, and healthy environment. However, I do not buy into this idea of "progress" and that we are moving forward towards some inevitably technological utopia that is supposed to better the lives of all of its users. Technology is supposed to help us, and at a certain point I think the balance between help and hurt shifted, perhaps without our conscious understanding of what was going on. The use of technology should be a conscious decision, and these days I'm not sure that it is, at least not to the upcoming generation whose members are trying to identify the skills necessary to get a successful job so they to can pursue the American Dream. Even if we cannot reverse the impact that some of the existing technology has done to our society, I think we should at least be cognitively aware of the choices we are making when we blindly accept new technologies as "good". The adaptation of technology should be a conscious, informed decision. Perhaps it's the fact that no one seems to be having this discussion that concerns me most...

The Idea of Marquette

So, like most of my posts I have written and rewritten this post several times, each time losing focus and ranting extensively on a topic that was not my central focus when I began. As I mentioned in my last post, these last few weeks and travel and transition have given me a lot of time to think about things: broadly the past, where I am now, how I got here, and where I am going. I keep retuning to this concept that I am going to refer to as “the idea of Marquette”, and I’ll explain why I call it that in a little bit. It’s actually a theory about relationships, and this applies both to relationships between multiple people and relationships between people and non-human entities. This theory originated back in my early years at NMU when a sort-of relationship triangle exploded and many people who were “in love” with other people had their hearts broken. Some of these feelings were so strong that I would say they were bordering on obsession, and that is what interested me at the time. After thinking about it and discussing things with many of the individuals involved, it occurred to me that most people attract themselves not to other people, but to an idea of that other person. We take the partial knowledge that we are given about an individual and we form an emotional bond to it, even though this is highly irrational and many of our preconceived notions about this other person (or who we think this other person is) are often very much false. To some extent this is how most relationships work, and why most fall apart: someone thinks they know a person but eventually the other person acts outside the original person’s preconceived belief of who the second individual really is, and they feel betrayed, etc. As far as my limited experience has been, this idea still stands.

So why am I telling you this? No, Megan and I are not having problems… it is just that I have noticed a lot of similar emotional responses within myself through this most recent transition, and in hindsight, during my transition from Marquette to Oxford. Most of the time I was in Marquette I was depressed and miserable. I had a few good friends (great friends actually) but generally speaking I had high expectations of the people that I was going to meet and interact with in college, and for the most part many of them let me down (although admittedly many of them did not know they were doing so, and this is not to pass judgment on any of them… They lived their lives the way they chose to and I respect that; these issues were within me). I was so bummed out with my life at Northern that there were multiple points within my time there that I considered dropping out or moving home, and those feeling had little to do with the school itself. Yet when I moved to Oxford, OH, the only thing I wanted my first semester at Miami was to be back up north. Yeah, I hated most of the people but I missed the feel of the town, the sound and smell of Superior’s nature, and the feeling that we were removed from most of the rest of the world… or at least that is what I thought I missed. In reality I don’t remember if I felt this way while I was there. Most likely I did not and this was my romanticized love for Marquette because I was no longer there; no longer required to deal with the stuff that I didn’t like, face to face, every day. I was simply left to my ideals, and my ideals told me that I would have rather been unhappy with something I was familiar with than deal with the stress of the transition.

Eventually I got passed it and made some great friends at Miami as well. I even learned to love the quaintness of the town and somehow embraced the fact that we were culturally stranded in a Midwestern corn field. Yet it happened again when I moved from Oxford to Alexandria, and that last sentence or two should serve as a proof. Most of the time I was in Oxford I wasn’t happy about it, but it was temporary so I swallowed my discontent and worked through my 2 year sentence. Yet even being consciously aware of that fact I have still spent much of this last week wishing I could be back at Miami. I’m not really sure why I feel this way, but I believe that “the idea of Marquette” followed me again. Things have gotten better after the first week, but the first few days I hated the somewhat sprawling landscape… hated the pace… hated the traffic and the noise… and part of me wanted to justify this all like I did Miami: It’s only temporary. But this time, it’s not. Maybe this specific house, but as far into the future I can see, this town and this job will be my life. I don’t consider myself a commit-a-phoebe, but that’s kind of a scary thought for someone who has lived “in transition” for the past 6 years. I suppose all life is transition though, ever changing…

Anyway, I am not really sure where that was intended to go but those were some of the thoughts that I have been having since I got here. As before, things are already getting a little better and I am sure it is only a matter of time before I find my comfort here, but I couldn’t help but laugh at myself when I realized that I was treating my old lives like lost girlfriends: idealizing their characteristics and believing there could have been a future when everything inside told me it couldn’t last while I was there. It’s time to move forward though. As hard as it can be for me to not look into the past sometimes and ask myself “what could have been?” I suppose this opportunity, this experience, is most important now. My new goal is to try and embrace the new opportunities I get every day, even when change is not desired. Don’t sacrifice the gift of change; this is my challenge now.