Beyond satisfying the typical requirements of an elite liberal arts college, CMC deserves a president who thoroughly appreciates and is committed to what makes it special: its unique brand of liberal arts education and the intimate, nurturing atmosphere that it affords.  Crucially, this requires professors and administrators to interact with students at more than a formal level. Yet I don’t know anyone who thinks Pam Gann knows their name, let alone them as a person. Maybe it’s different for the ASCMC crowd or the hyperactive on campus, but it seems that us mere mortals don’t register on her radar.

As a part of being on the football team, I’ve been forced able to go to the IRanWithGann event the past three years at CMC.[i] Besides getting an awesome selection of free t-shirts, this has also illuminated Gann’s relationship with the student body. First of all, this is one of the few times each year that I see her walking around on campus—let alone talk to students. More damningly, at the 5K, her conversations with students always seem to be of the “What’s your name/major?” variety. You’d think at some point she’d run into a student whose name she already knew or whose major she actually remembered. It’s hard to escape the feeling that she’s there to check a box (“See Board of Trustees! I told you I care about the student body!”) rather than have a genuine interaction with students.  Perhaps, though, this is just me being biased.

I suppose that could be forgiven. Over the past four years, my love for CMC has outgrown my demands for what it does for me. But more disappointing, I don’t see that same love of CMC, that wholehearted embrace of what makes the school special, in Pam Gann.  It may sound corny, but when she talks about the school, I don’t see a twinkle in her eye. Gann speaks highly about CMC, but her comments often feel like they would fit any elite liberal arts college. She praises our small classes sizes, our great professors, our selectivity, but always seems to miss the part about things that make CMC special.

In her first convocation, Pam talked about the how CMC fits into the broader higher education landscape and the importance of branding in “outrunning” the competition. This would have been a perfect place to talk about CMC’s unique attributes. Glaringly, though, she doesn’t even allude to the special character of the school. The implication is that we’re a liberal arts school like any other, struggling to (1) to be within the group of “brand name” colleges and universities; and (2) to compete effectively within this “brand name” group for students, faculty, and resources. The same speech would have worked at Amherst, Williams, or even Pomona.

At this point in the conversation, a voice of reason will often say “Yeah, but at least she’s raised a lot of money.” That is true. But money is not raised in a vacuum, and one person is not responsible for all of an institution’s fundraising success. Furthermore, our alumni population is getting older. It seems reasonable to think that older alumni 1) have more money since they’ve been able to work more years and 2) are more likely to donate money because, to put the matter bluntly, they want to have an impact on something they care about before they die. The steady increase in annual donations in the chart below seems to evidence this story. There is more volatility after Pam becomes president, but there isn’t a marked increase in donations over the trend line.

At a personal level, I don’t have any particular problem with President Gann. She hasn’t done anything outrageous or grossly failed in her duties as president. But CMC is much more than a typical liberal arts college and deserves much more than a typical president. At a dinner honoring Gann for her ten years of service to the College this past December, former CMC president Jack Stark thanked her for what she didn’t do: change the character of the school. But I think CMC deserves better. CMC deserves a president that doesn’t make its students question whether the president cares about them. CMC deserves a President that is firmly committed to keeping CMC a special place.

Pam Gann, simply put, fails those standards. For that dinner honoring Gann, the administration tried to film a series of students being asked questions about Pam Gann’s life and what they thought about her. According to Dean Huang, they had to scrap the project, however, because apparently not enough students said nice things. To me, that’s pretty damning. Out of a school of 1200+ students, we couldn’t cobble together enough pro-Gann students to make a two-minute video. Perhaps, I’m going a bit overboard, though, and you feel that Pam Gann actually does a decent job as president. But shouldn’t CMC, as our government department would say, strive for excellence?

Caption: This graph shows the total amount of alumni giving that went into the operating budget in a given year. It notably excludes large donations that go to things like a new buildings or a new Robert A. Day Master of Finance program. Those large gifts often take multiple years to negotiate and structure and thus are affected differently by factors like the economy, alumni aging, or a new president. The purpose of this graph is not to prove that President Gann fails as a fundraiser. Rather I am merely trying to show that under this basic fundraising metric she does not surpass the trend. Following her inauguration in late 1990s, support from alumni giving has mostly kept with its rising trajectory set by earlier presidents. Thus, deciding whether President Gann is doing an exceptional job fundraising depends on the degree to which she impacted recent large donations. But to answer that, we’d need to look inside Robert Day’s head, which I, unfortunately, do not have the ability to do.

I got to look up at this every day-- the dome of the Capital building.

If you don’t know much about the program, here are the basics:  you work for 40+ hours a week at an internship of your choice.   You also take two seminar classes in the evenings once a week, usually on a Monday and a Thursday (no TNC, sorry). You write a semester-long research paper with minimal guidance on any topic under your major-related sun.[1] The internship, two classes, and paper total to a full semester course load.

I don’t think I need to tell government majors why they should do DC.  You applied to CMC because there was a Washington Program.  You’ve known you’ve wanted to work on the Hill/State Department/Human Rights Watch since your eighth grade field trip.  You read Politico Click religiously and you don’t plan on making a huge mistake. Seriously, this is your paradise.  You will love it.  Start working on your application NOW.

However, if the idea of casually bumping into John Boehner/Steny Hoyer doesn’t make you pee your pants, never fear.  I highly encourage non-majors to apply for the DC program.  Let’s face it.  Government spending amounts to +40% of GDP.   This means the government can wreak some serious havoc in your future career field, but you’re going to be a much more attractive job candidate once you understand how that works.

Sam Bastien, CMC ’11, is an economics-accounting major with a financial economics sequence.   After CMC, she hopes to work in finance, not government.  Attracted to the opportunity for work experience, she decided spend the fall 2009 semester on the Washington Program.

Most of her fellow bankers-to-be told her she was crazy.  “Some of the other economics majors questioned my rationale for going,” she told the Forum, “After all, I would fall behind in my finance classes.”

She got an internship at the Securities and Exchange Commission, where she was the only undergraduate intern.  “After the financial crisis, you have to realize that the federal government can make a huge impact in the world of finance if it chooses to do so.”  Her job focused on regulatory financial policy analysis and she was tasked with research projects on hedge fund legislation.  She attended House Financial Services Committee hearings and witnessed the “intense” testimony of Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner on financial services reform and TARP.

Abby Woodruff, also CMC ’11, is a dual psychology-government major.  In DC, she worked at the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, affiliated with the American Psychological Association.  DC may not be a natural choice for psychology majors, but Abby believes they should consider it, “If you want your research to affect change, you need to go out there and learn how change is actually made.”  Congress votes on bills with major social implications on a daily basis.  In order to create the best policy possible, committee members consider expert testimony from psychologists.  But after her time in DC, Abby noticed some of the shortcomings of the system, “There is a great deal of psychological research out there, but most of it isn’t being used. Lawmakers love to hear about the relevant research, but there aren’t a lot of people devoted to bringing it to policymakers in ways they can use it.”  For future psychologists, this step can be the key to helping people on a large scale.  It’s one thing to put your research in an academic journal to further future research, but it’s a whole different contribution to bring your research to policymakers and influence the way government affects our lives.

Any downsides?  Although Gov 20 is the only prerequisite, in reality Professors Spalding and Haskell teach the classes assuming you know more than “the basics.”  Since most of the program participants are government or international relations majors, they’re usually right.  But the limited class selection has discouraged some from applying in the past, and proved challenging to non-majors who choose to go in spite of this fact.

Looking back?  In the long run, missing out on a few finance classes was worth the valuable work experience.  Employers have rewarded Sam for her interesting, if unusual, choice.  Sam recently received a coveted summer job offer in Sales and Trading at RBC in New York, “My internship at the SEC and my research on hedge funds came up a lot in the interview.”

To begin with a few criticisms, the obviously ideological nature of the publication can at times lead the authors to ignore obvious realities.  For example, Karthik Reddy’s article on America’s recent turn to Keynesian economics, mentions that the stimulus may lead to “crowding out,” whereby public expenditures displace private investment by raising interest rates.  Yet he must be aware that interest rates remain near zero and simply refuses to include this uncomfortable fact while describing the danger of crowding out.  The publication also has no qualms about unappealing metaphors.  Though Liberty’s Last Stand surely takes pride in being controversial, Spencer Kline (an editor-in-chief) might have considered it prudent to avoid referring to cheap low-skilled labor as “the grease that keeps our economy functioning at peak efficiency.”

On the whole, however, Liberty’s Last Stand is enjoyable and worth reading. Ariel Katz has the courage to argue in favor of the legalization and state recognition of polygamy and Andrew Jarmon presents a persuasive case for abolishing the corporate tax.   These article in particular highlight the unique contribution a libertarian publication can make to campus discourse.  To be sure, many of the articles will find a receptive audience at the generally liberal Claremont Colleges.  Matt Fillipo’s manifesto for progressive libertarianism will speak to many students at the Claremont Colleges (and CMC in particular) who are staunchly opposed to Prop 8, but would like lower tax rates to keep more of their lucrative consulting salaries after graduation.  Additionally, Livia Romano’s article on the human suffering in Latin America caused by the War on Drugs is informative and interesting.  The international perspective is particularly appreciated, especially given how infrequently we Americans tend to examine the effects of our policies on other countries.  Liberty’s Last Stand also has a blog, Penguins in Claremont, which features a collection of posts that generally attack the anti-liberty policies of various governments.  Some of these posts are quite funny, such as one that mocks Australia’s selective crackdown on pornography with small-breasted women.

What does the future hold for Liberty’s Last Stand?  Though I wish the publication the best of luck, the Libertarian Club has limited membership to draw contributors from and organizing libertarians has been compared to herding cats.  With all but one of the writers being seniors, the publication will need to inspire new writers and editors if it wants to continue past May.

Disclaimer: I am friends with many of the Ron Paul fan boys who write and edit Liberty’s Last Stand.

But if you just read the headlines, you may be missing the picture. While governments may be screwing things up on an unprecedented level, entrepreneurs, innovators and economics are making everyone’s lives better.

First, during this decade it became possible to reach almost anyone in the world instantaneously, and cheaply, through email and cell phones. I can write these words from my home in Alamo and you can read them wherever you are, for the price of an internet connection. The gap between celebrities and their fans is receding quickly. I believe we are only scratching the surface of potential applications for the internet. We are inventing and adapting new technologies at a breakneck pace.

Second, globalization is helping millions of people earn higher incomes and escape poverty, especially in Asia. Access to international markets have helped millions of Chinese workers earn more.  Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz’s excellent new book From Poverty to Prosperity outlines this in more detail. We are helping our own, too: Kling and Schulz point out, “Sixty years ago, a social studies teacher looking for a movie that would motivate students to sympathize with the plight of the unfortunate in America might have chosen The Grapes of Wrath. Today, it would be Supersize Me. All sorts of consumer goods, especially entertainment, have become extraordinarily cheap, making people’s lives better. If you don’t believe me, ask the homeless dude with the laptop.

As anyone who grew up playing SimCity knows, you can’t make your town smart and healthy overnight – but play the game on fast-forward for thirty years and everyone’s smart and living longer. Development is slow and boring.

Of course, Band of the Decade isn’t a designation one just throws around (regardless of what it looks like I’m doing here). From a purely musical perspective, the group is responsible for some of the best records of the decade. At the forefront is Kid A, the band’s 2000 release which has been hailed by everyone from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork as the best album of the 2000s. The ten tracks marked a departure from previous guitar-based rock music, with the band exploring the possibilities of computer synthesizers, sampling, and even autotuning of singer Thom Yorke’s vocals. Instead of releasing a single and promoting the album conventionally, the band released a series of video blips that were circulated on the Internet and played on music television stations.

Perhaps this was a fitting way for such an album to be released.  Kid A was a complete and utter shock to the music world at release. While record sales were successful (USA Today called it “the most eccentric album ever to debut at No. 1″), it was panned critically, with many longing for a return to the tranquillized rock roots of OK Computer (which, incidentally, is frequently cited as the best album of the 1990s). Kid A’s layered electronic textures and lack of traditional verse-chorus song structure makes it difficult on first listen. Radiohead pioneered the use of the internet in distribution of the album, which leaked in its entirety online prior to its physical release. The album was accompanied by a website that very well may be the most bizarre text-based site to hit the world wide web.

Radiohead followed up the immense artistic success of Kid A with Amnesiac, an album pieced together from the same marathon recording session that spawned Kid A. Despite being made at the same time, the latter group of songs has an entirely different feel, and had a successful single in both Britain and the United States with the haunting “Pyramid Song.” In spite of the changes to Radiohead’s sound, with horns and upright bass finding a spot right next to Johnny Greenwood’s Ondes Martenot. In 2003, another album, Hail to the Thief, attempted to find a semblance of balance between experimental electronics and traditional rock structure. Many of these songs were born out of live performances, as opposed to using the studio as an instrument as on previous efforts. The result was a return to a more conventional sound, with guitars and drums taking the spotlight on tracks such as “Go to Sleep (Little Man Being Erased).” With their contractual obligations to record label EMI completed, the band took a hiatus, and many fans feared the permanent dissolution of the group.

Yet in 2007, Radiohead returned in a manner that made international headlines. With a new album, the catchy and likable In Rainbows, the band announced they would be distributing the record without a record label, straight from their website. Additionally, the band instituted a “pay what you want” principle, with fans able to download the tracks for any price (or for free). The result was a resurgence in Radiohead fandom, with many new listeners finding the band through this free music distribution. It turned out to be a great pairing, as critics hailed In Rainbows as one of the bands best albums, with songs that redefined the band’s style without compromising the roots of their previous efforts.

The future of the group is currently uncertain, with members pursuing solo opportunities: guitarist Johnny Greenwood provided the musical score for the film There Will Be Blood, while Thom Yorke’s solo work found a way into Twilight: New Moon, of all things. Regardless, the band has released several stand-alone tracks in the last year, and made appearances at music festivals like the All Points West Music and Arts Festival and UK’s Reading Festival. There could even be a new album in the works according to various members of the band in recent interviews. It will be difficult for the group to follow up on their immense success in the recording studio, but with a new decade at hand, other artists will have a difficult time keeping stride with the World’s Greatest Band as we enter a new decade.

PS: Radiohead makes some of the best music videos out there.  

Knives Out

There, There (The Boney King of Nowhere)

House of Cards

As usual, campus security was riding around in golf carts, sprinklers were watering the grass and sidewalks, and sketchy black cats were scurrying through the bushes by the Athenaeum and Heggblade. The weather was 65 degrees and sunny by day and as cold as 40 degrees at night. And it was really, really quiet.

On Saturday around 5 PM, a few stranded East Coasters at the senior apartments grilled chicken and steaks, played Beirut, and blasted really loud music. Nobody complained.

As our freedoms reached the peak levels of our college years and we started making some poor choices, we thought, what if more people were here? What if instead of a couple dozen students who have no choice but to be here, 1200 CMCers stayed on campus for a day or two before going home?

Unfortunately, CMC closes all residence halls at 8 PM on the Friday at the end of finals week. My guess is it would be expensive to keep the dorms open an extra day — energy costs, liability insurance, cleanup costs, etc. would all add up. I think it’s worth it. Dorms should stay open until Sunday at 8 PM, not Friday at 8 PM.  And here’s what we could do with the extra time:

An All-Campus Game of Capture the Flag

Each dorm puts their flag in their main lounge (or dunk hoops) and receives a target.  If you capture a dorm’s flag, they are out of the game and your dorm gets that dorm’s target.  Every student is equipped with either laser tag guns, paintball guns, nerf guns, or water guns.  Obviously, each potential weapon has its trade-offs and would need to be laboriously debated at the Athenaeum before any decision is made.  There might be problems with 1,000+ students running around campus with fake automatic weapons, but let’s ignore that for now. Other possibility: North Quad vs South Quad.  Blowout After-party: Senior Apartments.

A Community Service Project/Day

I don’t really know what this would entail, but I’m sure we could figure it out.  Some companies have a policy that requires employees to take a day off from work to do community service.  Some companies do it together and all on one day — that’s the idea here, but with CMCers instead of a company. Instead of the townies coming to us, we’ll go to them for once. Blowout after-party: Scripps Pool.

Color Wars

If you went to camp, you know what this is. If you didn’t, read here. Dean Deb Wood will not be happy about this one; I doubt she went to camp. Blowout after-party: Green Beach.

Ski Beach Day

This year, the weather was perfect on the Saturday in question. It was 80 degrees and sunny mid-day. We would take buses up to Mt. Baldy, ski, then go to the beach. We’d probably have freshmen and sophomores go to the beach, then ski, and vice versa for seniors and juniors. Maybe we’d meet in the middle and rent out some huge restaurant/hall in LA for lunch for everyone. Pomona does this to a lesser extent already, why don’t we? Blowout after-party: Mt. Baldy

Camp-Out on Green Beach

We get like 500 tents and put them all over Parents Field in a circle. In the middle, we build a giant bonfire (the environment be damned). At midnight, everyone gathers around in pajamas and passes around a megaphone, giving toasts to the semester and throwing in symbolic pieces of the semester (my Business Law textbook, for example) into the flames. In between some of the tents, we’d have fires for marshmallows, etc. Blowout after-party: Parents Field

The Longest Boat Race in the History of Claremont McKenna College and the Entire World and the Galaxy and the Universe

From the Senior Apartments to President Gann’s front doorstep. It’s an idea that’s been thrown around a lot… let’s do it. Blowout after-party: Pam Gann’s Backyard

Runners-up: Huge snowball fight, carnival day, Joshua Tree trip, Mock Wedding, Hula Hoop Day, Rodeo Day, Catalina wine mixer, Cross the Border Day (AKA Tijuana Day), Dig a Tunnel to Scripps Day, Hug a Townie Day

Sure, institutional changes don’t happen overnight, and they don’t happen easily. Usually it takes a $200 million gift or a 25 percent decline in our endowment for things to change. Regardless, I’m graduating in the spring and plan on enjoying senior week while you all take finals. But if I were a younger man, I might fight for the right to capture the flag.

Most Birthers claim that Obama was born in Kenya, while others think his birth occurred in Indonesia.  Even though Obama has released a copy of his birth certificate showing that he was born on Oahu, these conspiracy theories continue to animate the fanatical right.

What is most surprising about these conspiracy theories is the number of relatively mainstream people willing to associate themselves with the Birthers or at least recognize the issue as a legitimate controversy.  One of CNN’s many reasons for dumping Lou Dobbs was his repeated raising of Birther issues.  More predictably, The Birthers have found audiences on conservative talk radio and conservative web sites such as Free Republic and WorldNetDaily.  The number of people who have serious doubts that Obama was born in the United States is shockingly high.  According to one poll, 28% of Republicans believe Obama was not born in the United States or are unsure.  These numbers, however, ignore an important geographic disparity: doubt about Obama’s place of birth is far higher in the South than anywhere else in the country. In the South, only 47% of respondents said they believe Obama was born in the United States, with 30 % unsure and 23% convinced he’s foreign born.

Many Republican politicians find themselves in an uncomfortable position when it comes to Birther conspiracy theories.  On the one hand, the Birther movement kills the Republicans’ credibility among the vast majority of the population and Republicans.  At the same time,   Rep. Mike Castle, a moderate Republican congressman from Delaware, was blindsided at a rally in July when a near-hysterical woman accused him of ignoring the “truth” that Obama was a citizen of Kenya.  Wanting to pander to the fringe without becoming entirely discredited by the lunatics, many Republicans have opted to align themselves only tangentially with the Birther movement.  For example, Republican congressman of John Campbell of California proposed a bill that would require presidential candidates to prove they are “natural-born citizens.”  On MSNBC, Chris Matthews interviewed Campbell and repeatedly asked him if he believed Obama was a natural-born citizen.  The extreme evasiveness of Campbell’s answers perfectly demonstrates his “wink-wink” strategy of secretly pandering to fringe elements of the conservative movement without having his reputation sullied by outright association.

As a final note to seniors still seeking employment, the Birthers are willing to throw down cash for investigations of Obama’s past.  Neil Sankey, a former member of Scotland Yard, has been hired by Birthers to investigate Obama’s personal history.  I know most CMC alums can’t match Sankey’s background, but perhaps “Topics in Forensic Science” has taught some desperate seniors enough to follow in the footsteps of Jonathan Ames.

Urban Dictionary defines “hooking up” as everything from making out to intercourse, which in a sexual context, is to say anything.  The word is an empty vessel through which we can share our exploits without sharing them, into which we can pour our shame without confessing.  It allows us to simulate genuine interaction without actually having to go through the ordeal of being completely honest.

But shouldn’t we be honest, if not with each other, the at least with ourselves?  If you can’t deal with saying “I had sex with some rando last night” or “none of your goddamn business,” maybe you shouldn’t be hooking up.  Just a thought.

A more interesting question, though, is to ask what the phrase says about our sex lives generally.  Is it not indicative of a type of interaction that places more emphasis on simulation than reality?  Half the conversations on a typical Saturday night really don’t deserve the name.  Talking is less an actual interplay of ideas than an exchange of signs, decodable only in a carefully calibrated argot—what some call the game.  The words spoken and the sentences they create matter less than what they represent.  “Want to watch a YouTube video in my room?” is not a genuine request but actually a nifty and socially non-threatening way to ask the other person if they want to hook up.[1]

This raises a question: why is so much of how we pursue each other pretense and deceit?  There’s a reason it’s called the game, but why is that so especially true at the 5Cs?   Why do we grind up on each other in dark rooms, searching for a hint of a connection somewhere, somehow, as we drown in a sea of signifiers? I don’t want to moralize—and really I shouldn’t.  I just think maybe we need to take a collective look in the mirror.

I mean, why do so many of us want a normal dating scene?  And yet why is the only ostensible indication of this in articles written behind the safe ramparts of online discourse?  Why is it creepy to ask someone to hang out in your room when you’re both sober and not when you drunkenly stumble into each other at TNC?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but I think I know the root of the problem: being a genuine person is hard.  It’s far easier to hope to drunkenly stumble into someone that you like on a Saturday night than ask them on a date.  You don’t actually have to show initiative, just trust to Providence and the will of Andrew Cosentino.  Of course, any missteps you make can easily be blamed on being drunk.  And any emotion you might feel can be safely siphoned into the linguistic black hole “to hook up.”  In short, our sociolingual edifice is more than accommodating.  But there’s value to that harder step.  It’s why Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living” and—I think—why there was such a positive response to Charles’ open letter.  Perhaps all of us—myself included—need to better appreciate how hard it is to forge meaning out of life, and how worthy that struggle truly is.

But what do teacher ratings actually measure? Two studies provide surprising results. A 1993 study showed that outside observers can predict a teacher’s ratings by watching video of a teacher for 30 seconds, with the sound turned off.¹ Apparently, the words coming out of a teacher’s mouth don’t matter as much as their body language.

The second study shows that we could replace the 30-question survey with two questions (Does the teacher seem like a nice person? and Is the teacher organized?), and get the same results.² This suggests that our criteria for “good teaching” boil down to factors that have nothing to do with how well students are learning the material.

We do not assess our teachers based on how well they’re teaching the material; our standard model of viewing the interaction between student and teacher primarily as a mechanism for transferring learning may be wrong. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason, argues that our relationship with teachers is more about giving us confidence, inspiring us to do great things, and “overriding the governor” by assigning difficult work, than it is about learning the course material. Although our opinions of teachers have little to do with how qualified they are, almost every school makes hiring decisions based on a candidate’s published papers, and the prestige of the candidate’s degrees. CMC considers student evaluations when making tenure decisions, although it is one of only a few schools to do so.

If CMC replaces a 4.00/6 quality teacher with a 5.00/6 quality teacher, how has the school improved? High ratings are a good predictor of a good classroom experience, and low ratings are a sign that you’ll spend the semester resenting the time you spend in class. A great teacher can make students fall in love with a subject, or inspire them to do great work, but it’s not clear that either is correlated with either the teacher’s knowledge of the material, or student learning. Teacher quality is important for test scores, but it’s unclear that better teachers have an impact on how much material we’re learning.

—————————————————-

¹Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations From Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 64 No. 3 (1993) p. 431-441.

²Gerald M. Meredith, “Dimensions of Faculty Course Evaluation,” Journal of Psychology, Vol. 73 No. 1 (1969), p. 27.

These quizzes offer a tantalizing prospect: a neat, clean packet of information about ourselves that we can consume at will.  In that way, they allow for the commoditization of introspection, just as Facebook generally allows for the commoditization of friendship.  We can share in a friend’s trip to Sicily by checking out their latest photos and wittily posting comments about them.  But just as Facebook is one of the defining features of our online lives, the ease it confers seems representative of what the Internet and information technology means for our lives more generally.

Instant messaging, both the cellphone and gchat variety, offer us the same ease of living.  You don’t have to go through the hassle of calling a friend or meeting them in person; rather you can im them at your leisure.

Wikipedia similarly makes life easy; it affords us the net sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.  We can stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants and drop knowledge from heights only dreamed of by our grandparents.

Or take Twitter, which allows us to broadcast ourselves to the world with even more ease.  Of course, all the wild gesticulations at meaning screamed on its pages seem only to signify peoples’ inability to deal with the unbearable lightness of speaking.

If you feel like actually venturing out into the physical world, don’t worry; there’s Google Maps for that.  You don’t actually have to burden yourself with knowing where you’re going or where you are, simply plug in the address and follow along.

We spend much of our days tooling around on the Internet, living what you might call the tabbed life.  Life is light and carefree: we’re a tab away from Pandacam, a couple clicks from a sick YouTube video, and a quick alt-tab away from that essay you don’t feel like writing.  In this world, why ask the big questions?  Why question so deeply or think so hard that it hurts, that it shakes your foundational assumptions about the world?  That seems hard.  Besides, there’s Wikipedia for that.

Easily lost, though, in this sea of easy living, is the fact that life is more than mere preference satisfaction.  Life should be heavy, laden with the weight of experience and meaning.  Friendship shouldn’t have to be streamlined by a newsfeed.  A meaningful friendship implies that you’re willing to take the good with the bad, that the desire for shared experience outweighs any immediate difficulty.[ii] Similarly knowledge about a road or things in general is not only important insofar as it is useful; there is value in a familiarity with existence and there is virtue in acquiring it.  The associative connections that familiarity allows, besides nurturing analytical ability, fosters relational associations between things—that is to say meaning.  It’s hard to have meaningful relationships; it’s hard to say worthwhile things; and technology is making it pathetically easy to avoid that.

But just as life can be lived well, so too can technology facilitate that.  It is, after all, just a tool.  And what a tool: a world of information has put thought at our disposal like never before.  Just as mediocrity has never been easier, greatness has never been more attainable.  The beastly life is just a click away.

[ii] I think this is why long car trips with friends are worthwhile even though being stuck in a glorified tin can for a few hours unequivocally sucks.  The immediacy of the car forces you to bond over the shared experience.