Month: March 2020

When I first began reading Garnette Cadogan’s piece, “Walking While Black”, the first few pages led me to believe he was talking about awareness and his experience with this regarding the world around him. By the end of the essay I still recognized this as a key part of what he is trying to express, but just in a different aspect. The aspect of having to be hyper aware of who he was and where he was, and how this affected his life overall. Cadogan’s resistance to the fear others felt walking at night on the streets of Kingston in comparison to the fear he feels everyday in the United States, a place where people are supposed to be free to express themselves in whatever way they want, sheds light on a serious issue in this country. His story surrounding the significance of walking is not the only one being told this way, and the fact that there are so many others walking in the same shoes shows the prevalence of the problem. Cadogan speaks of how social division presents itself, both in Jamaica and in the United States, but points to the differences in how this social division applies to himself and his way of life. He sees the beauty in social division in both countries; the history, the variety in culture, the joys of individuality. Simultaneously he sees the negative end of the division, but how he personally is affected is different from each place he lived and considered his home. This swing in the way he viewed fear from one place to another stood out to me because of the way he chose to look at fear itself. In Jamaica, Cadogan didn’t allow fear to control who he was, how he dealt with his own thoughts even after people told him the streets were dangerous. In the United States he no longer had the choice of how he viewed fear. It is just a part of who he is when he is here and there is no way to escape it.

Social scientists, of course, may want to question whether policing petty crimes has an effect on overall crime rates, or if it just clutters the prison systems in our country. Although not all tax-paying Americans contribute to the cost of these prisoners think alike, some of them will probably dispute social scientists’ theory that indicates that if as a society minor crimes are not policed there will be an increase in more serious crimes being committed. This theory, known as the broken windows theory, shows zero-tolerance policing as a more effective method, and bending the rules for lesser crimes would go against this ideology, and in the end, prove to be less than beneficial for society. 

The essay written by Adrian Chen takes a different approach on good VS bad argument regarding the integration of social media into our relationships. The sizable Twitter following that Phelps-Roper gained over a relatively short period of time challenges the “rule of thirds” looking at the gain and loss of friends, but also develops the question of do you really consider everyone on your social media following your friend? The answer to this may differ from person to person, but on average the number of people we are actually close with on social media platforms is much less than the actual number of followers. When I look at the people I am following on social media, I can see people I am close friends with in real life and on social media, some people who I know in person but I am not close with, and some that I only interact with online. Finding a balance between spending time with someone in person and also being able to talk to them online is where aspects of both essays come together in understanding. In Chen’s essay, Phelps-Roper met people online through social media and then proceeded to meet them in person. This shows the beginning of the idea of balance. She met them online but over a phone screen you cannot replicate actual human interaction. This also shows how using social media can help create these initial bonds with people and make it easier to meet them face-to-face. In Chen’s essay, Phelps-Roper says, “She and C.G. connected as strongly in person as they had online, and they now live together” (Chen.) Social media was in Phelps-Roper’s interest here, because there were more people to listen to what she is saying there is a higher chance of someone listening. Online social platforms allowed her to spread her current views, but at the same time it let her hear other people’s way of life and their views which were different from hers. Because of her strict religion and family values, she would only ever get advice from her mother and other people with similar views, but social media allowed her to branch out and hear how other people live, which urged her to make a change in her life that she probably wouldn’t have made without influence from others on social media. 

1) When I look at the people I am following on social media, I can see people I am close friends with in real life and on social media, some people who I know in person but I am not close with, and some that I only interact with online. 

When I look at the people I am following on social media, I can see a clear distinction between the people I interact with on a personal basis, and those I do not. 

2) This shows the beginning of the idea of balance. She met them online but over a phone screen you cannot replicate actual human interaction.

This shows the balance between online and in-person interaction, the communication through a screen only can do so much, the rest needs to happen face-to-face.

3) Social media was in Phelps-Roper’s interest here, because there were more people to listen to what she is saying there is a higher chance of someone listening. 

Social media was in Phelps-Roper’s interest here because it was an outlet for her to express her views to a larger number of people. The bigger the group of people, the higher the chance of someone listening to what you’re saying. 

When approaching the local revisions for this paragraph, one of my first thoughts was on how long it is. Typically this is something I would notice when going back and editing a paper but clearly I missed this in my first revision process. Because there is so much to talk about when analyzing an essay I tried to pack it all into one paragraph and that was where I went wrong here. I tend to have a problem with wordiness in my writing and that is what my first revision revolved around. There was an unnecessary number of words trying to express my thoughts so I took all of those out and put it into a more concise way of saying the same thing. My second revision was to a sentence that didn’t make sense when I read it, something that could have been caught by reading the paragraph out loud to myself because then I can really hear where I can use better wording in my sentences. My third revision was similar to my second, when I really listened to how this sentence sounded something just didn’t work. I changed the wording of the sentence to flow better to help the reader understand my thoughts better than they were able to before.

Looking at the title of Paul Bloom’s essay, “Empathy is Overrated”, the topic he presents seems like a controversial concept to think about. Talking about empathy, the capacity to understand or feel for another person, in a negative manner doesn’t seem like a beneficial way to think about such a basic human conception. However, Bloom presents his perspective on what empathy really does for us in a way that allows the reader to put themselves in the situations he describes and see empathy the way he does. After analyzing Bloom’s writing, I believe the main point he is trying to express is the misconception of the real driving factor in empathy. The majority of people are taught that empathy is being able to understand someone, to feel what they are feeling, but Bloom sees it in a different fashion. He sees feeling someone’s pain, anxieties, fears, etc., as a non-beneficial way to be there for someone when they need you. Instead, he views compassion as a more constructive measure of condolence. “What really matters for kindness may be self-control, intelligence, and more diffuse compassion” (Bloom 4). 

Because of these underlying views on empathy, another point Bloom makes in his essay is how the effects of empathy are seen in different situations and more often than not the negative outcomes outweigh the positive (5). The decisions that we make based upon empathy tend to be unethical and could have better solutions if we viewed them in a more intellectual, compassionate approach. This is another main point highlighted where Bloom talks about how “empathy reflects our biases” (2). We are more ought to feel for people we can relate to, and if we try to apply empathy on a large scale this is where problems arise. “Intellectually, we can value the lives of all these individuals; we can give them weight when we make decisions. But what we can’t do is empathize with all of them” (3). In saying this, Bloom is pointing to the importance of creating the distinction between what feelings to apply in a situation, intellect versus empathy. 

Empathy is a feeling that we learn, we do not come hardwired to feel for other people in this sense, and that is partially why different people have different views on something that feels second nature. This notion of learning how to think is where I felt the essay written by David Foster Wallace, “This is Water”, and Bloom’s essay highlight one another well. Though they are presented in different ways, Wallace’s take on the education system we have established teaches us how to think. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience (Wallace 3). This control that he is talking about here, the ability to control how we think introduces the points Bloom brings up in his essay. Bloom’s idea of decision making and the role that empathy has those circumstances. I think bringing the ideas in both of these essays creates for an interesting conversation regarding our motives in providing moral support, and the angle at which we should approach the situation.