Month: October 2018

The main thing that I got from this article is “correlation doesn’t equal causation”. As a statistics major, I have spent a lot of time hearing this over and over again when learning stat, and it’s one of the elementary ideas. However, when it comes to news headlines and debate focuses, people seem to not realize this important detail. Either that, or they choose to ignore it as to fool their audience. Whenever reading any type of information, always check to see, “is this cause and effect, or is it just a correlation?”.

Another important point that the article made is that research is always used as a blanket term now. Everything is about everyone when it comes to new psych information, when in reality each person is very different from the next. To say that Steph Curry is merely good at shooting the basketball because he practiced a lot does not take into account so many factors, such as athleticism and sport IQ. This is another case of correlation and not causation; although he definitely practices a lot to get better, he may just practice because he’s already got a talent and passion for basketball, not because he started terrible and wanted to be amazing. For every person it is completely different on how their ability will pan out in any given area of strengths and weaknesses, and with the 10,000 hours idea, this could never be a more general expression over the human race.

While hip hop has its roots going all the way back to the 1970’s, I’m choosing to focus my essay and TED talk on the 90’s until now to better explain why such a big paradigm shift occurred in rap music and culture. To be more specific, this shift relates to hip-hop being considered ‘black music’ to it now becoming one of the most popular genres in the world.

This shift is important because it can give insight into how different ideas, cultures, and genres gain widespread popularity. It also help explain what ideologies in society have changed to allow the genre to gain popularity and what formed it into what it is today. As expected, rap is nowhere near the same as it was 20-30 years ago, so exploring how society has changed with it can maybe answer why some of these changes in sound happened.

With this topic, there are many different angles I could approach it from; how has the culture changed due to a shift? How has rap’s popularity changed due to a shift? As I glean more information, I will focus more on one that I feel is the most interesting and has the most background for me to make a thorough argument.

The paradigm shift that the author is trying to relate is the change in kids’ and teens’ lives due to ‘screens’. Kids have began replacing the time spent doing outdoor activities and going out with connecting with friends online through Snapchat, Instagram, texting, and more. With this shift in how kids and teens socialize, there have been many other factors that have come out of it; higher rates of depression, less social interaction, less dating and sexual relationships, and others.

One thing I agree on is that the shift in social behavior due to smartphones has definitely affected mental health and sleeping. For many people in my high school, depression was a very common thing and our grade had one of the highest depression rates of recent years. I have no doubt that this has something to due with the pressures of social media; wanting more followers, wanting more likes, cyberbullying, wanting to look as good as other people online, etc. So many factors come into play online and people feel an urge to be something their not when on social media, creating a real identity crisis. Along with that, sleep has definitely had a major effect from this smartphone usage. For me personally, I use my phone right before bed almost every night, use it as my alarm, and wake up with it the next day, just as the author described. And I believe this has had effects on my sleep. Whereas I used to get a healthy 8 hours of sleep at least, in high school I found it tough to even get around 6 hours a night, and had a tough time waking up in the morning. The amount of screen time were getting is only wiring our brain to be awake way later than it should be, as the bright phone light only blocks our brains natural slow-down to make us sleepy. In this vein, I think there are a lot of problems that come with the paradigm shift in kids lives.

However, I don’t agree that kids and teens are going out less now than they were before; if anything, they could be going out and socializing in real life more. With the advent of texting and other messaging apps, it’s now exponentially easier to meet up with somebody by simply shooting them a text asking to meet up, and with group chats you can get a bunch of people together with only one message. I would definitely not say my real-world socialization declined at all due to smartphones, and dating as well was super common in my school too. I don’t know where the statistics for that come from, but if there is any difference from 30 years ago to now, I would certainly say there’s nothing to worry about with it.

In my speech, I talked about the inspiring life and death of Navy SEAL and Marine Travis Manion, and how he led others in his belief of ‘if not me then who’, being a leader for the people around you. For my essay, I decided to compare him to someone else who made huge sacrifices for their beliefs: Colin Kaepernick. While his sacrifices did not include his own life, his ideology of being a leader for the people around him is the same.

Kaepernick began kneeling for the pledge in 2016 to symbolically protest the mistreatment of black people by police and the US government. His idea was that he did not want to stand for a flag that didn’t truly represent him, and it surely got the message across. However, his acts did not stop here. Earlier this year, Kaepernick was featured in a Nike advertisement about overcoming adversity and silencing those who oppose you, alluding to his actions in the NFL but also representing athletes who train for success. This crossover advertisement was very polarizing as a lot of people praised Nike for their work in representing the black community, as a lot of black athletes are signed to Nike. However, many people began to boycott the company because of its inclusion of Kaepernick. I liked this artifact a lot not only because of how polarizing the topic is, but also because of its recency and connections to major companies (NFL, Nike). Seeing companies get involved with public issues is always very interesting to me because of how much power their opinion and choices hold in the community; if Nike is behind Kaepernicks protest for equal treatment, then who can stop him?

In the same way I would like to connect this to Travis Manion in my essay, since even after he died an organization (Travis Manion Foundation) was created in order to further his message. The power that companies and groups have in the world is remarkable, and if more brands could put themselves behind social issues then it would bring much more power to the people he need it most to get their voices heard.