I am a passive consumer of the news. I skim headlines in my Google Reader but often literally only know as much about a story as is explained in those few words. The articles I actually click through to read tend to be fluffy, rather than hard news: 7 Secrets from Professional Chefs, Cat Makes it Home After Long Journey Through Wilderness, etc. And when a hard news story does catch my attention, I’m usually late, and it’s usually because I’ve been hearing SO much about it that I feel compelled to go read for myself and form an opinion of my own. The Manti Te’o story was one such instance. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, click the link in the last sentence and go read the article. I’ll wait.

Back with me? Okay, isn’t that creepy? I was so disturbed and found the story so uncomfortable that I actually wanted to focus on a current event here on the blog, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. So, I asked my friend Kyle, of KyleWrather.com fame, to write a guest post! Kyle is a Masters student in Communication and used the Manti Te’o debacle in discussion for the class he’s TAing. According to his Twitter, his interests include  journalism, media, culture, sports and more, so what better person to have comment on this strange phenomenon of our modern world? Enjoy!

How do you know the people you know? Not how well do you know them, but through what intermediary technologies do you stay in contact with them? We are fortunate to live in a time where social connections can be forged with little or no concern for distance, circumstance and background – but with these innovations we continue to face challenges in cultivating our social lives. Tools allowing friends to make contact after years apart or letting families see each other despite being on opposite sides of the world come with a downside: we forfeit our ability to know them outside of the ways they present themselves.

Consider the recent revelation that Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te’o’s girlfriend of three years who tragically died of leukemia never existed. Overcoming the tragedy of her loss constitutes much of the narrative surrounding his college football team’s success this season. Te’o has claimed he is the victim of a cruel and elaborate hoax and while this is possible (the MTV show “Catfish” is roughly based on this same idea) the idea that someone’s significant other of three years is a fiction hard to swallow.

I’m sure there’s more to the story than Te’o or anyone is letting on, but whether he is a tragic victim or complicit in the deception, it’s important to remember he’s a 21-year-old from Hawai’i who has been thrust int0 one of the biggest spotlights in sports (and that was before the hoax was revealed) and lives under incredible scrutiny and stress. It’s not hard to see how something like this could escalate. Unfortunately, the technology that allowed Te’o to forge a relationship despite his busy and remarkable life also allowed his fictitious relationship to continue.

In 15 years the Internet has changed dramatically and so has the way we understand our relationship with others through it. Roughly 10 years ago, while I was in high school, I (and like many people my age) witnessed an explosion of new tools (blogging, instant messaging and broadband) for communicating with friends.  In those early days my friends and I had only a fleeting grasp on the impact of our Internet experimentation –Livejournal posts and message board updates could last as eternal monuments to early-2000s teen ennui. Largely unsupervised by parents (who had even less of an understanding of how the social Web would work,) we pioneered the uncertain and unexpected wilderness of the Internet as a yet-to-be-defined social space. And like any pioneers this exploration was fraught with danger: impersonation, exploitation, and bullying were rampant in those days; but because the Web was a novelty for us, the stakes were relatively low.

But this reveals the ultimate conundrum of the social web – a space were we can define ourselves however we want is also a space removed from the traditional markers of what defines us. Our Internet selves are carefully combed, curated and molded to portray the selves we want the world to see and this has evolved from the wild-west of carefree (but dangerous) socialization we experienced as teens.

The Internet has revolutionized what it means to socialize. Today we have access to others who share our same interests, ideas and feelings in ways our predecessors never could have imagined. Email, video-chatting, blogs and social sharing mean potential friends, family members and loved-ones are only a few keystrokes away. These interactions happen faster and cheaper every day allowing us to build deeper, more meaningful ties. But with these benefits, we also have no choice but to enter every web interaction, especially those with someone never met in real life (IRL,) with guarded suspicion.

Sadly, Te’o’s experience is not an exclusive product of the social web, but instead a product of the communicative tools necessary for social life. Phone impersonations, in-person impersonations and deceptive letters have been happening since humans lived in caves. I seem to recall some Victorian novel with a plot almost exactly like Te’o’s story (let me know if anyone remembers its name.)

Technology remains a powerful tool in social life, but to enjoy its benefits, we have to be prepared to use it with caution. While it has enabled people to love each other and share their lives over previously insurmountable distances and barriers, opportunities for deception and abuse (as in Te’o’s case) continue. Our struggle remains to adopt and adapt these technologies to cultivate and preserve relationships with each other.

Did you read along with January’s book club selection, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel?

Here’s the product description from Amazon:

"In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power. England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death."

It was a dense read, and I only finished the morning of my book club gathering! I was actually the only who made it through before we met to discuss it, which I think reflects more on the book than on the dedication of my book club friends. :-) On the positive side, I enjoyed that the book was written in modern language, and its hyper-personal focus on Thomas Cromwell drew me into an emotional connection to the characters that I might not have had otherwise. But overall, I struggled a bit to get through it. Some of my problem was an utter ignorance of the historical facts! I spent the first third of the book waiting for it to explain why they started calling Thomas Cromwell, the main character, Oliver (the only Cromwell I knew of), until I finally looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered that Thomas and Oliver Cromwell are, in fact, different people. I found the book to be wonderfully written and was often caught up in the writing itself, struck by particularly poignant passages, but overall the book was not engaging. I had to force myself to sit down and read it because it wasn’t sucking me into the story. I agree with one reviewer who says, “Wolf Hall does not have the epic sweep of some novels of its genre. […] What grabs us here is not the broad picture but the detail, and Mantel is very good indeed at making it all real.”

All that said, I had an enjoyable time gathering discussion questions and evaluating my thoughts in order to lead the discussion at book club. The English major in me nerded out! This podcast from Slate gave me some good perspective, and I also found a discussion guide online.

Evidently Mantel treats several characters in non-traditional ways, i.e. Thomas Cromwell reads as the “good guy” and Thomas More (an actual saint in the Catholic church) is the “bad guy.” Since I had no historical frame of reference for these figures, I swallowed Mantel’s perspective hook, line, and sinker, so it was interesting to have it pointed out to me that this was a fresh take on the history!

Mantel made a few other interesting choices, such as the somewhat arbitrary time period she chose as the span of the book and the title itself, Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall is the family home of Jane Seymour, who ends up becoming Henry VIII’s wife. She is a rather minor character in the book, and Cromwell only visits the actual Wolf Hall at the end of the book, so why is the title significant? The guys at Slate pointed out the Latin phrase homo hominum lupus est - “man is a wolf to other men,” and my book club and I agreed that we think that plays into the title.

This passage, to me, is a good summation of Wolf Hall’s plotline:

Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

And this quote, a good commentary on historical fiction:

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Wolf Hall is well written and a good story. It’s interesting to watch personalities evolve, power shift, and relationships crumble. As a piece of literature, I can see why it was awarded the 2009 Man Booker Prize, England’s highest award for fiction. But to quote a reviewer again, “Wolf Hall is a fine read for the enthusiast of English history, then, and one that rewards the reader patient enough to submit to its length. I think I need a break, however, before cracking open the pages of its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies” (if in fact I ever do at all).

My husband Andy loves to learn. He uses his brain all day at work and then comes home and is still hungry to learn more! He’s constantly devouring technical books, exploring new computer languages, and researching things that interest him.

Until I saw how much a part of his life learning is, I thought I loved to learn, too. I was always a good student and enjoyed school, so I assumed it followed that I liked learning. But I’ve come to realize that I loved the trappings of school and learned more for its sake than for the sake of learning itself. I liked learning things so that I would make good grades. But take away that incentive and learning hasn’t been that important to me. I like looking lots of little things up on Wikipedia, IMDB, and the likes, but that’s trivia and not really true learning. Take, for example, my various thwarted attempts at learning Spanish! Without the structure of class, assignments, tests, and grades, I’m not really that motivated to succeed! It’s hard for Andy to understand this, and I have at times felt inferior to him because I can’t just make myself settle in a learn something.

As with being an “S” and therefore struggling to set goals for myself, I don’t want to use this as an out, but I also don’t think I need to beat myself up over it. We’re all different, and we all learn in different ways, so perhaps if I acknowledge my desire for external “gold stars” and find methods to learn that satisfy it, I can overcome my seeming inability to learn as an adult. I think it’s important to keep your mind fresh and not stagnate, so this year I’m going to try and put some weight behind that statement!

Another thing I need to acknowledge about my learning style is that I am not an independent learner. I don’t like studying in a vacuum  I ask a lot of questions, and I like to have someone there for when I get stuck. If I’m left to my own devices to figure something out, I’ll more than likely just quit rather than power through. I know there’s a lot of benefit to struggling through problems, but that’s just the way it is for me. I don’t necessarily like it, but again, I think acknowledging one’s own nature is an important first step to making progress.

The two main things I’m planning to work on learning are computer programming and Spanish. In both cases, I think I can set myself up for more success than I’ve had in the past by acknowledging my learning personality and shortcomings and trying to address those from the start. With learning to program, I thankfully have a great resource right in my own home: my husband! I’m walking the delicate line of trying to do some things on my own in order to absorb them better while at the same time asking enough questions to keep myself from feeling stuck and giving up. I’ve read through a goofy book called Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby, which helped me by laying the foundation of definitions that I felt I needed, but I then dove in and wrote a simple program with help from Andy. I did most of the thinking, as far as laying out what the program needed to do, but he helped by providing resources and explaining things I didn’t know how to do. My next step is to work through Learn Ruby the Hard Way. Unlike Why’s Guide, this book forces you to work through actual code (rather than just reading it, which often causes my eyes to glaze over), so I think it will be good for me to not be able to cop out by skimming the examples. I’m also planning to dive into a meetup group called Py Ladies, which I mentioned in my last post about coding. Hopefully this will help keep my enthusiasm up, provide me extra incentive to keep learning (outside of coding for coding’s sake and for being able to do it with Andy), and maybe even play into my resolution to work on relationships in 2013!

To learn Spanish, I have honestly wanted to just take a class somewhere. However, that requires time and money, and I am stubborn enough that I really feel I ought to be able to do it on my own! I have such a strong background in French that you think it wouldn’t be so hard. I’ve found a couple of online resources that I’m going to explore. One is a free software available through the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library called Mango Languages. I set up an account for it last year when I said I was going to learn Spanish but then never did anything with it. It seems Rosetta Stone-esque, but I love that it’s available to me for free! I’ve also just set up an account for a website called Memrise. I don’t know exactly how it works, but it definitely gives you incentives, and even has a competitive aspect, which I think will play out well for me. The lessons seem short and accessible, and there are a lot of them available.

I don’t know if I would have the impetus to even try to learn if I weren’t married to someone like Andy. I might be content to just read my fluffy books, watch TV, etc. But then again,  I might not. I think marriage brings out both the best and the worst in us, and hopefully Andy’s commitment to self-improvement and learning will begin to bring out a similar spark in me. It certainly can’t hurt that he will be endlessly supportive of any efforts I make in this area. In the past few months, holiday busy-ness aside, I’ve felt like life has kind of gotten away from me, and I’ve been struggling to even make time to read and update my blog amongst all the household and work tasks that need to be done. It would be easy to just accept that as the status quo and not try to grow or fit anything else in. But Andy has even offered to pitch in with housework if it will help me have more free time for pursuits like this because he is such a strong believer in the importance of learning! His enthusiasm will hopefully be a good inspiration for me as I stretch outside of my comfort zone and try to fall in love with learning.

What’s your learning style? Do you like exploring new things for their own sake?

The Air We Breathe by Christa Parrish is the most recent book Bethany House Publishers sent me to review.

It was a quick and mostly engrossing read, but I honestly can’t come up with a whole lot to say about it. The book is divided into chapters that each follow a different character in one of two years–Molly in 2009, Hanna in 2002, Claire in 2002, and the same Claire in 2009. It’s clear from the get-go that their stories are interconnected somehow, but it takes most of the book for the connections to be explained. For what it’s worth, I made the biggest leap well before the author explained it, so that made it sort of a letdown when Parrish finally spelled the connection out for me.

I had trouble accepting the underlying plot structure of the book. Hanna was out with her father when a horrific event occurred (I won’t say more than that for fear of ruining some of the surprise!). While I know events like this do occur, it was handled in such an understated way. It was simply part of everyday life for Hanna and her mother. But I felt like I needed it to be focused on a bit more–for someone to say, “Whoa, that is a really awful, unexpected thing! Let’s talk about it a little bit!” Hanna goes through counseling and has a chance meeting with a woman (Claire) who has lost both of her children in a car accident. The two have an immediate and inexplicable bond until another crazy, unbelievable event occurs. The resolution of the book depends on another chance occurrence, which was once again hard for me to swallow.

The relationships are what make this book, but I found even those to be a bit shallow for my liking. The bond between Hanna and Claire is beautiful. Claire is a Christian, though she is struggling with anger and doubt stemming from the accident that killed her, children, which I wanted the author to delve into more. However, this is the basis of the relationship they build, and it was cool to see how a child sought out someone to answer the deep questions she had. Molly and her mother had a lot of tension between them, walls that had grown thicker and thicker through years of anger, and I really wished that had been addressed more fully. Molly has a sweet friend named Tobias, and I liked watching their relationship develop throughout the pages. All of the characters were likeable and believable, which made me want to keep reading to find out what happened to them.

As with other Bethany House books I’ve reviewed, I was pleasantly surprised by how understated the Christianity was in this book. It didn’t try to beat you over the head with religion, but it was definitely an important theme in the book simply because it was an important part of the lives of several of the characters. I think including Christianity in that way will be instrumental in breaking down the barriers between “Christian fiction” and mainstream or literary fiction. That said, the writing itself in this book was nothing to write home about, as they say, and I’m not sure it would succeed outside of the comfy niche of Christian fiction.

I didn’t dislike this book, but I can’t offer much to strongly recommend it either.

I am epically bad at setting goals--long-term, short-term, daily, weekly...I sit down to try and come up with things I would like to do and my mind goes utterly blank. This seems odd to me because I'm such a planner and love having things spelled out. My layman's psychoanalysis theory is that it's because I'm an "S" on the Myers-Briggs spectrum. According to one description, this means, "I’m concerned with what is actual, present, current, and real" and that "sometimes I pay so much attention to facts, either present or past, that I miss new possibilities." On the flip side of the spectrum is the "N" personality type, who is "interested in new things and what might be possible, so that [she] think[s] more about the future than the past" and even "sometimes think[s] so much about new possibilities that [she] never look[s] at how to make them a reality." I don't want to use this as an "out" to simple excuse myself from trying to create goals for myself, but I do think it's useful to acknowledge that it might be harder for me than for others. I don't think I have a visionary bone in my body, because if I even start to let myself dream I end up getting caught up in the steps it would take to get to that dream so quickly that I can't get excited about it!

I love this infographic about what makes a good goal: