Oratory Oracles

In the fifth grade, I entered the school's Oratory Competition with a stellar essay. No awkward sentence structure, no idea overlap, nothing but beautifully composed, succinct ideas on paper. As I got up to deliver this speech that I had so painstakingly crafted in front of a very large crowd of parents and teachers, I felt ready to take over the world of composition... Until I started talking.

All the words I had put so much effort into automatically became empty-sounding and repetitive. Speaking on the microphone, my voice reverberated and sounded way too loud for the auditorium. I forgot the conclusion, and had to leave the stage after my last body paragraph.

Of course, I lost the contest. Dead last.

In retrospect, maybe I should've practiced. Maybe I should've tried talking into the mic a couple of times before the actual night of the contest, or practiced my diction, or memorization, or how to stay still during the talk. Maybe if I had written the speech earlier...?

Fortunately, I had a chance to redeem myself next year, and in following years: I won the Oratory Competition on two separate occasions, seventh and ninth grade. However, there are still little things I do that I wish I didn't: I still tend to cross one leg over the other, or fidget a little with my hair, or move around too much. I sometimes use verbal fillers, or speak choppily, and I need to concentrate in order to not mess up my English. Overall, however, I think I've improved slightly from that fifth-grade attempt at crafting a good speech.

I now know that the art of crafting a good speech is a mix of different elements: you can have really good content, but if the delivery isn't on par, it will detract from the overall impression that the audience gets from it. However, a speech can be very poor in content, and yet be delivered in such a way that fools the audience into thinking it's the best speech they've ever heard. It has to do with the three ingredients of the basic rhetorical recipe: ethos, pathos and logos.

I've realized that by combining the three, I can end up with a captivating speech, without necessarily going overboard or too deep with the content (a common mistake that I used to think I needed). In other words, if you sound too smart, you'll increase your ethos, but completely lose the other two elements.

For this following TED talk, my aim is to be able to craft interesting content, while at the same time controlling my delivery and style in order to engage the audience fully. Also, stop fidgeting. And practice beforehand. And, um, avoid verbal fillers.

Jeez. Thank God this isn't a competition.

A Case For The Circle

Spoiler alert: these pictures are all real.

BBC News Headquarters, London

Google Headquarters, Dublin

Corus Quay, Toronto

Google, Tel Aviv

Would you want to work in any of these?

I know for a fact I would-- not only are these cool per se, but their companies seem to be actual beacons of good. Take Google's motto, for example: "Don't Be Evil". It's quirky, independent, alternative. It embodies all they do (it's even embedded in its search algorithm). They also emphasize personal and communal development, by providing opportunities for growth both in and out of the office space. All in all, it sounds perfect. Just like The Circle was in those first chapters. The question is, when did The Circle stop being good?

It was painted as a utopia, a perfect paradise-- the ultimate company. However, there must've been somewhere at which the reader was funneled into believing that the organization was in fact evil. Was it when Mae went clear? Was it before? Had the company been racking up the negatives until they blew up?

Individually, the little programs that The Circle has (SeeChange, for example) are not bad in themselves: the little cameras "would cut crime rates down by 70, 80 percent in any city where we have meaningful saturation" (p67). Furthermore, the OuterCircle, Zing and InnerCircle feeds that Mae uses to communicate echo Facebook, Twitter, and messaging platforms that we already have, and LuvLuv can be compared to the advanced version of Tinder.

The point of this being-- we already have this technology and online prowess. The Circle as a company merely englobed these phenomena we subscribe to and put it on steroids under various slogans: "secrets are lies", "in this short life, why shouldn't everyone see what they want to see?", why shouldn't everyone have equal access to all the experiences available in this world?", "privacy is theft", amongst others. These aren't that different from Google's motto, but what makes The Circle so evil to our eyes?

Perhaps The Circle lost all its credibility (to the reader) at the point where collective enterprise interfered and was valued over individual liberties by trying to get everyone to give up their intrinsic essence in favor of the company's network of shared experience. You can say, then, that The Circle only stopped being good when the obsession with oversharing got to the point of losing one's identity to the collective. I think this is echoed throughout the book, but we have forgotten it: oversharing is losing your own identity, surrendering all that makes you yours in order to adopt the philosophy of a larger body that doesn't necessarily reflect our own mantra.

And that cannot be compensated by quirky architecture and office space.

Mistaeks

We all make mistakes. From the small and mundane, to the enormous, accompanied-by-a-bad-word mistakes that make us want to burrow down into a hole and never come back out. Like my Snapchat story last Friday. Or the first fifteen years of my life. Or that old Facebook picture I should have deleted before adding any new college friends.

For your entertainment, circa 2010. I did in fact eat that box all by myself. 

Thankfully, I could take both the story and the picture down, and promptly get rid of them, and no one was the wiser. However, The Circle offers an alternative: banning the deletion information. By not deleting anything, The Circle aims to make all information free, but instead, they create a prison of mortification. 

The basic premise we operate under is pretty simple: we all fail. We all make mistakes. Saying "that's okay, you're only human", is a way of empathizing with the person who just made a mistake, and assuring them that they're not in the mess alone. Being "human" is, innately, being flawed. And that's okay, because humans have a particularly interesting quality to them:

We learn from our mistakes. 

It's true, we're not allowed to "delete" in real life; to go back and make our mistakes disappear, or to actually have them taken off our record. All of our actions do take a toll and leave a mark on us, but this mark then allows us to learn. This in turn helps us rationalize the fact that we messed up, and then come to terms with it. We slowly forget we messed up, and only the correction remains. 

In not being able to delete anything off the company's cloud, the opposite happens: we aren't able to grow past our mistakes, because we never go through the process of rationalization that characterizes learning from them. We keep on being reminded that we messed up, over and over, by the certainty that the evidence is uploaded somewhere on the cloud. Besides, there are copyright issues.

This is an example (quite extreme, I must admit) of an enormous copyright dispute:

Source, Wikipedia

David Slater, a British nature photographer, was photographing Celebes crested macaques in Indonesia, when he purposefully let the camera's shot trigger within reach of a pair of female macaques. The macaques proceeded to take "selfies", and Slater then sold the pictures to a news agency, under the premise that it was his own work. This created disputes across ethics and legal boards, as to whom the copyright belonged to. In 2016, a judge declared that given that monkeys are not humans, they can't hold copyright over material, and the picture was permitted to circle (pardon the pun) freely.

What if the monkey had won the dispute? What if this picture actually threatened their way of life in a certain manner? It would create immense repercussions within nature, all because of a certain "harmless" image that couldn't be erased. The same goes for humans-- the ability to erase is a precious one given to us by the Internet, through which our privacy can be protected, and we get a second chance, and we should always have the right to this.

The aim of not being able to delete anything uploaded to the internet is, according to Eamon Bailey, in line with their well-meaning but reductionist mantras of "Secrets are lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is theft". However, these mantras are white or black: they don't take into account the grey areas. And the thing is, life is a collection of grey. We should be allowed to keep our right to privacy, just as we have for the past thousands of years before the "new dawn" of technology, or we risk becoming machines who think they know everything about everyone around them... but really, don't know anything at all. 

The Weird Paradox

There's a peculiar situation going on in social media these days: Instagram Moms. They've taken over the platform with pictures of their kids, their activities, the sweet notes they pack in their lunch boxes every morning. They have this thing going on in which they balance family, fun and fitness in ways that only superheroes (or really skilled yogis) can. My cousin is one of these Instagram Moms:

All images reproduced with permission from her.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with choosing to show your life online. However, these images are only quick snapshots of what is a much greater frame: her busy life. Of course, the picture painted is made to be aesthetically pleasing, and I know she takes great care to show the best parts of her family on social media. Contrary to the public's perception of her feed, she doesn't spend hours brunching with the in-laws, or cooking, or hiking around undiscovered sierras in Germany. Her life is pretty much ordinary... With a couple shots of adventure in it. Overall, by looking only at users' social media profiles, reality is painted to be much different to what everyday life looks like.

This is what Mercer talks about in The Circle: the clear division between the self and the online self.

Mercer has become my favorite character in The Circle. His clear, lucid appraisal of Mae Holland's situation and life as a circler is a welcome read after the rest of the characters' oblivious descent into the madness of the corporation. He notes the "weird paradox" that is "thinking you're at the center of things", whilst at the same time "becoming less vibrant". Mae's socializing is limited to a few "smiles" (online, of course), or "frowns", without any face-to-face interaction, because of her always being hooked to the platforms online.

That is what I think about when I see how many of my Instagram friends follow accounts like these:

Left: @jayalvarrez, below: @alexisren. Both from Instagram. 







They comment and "react" on these pictures of beautiful landscapes, other people doing things they wish they could do... And live these peoples' lives through their own mobile devices, instead of going out and doing it themselves. This is what Mercer tells Mae: how she's become a mere router that receives and re-transmits information in the  forms of "smiles" and "frowns".

It's hard to understand nowadays that a Facebook like or an Instagram heart doesn't automatically transmit to actually experiencing something: it's just an umbrella concept to house the people who like the same activities or ideas. Furthermore, and as with my cousin's feed, these are only quick snapshots of their lives, and don't encompass all of it.

Mae herself notes that it was "strange (...) being reduced to a list of likes and dislikes" in LuvLuv's presentation, and yet she doesn't realize that she has been reduced to that by her own accord. She doesn't experience these things anymore, but merely observes, digests and rates a situation or activity without moving from her desk. This has become increasingly (and scarily) common these days, and The Circle mirrors this common phenomenon perfectly: the swallowing of the self by the online persona, a merging that turns multidimensional beings into an information-spewing colander of fake experiences.

Mercer, Mae and Timberlands

I have never, not once, been exposed to temperatures lower than 50F.

Given that last week, at the end of August, the temperature dropped to a 46-degree low, I thought it was wise to invest in a good pair of boots. After asking a couple of my more winter-savvy friends, I went on the Timberland website, looked around for a bit, and- not satisfied by the options- logged off.


When I opened Facebook yesterday, my feed looked something like this:

Also, how did they know I now live in Pennsylvania?

I want to draw attention at the boots in the sidebar: the same exact boots I was looking at not a week before. It's not only Facebook though:

                                                                       Absolutely no aesthetic.

Tumblr, the secluded, pseudo-indie microblogging platform where I ran away from the pointless stream of useless information that Facebook bombards me with. However, now it seems like I can't open any social media platforms without coming face to face (or, well, screen-to-face) with these advertisements for boots I didn't even like.

For some reason, I feel like this is an enormous breach of privacy.

Of course, I could clear my cookies and browser's cached information, but then all my useful login details (usernames, passwords, general preferences) would be erased. I wish there could be a way to maintain my browsing privacy without hindering my online experience: a way of limiting the availability of my information to every company I visit, while still saving my preferences on the sites that I do wish to have them on.

I feel my point of view is somewhere between Mae Holland's and Mercer's, from The Circle. While Mae Holland aims to be fully connected, or "close the circle" (in Eamon Bailey's words), Mercer isn't fully on board with this idea. Much like Mercer, I don't believe that companies should be able to "scan(...) all of our messages for information they can monetize" (p. 135). It's creepy, the way all websites know I attend Penn State, am concerned about eating disorders and diets, and always display ads about these topics in whatever website I visit:

Mae herself kind of comes into contact with this, at the LuvLuv presentation, where she feels that "having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, the real you" (p. 126) is distorted. In much the same way, I think the storing of my information reduces me to "an algorithm", and no matter how accurate it is, it will never be able to describe me in totality. It's scary, to imagine being classified as a series of numbers, and reduced to my Google searches, the products I browse, and the places I visit.

However, I do admit that getting targeted ads is useful, as opposed to only getting random ones, and sometimes I'll even click the link to buy what they're selling. I feel like there needs to be some sort of streamlining online in order to have an enjoyable experience and interaction, and this is only achieved by a certain customizing of "private" information that must be made public. In some way, it's not being coded, but being understood. And that, in a sense, is very comforting.

In this way, I'm more like Mae: pragmatic, I know that "the future" includes different definitions of "privacy" and "communication" to what we have now, and don't want to be left behind in the wake of evolution. I see how useful it is for companies to "manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs" (p. 134), and how the storage of personal information helps the internet feel much more personal than a plethora of randomly-generated ads would.

So, in conclusion, I know that a big place like the internet can be made to feel smaller (and more personal) through interaction with the individual users, and this can only be done by storing certain information about everyone. However, it is worrying and kind of annoying to feel "followed" by all these companies and ads, like a  good song stuck in the back of your head for so long it became boring. What do you think? Is a personalized online experience a good price to pay for your private information and habits being dispersed around the internet?

Newbie

There are very few things more nerve-wracking than stepping into a completely new campus on the first day of New Student Orientation, and one of these is stepping into this completely new campus on the first day of class.

Me, saying goodbye to my family the first day of Orientation

It's not just the hordes of people, or the sweltering heat, or the cold sweat running down your back-- a cool reminder that your class must've already started, and you definitely overslept, even if your schedule says you're a half hour early. It's not only the utter lack of company, the vague discomfort of the new food lurking around your belly— it's the absolute certainty that you're not prepared for college at all, and can I go back to El Salvador, por favor? 

Central Pennsylvania, Woody Hibbard, Flickr

El Salvador, Diego Brito, Flickr

(That picture just above this caption is basically the whole country. Central Pennsylvania is just a tiny sliver of land in a state. You can see how moving from a tiny country to a big expanse of countryside was a huge change in itself.)

I can imagine Mae Holland, from a small town in California, feeling the same sense of overwhelmingness as I did when I first got to Penn State. Being surrounded by so many people who knew what they were doing, where they were going, how and why things worked around here. For me, every interaction was just an intricate set of symbols and rituals, interconnected in some mysterious way, without any proper logical order to it.  Everyone seemed to exude an aura of intelligence, coolness and absolute confidence in themselves and their surroundings that I most definitely lacked. Mae definitely felt the same way, overwhelmed and scared.

However, Mae had a friend, Annie. And I didn't. 

I feel like our experiences in a new place differed because of this: Annie provided much-needed support to Mae in the first couple of days. She had both an insider and outsider's point of view on the situation, so she felt more comfortable moving around the company. I feel like having an insider in the "company" (in this case, the university) can be both good and bad. I mean, I had to get friends, stat. So I went out, forced myself to smile and talk, and I've now got a nice squad that I can rely on for support. They're not Annie, but they'll suffice. 

I distinctly remember how it felt getting the key to my dorm room: freeing, exciting. I now had a place to call my own. Similarly, Mae gets a station in a "flower pod" of desks; a space that is hers only. This helped her feel part of the community already, by asserting her being needed and wanted by the company. They wanted her there so much, they gave her her own station. 

My own station isn't as glam as Mae's:

But the same feeling remains-- my own space to customize, alter and make mine as much as possible. 

Finally, the main tradition that separates me from my community is its unwavering love for all things football.

I never had any idea what football was, how it was played, and what the rules and specifications were. I saw everyone get excited over season tickets, and buying university merchandise, and I honestly didn't understand what was going on. Much like Mae, though, I was quickly sucked into the masses cavorting towards the stadium on game day, if only to see what the fuss was about:

And I loved it.

I think it's safe to say, I'm on my way to becoming a really good Circler Penn Stater.

Go blue!

A Journalist's Juggle

Our essence is unique and built up of passion, dreams and desire. It's almost impossible to word the excitement behind passion, but I've focused on two particular passions of mine which I thought I could write about easily and still transmit some of my feeling through them. Feel free to skim read over them, and comment which one would you be more interested in reading! 

1

The Diet

These days, there are a myriad different diets being touted as the ultimate way to lose weight, get fit, feel better: Paleo, going vegan, gluten-free, IIFYM, LCHF, etc. I'm really interested in finding a dietary lifestyle that goes well with me, and that makes me function to the best of my abilities. The blog posts will include reviews of different products, recipes, what worked and didn't work for me and a brief journal recounting my experience with every particular diet. I'll follow the five diets listed above during approximately two weeks each, and I’ll do three posts per diet:

• ·      Introduction/expectations
• ·      A halfway-through post on which I share my impressions on the diet so far
• ·      A final recap and product review about the diet

As well as my subjective opinion and experience on the diet, I’ll be recording “hard” facts:

• ·   Energy levels
• ·      Weight
• ·      Average heart rate

And will be taking some measures in order to ensure a fair test for all the diets:

• ·      Amount of physical activity (measured by my GarminHR fitness tracker)
• ·      Type of physical activity (6 sprints per session, 3x a week, and some light weights)
• ·      Sleep time (6-8 hours)
• ·      Caloric intake (although I won’t be enforcing this strictly, given that some diets work by counting “macros” instead of calories, or becoming attuned to the levels of satiation

At the end, I’ll do a cross-review of all the diets in terms of convenience (for college students, at least), price, how it made me feel, and any weight I may have lost. I plan to reach a conclusion that is sustainable for the long-term, and be able to incorporate it as a part of my daily routine.

I’m interested in developing this topic further into my blog, because proper nutrition has been always a concern of mine, and I really like experimenting with different dietary habits to see if I can accommodate them into my own lifestyle.

2

Salvadoran Craft Review

Given that I come from El Salvador, Central America, I thought about doing a sort of review about Salvadoran crafts and their makers: I'll be showcasing a particular product per week, for the ten weeks that the blog will go on. These artists are all local, and make the finest crafts for both domestic and foreign consumption. 

I'll be talking about their background, a brief biography, and perhaps a link to their Etsy, Society6 or Behance profiles.

Some of the artists I'll be profiling are:





Sonia Lazo















Andrea Tobar























Steve Aparicio

            
                  Douglas Rodas