The Tufts Daily
32
Op-Ed
Commencement 2012
Can you hear me now? by Stephanie
Farber
“Are you listening? Hello? Can you hear me?” I’m sure you have all had this conversation. You’re on the phone with a friend and the line starts to break up. The connection becomes fuzzy until you’re yelling at no one, and the line goes dead. That’s not at all what was happening to me. There was a phone involved, but no calls were made. Nope. I was yelling to get the attention of my friend who was incessantly texting her boyfriend. Now, please do not pin me down as a technology-hater reminiscing on the days of handwritten letters and rotary phones. The cell phone is one of the greatest inventions of our time: safety, convenience, constant communication all in the palm of our hands. However, it’s the constant communication that I find troubling. More times than not, cell phones are extensions of our hands rather than accessories. Texting in class, while doing homework, at work, dur-
ing water breaks at practice, under the table at dinner — you name it and it’s been done. I admit that I, too, have frequently fallen victim to the rush of sending a text before a professor turns back around from the blackboard. Why is it that this is so thrilling? Have the tools meant to enhance communication become a hindrance to socialization? I have played sports all my life, and competition is part of my nature, but competing with a phone for a friend’s attention is a battle I do not enjoy fighting. If our attention is split between radioactive waves and live friends, someone is getting the short end of the wire. It’s not called a “CrackBerry” for nothing, after all. I am frequently insulted when I find myself saying the same thing three times before getting a response. Furtive glances toward a phone during a friendly conversation retract from the authenticity of interactions. Our parents’ generation didn’t get its first cell phones until their 30s and 40s. Now, if children wait until 10, they have most likely already become a social out-
cast. Naturally, the ease of parent-child communications is a major benefit of cell phone use, but the detrimental factors nearly outweigh the gains. When typing a message, it is very easy to forget about the person on the receiving end. We have seen the growth of cyberbullying and active efforts to quell the next generation of taunting. Cell phones create a portable medium through which kids can continue to antagonize peers without recognizing the consequences or full effects of their words. A New York Times article suggests other harmful effects that teens are not aware of. The desire to text late at night can lead to sleep deprivation, the addiction can lead to anxiety, and the distraction in school can lead to falling grades. Additionally, kids are losing the ability to value being alone. Constantly being connected to the world makes it nearly impossible to ever fully relax and break free. Not to mention, texting brings muscle cramping to a whole new level as many teenagers complain of sore
thumbs. Cell phones were not designed to destroy the world, and they certainly have many positive attributes. It’s comforting to know that in the click of a button help could be on the way in an emergency. It’s easy to shoot a quick text when running late for a meeting or simply to keep in touch with an old friend. In college, cell phones facilitate communication with parents. Making plans could not require less energy than sending someone a text. Like other technological innovations, for all the good they bring, cell phones pose their flaws. As we recognize these issues will we do anything to stop them? Admittedly, my phone was on my desk through the entirety of writing this op-ed. And tomorrow, I will still compete with the toy box for friends’ attention. Even if you can hear me now, are you really listening? Are any of us? Stephanie Farber is a rising junior majoring in English.
Consumers should push Apple to serve as model for other tech companies MAC
continued from page 31
It is clearly within Apple’s interests. With the recent passing of Apple CEO and visionary Steve Jobs, and future product innovations remaining uncertain, a serious CSR strategy and commitment to the greater public good could be what continues to differentiate Apple from its competitors and rewards Apple financially in the long term. The time for change could not be more opportune. Harsh working conditions leading to suicides at some of its suppliers’ factories have made Apple the target of international crit-
icism. Apple needs to act. It has taken a few steps, but not nearly enough. After allegations that certain of its contract manufacturers in China are sweatshops, Apple began yearly audits of all its suppliers and has slowly started raising standards and pruning suppliers that do not comply. However, raising standards without raising pay merely makes suppliers cut other corners. The pressure from Apple to do more with less may be rationalized in terms of efficiency, but it has human and environmental costs — costs that have been repeatedly highlighted by the media,
most poignantly by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza in their article on the human costs built into an iPad, [which ran in The New York Times on Jan. 25]. The suicides at China’s now infamous manufacturing behemoth, Foxconn, have created the uncomfortable impression that “cool” products like the iPad are being produced by what amounts to economic slave labor. This is decidedly “uncool” and not the image that Apple wants to portray. It should respond by using its accumulated profits to help revolutionize the tech industry once again and turn
sustainable development and production (from both a social and environmental perspective) into business as usual. As one of the most admired corporations in the world, other companies — especially those in the tech industry — would likely follow Apple’s lead. The only way this will happen is if Apple faces pressure in the marketplace. The question is whether there will be increased pressure on Apple or whether buyers enamored of their products will continue to buy them regardless of the human and environmental costs. I believe it is our responsibility as consumers to push
Apple to become a more sustainable company and serve as an example to others. For many students, a computer is the most expensive thing we own. Something that we invest so much in should align with our values. If we care about such things, we must make ourselves heard, think twice and vote with our wallets before purchasing that next Apple product. Just make sure we let them know why.
Brooks Shaffer is a master’s degree candidate in international business and environmental policy at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
For constructive dialogue, Tufts needs more than knee-jerk indignation Greek Life
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to giving me free choice regarding the company I wish to keep while emptying my bowels and bladder. So too are varsity sports, several of the Tufts a capella groups, and the clothing section of the university bookstore. Border accuses the Greek System of dividing men and women, but she proceeds to do exactly that by admonishing the women of Tufts for needlessly trading their souls for sorority bids but tacitly acknowledging the legitimacy of men wishing to join fraternities. The same hypocritical narrow-mindedness that dictates much of Border’s argument is possibly even more prevalent in the sentiments expressed by William Huang, Alex Chan and various Asian-American groups across campus, especially, though not exclusively, the Korean Students Association (KSA). For a minority-group that suffers from such highly-flaunted discrimination to actively complain about another minority achieving its goals (I am referring to the new Africana Studies Program, the inception of which was apparently met with disappointment by Chan) is to dramatically misinterpret the Civil Rights struggle, which revolves around the principles that inequality for some is inequality for all, and progress for some serves the betterment of everyone. I do not mean to say that Asian American groups are the only ones guilty of focusing on their tree and missing the forest. Indeed, I think that for all its supposedly liberal and progressive tendencies, this campus is deeply hostile toward the open discussion of beliefs, unless of course those beliefs come in neat wrapping paper and a bow tie or have the support of a vocal enough contingency. When people are informed — and you would expect that to be more of the time at such an elite scholarly
institution — they adopt one view and accumulate academic language around it to the detriment of other perspectives. As in the case of a clogged artery, everything that passes through the minds of this campus’ most motivated activists is filtered through the plaque of committed intellectual bias. Often there is simply no room for other ways of understanding the world to pass through. There is an important difference between talking at someone and talking with someone, a difference that is lost on too many of our school’s more outspoken individuals. The KSA’s feverish response to the foreverinfamous bias incident was a prime example of precisely the wrong way to initiate a purposeful conversation at Tufts. It certainly did a far better job of marginalizing the Asian community than whatever occurred in the Lewis Hall lobby during spring semester 2009 (and, as I trust the Daily readership noted, there was no one quoted in the article who was actually there to witness what happened, and, between the people who were, there is not, and has never been, a clear consensus on that subject). I know that voicing a less than 200-percent politically correct opinion at this school is like pogo-sticking across a minefield, so I wouldn’t dare suggest in any way that rallying militantly behind hot-button topics is poor practice for anyone genuinely trying to improve interpersonal relationships at this school. I wouldn’t say that overblown reactions make for good political and media fodder — and can win you a new, fully-staffed academic studies department perfectly fit to (and I’m sure Lauren Border would agree here) perpetuate the categorization of the world into terms of “us versus them” — but will do absolutely nothing to unite the people who comprise the Tufts community. The collective Greek Life community
wrote a long op-ed defending its honor against Lauren Border’s antagonistic op-ed. Her words managed to set the Facebook world ablaze with backlash, and she, accordingly, backpedaled as quickly as possible, writing another op-ed that appeared beneath the Greek Life piece, apologizing for the most contentious arguments she put forth in her first one. More recently, the men’s crew team was suspended for “promot[ing] aggression and rape” with t-shirts displaying a shockingly “phallic” depiction of a 4-person rowboat and an equally perverted pun on the word “coxswain.” Of course, the drawing was a faithful representation of what a manned crew boat actually looks like, and the caption accompanying it has all the rape implications of a “that’s what she said” punchline, but that’s beside the point. The point is, someone felt a twinge of self-righteous anger when they saw the shirts, reported it to an administration that would rather do somersaults over shards of glass than risk a politically uncomfortable situation, and now a host of students who positively contribute to this school will be reprimanded for having the audacity to use free speech. The crew team’s punishment was eventually mitigated by University President Anthony Monaco, largely, I suspect, due to student unrest with regard to the issue. But the brothers of Delta Upsilon were punished without reprieve for pulling a similar stunt. They were also accused of homophobia for electing not to hang a Gay Pride flag on the front of their chapter house. Personally, I fly one such flag outside of my window. That doesn’t mean I think someone who chooses not to is homophobic. I think most seniors will recognize that this is par for the course on a campus where silence is called indifference and dissent is punishable by public stoning. It is why we have a fairly diverse student body that is very much segregated, a
fairly educated populous that prefers shouting matches to constructive dialogue. Dialogue is impossible if everyone censors their thoughts for fear of angry mobs of energized young people armed with too much emotion, too much compromised rhetoric and the profound desire to mend the many heinous evils of the great, wide, privileged Northeast bubble we call Tufts. There is enough line-tiptoeing and mediafueled outrage in this country without the added contributions of 6,000 worldleaders-in-training. There is also more than enough ignorance, bigotry and truly disgusting evil in this world to get worked-up over. Next time you become aware of someone expressing a stupid and questionably offensive ideas take a deep breath, consider it within a larger perspective, jump off your gleaming white stallion and take the time to educate them. Or ignore it. Or let it bother you for a moment, before you go back to worrying about the many pressing concerns of everyday life instead. The choice is entirely yours. Just don’t start spewing the same unproductive, recycled, pseudo-worldly manure you picked up in your first sociology textbook on the rest of us, pretending that it doesn’t stink and that you are making a positive difference by spewing it. Don’t complain about a lack of discussion and progress when the corpses of the last people you smothered for their insolence haven’t even begun decomposing. You can have a campus that is quiet, polite and stagnantly divided or one that is loud and messy and capable of change. Again, the choice is yours. Decide which you prefer, and don’t begrudge the rest of us if we oblige you. Thanks. Steven Cohen graduates today with degrees in international literary and visual studies and Spanish.