Image "The Exit" courtesy of Elwood W. McKay III/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net
How are you? Thank you again for the lively discussion on the themes we've had so far!
Here are some things on what might be a quite wide topic - societal roles, relationships, and change. I had to search around for what might be the most interesting things to upload here, and while there is so much out there that we could build a whole course around this theme, I had to choose what I could.
I also had to decide - do I stick with Japan, or cover topics related to this abroad as well? That was also a hard thing to decide, but having found the things I did from a number of places I decided to upload the best and most interesting.
So here is our homework for discussion on the blog, and that may also perhaps give you some ideas on your final presentation topics.
So first up is a short clip from Fox News in the U.S. about the effect Facebook may be having on marriage in the U.S.:
Here's a very different one on Muslim women and social change - a photo essay clip with some incredible images. While it will appear small on the screen shot below, it is quite moving and consists of the narrator's own photography:
Here's a longer, but equally-dynamic TED talk from a Vietnamese-New Zealander university student on social norms and social change:
These videos uploaded from YouTube. I do not own the rights to these videos. They are strictly for classroom use.
Take care! See you next week!
Here's a great series of comments from Tsuyoshi. I've excerpted them here:
ReplyDeleteIt was a curious data that 1 in 5 couples in the US got divorced because of the facebook. When I was in US which was more than 10 years ago, I learned the data that 54% of the couples got divorced during the three years after their marriages. That data gave me the significant psychological impact for me and at that time, I truly thought, “Then, what was their purpose of their marriage?”. And at least, one decade had passed, but the situation might not be changed. Thus, that news was not a surprising matter for me. Perhaps, in the US, different from the Japanese, the people will be get divorced whatever the situations are. Thus, facebook cannot be the only reason for the divorce. In the meantime, the existence of the facebook represents one aspect of the 21st century society. It is that the people can establish the new relationships easily, but in the meantime, they have no hesitation to cut their relationships easily, because those relationships are established only in the online. Thus the people can make the friends easily although they had never met before. I do not have accounts in facebook and twitter because I cannot trust the people who can recognise only thought the online system. Sometimes I wonder, “How can they trust the people who had never met? That is not a real”. However, that is the human relationship in the 21st century. Thus, their relationships can be broken so easily. Facebook gave us the new method to make the new relationships and also, it gave us the new reason of divorce.
About “Veil of Muslim women,” (i)n the present society, veils by Muslim women are recognised as one major essence of Islam, and because of it, especially, for the radical Christian people, veil gave the uncomfortable psychological feelings. After 2001, antagonism between them got severed, especially, in the US, and veil got targeted to attack. For example, I heard the news that the Muslim women were not allowed to wear the veil in public in France. Not all the Muslims were not evil, only limited people are the problem. However, because the veils are apparent in public, the women would have to experience the hard matter. That is questionable. The Muslim women are not positively wear the veils. Because of the traditional custom, they had to wear it and there is no option for them. In other word, the veils are the symbol of female obedience to the males. Thus, veils by Muslim females had two considerable topics. “Symbolization of antagonism” and “Female independence in the Muslim world”. It is not a simple matter to argue and direct the conclusion, but veils can be the symbol of social changes in the 21st century.
Here is my reply to your first part:
DeleteAbout "Facebook divorces," it seems to me that the number correlates with the rate of divorce over the long term in the U.S., and it also seems to me that those same couples were getting divorced at about the same rate as they were before there was Facebook. So I'm not sure Facebook is really to blame here. What Facebook, and other social networking sites might do, is make the likelihood of clandestine hookups between people outside of marriage more possible - though given that the privacy settings on FB are getting somewhat thinner than they were before, the possibility of secret liaisons through FB are getting harder. So I'm not sure if even FB can be blamed for that. People can see who's looking at their page, and there is a sense, more and more, of "six degrees of separation" on Facebook - the sense that people you knew a long time ago and haven't seen since could be found through friends of friends (of friends!), over an extended network, even if you weren't looking for them, so people can see not only who knows who, but who's in who's networks - and can see who is connecting with who. So I wonder as well if some couples who are having problems are not only trying to use FB to find people to have affairs with outside of their marriages, but are also using FB to blame the problems of their marriages on, as if FB was the cause. But it's clear that in at least some of these cases, the problems they've had in their marriages exist independently of FB - even though in at least some cases, FB does amplify the problems more.
At the same time, we have such a more fluid society in the States, and divorce is much easier to initiate. Even with the costs involved in the case of wealthy people, recovering from a divorce financially is still more possible. Given that the U.S. pioneered social networking to the extent it is now, it reflects the fluidity of social relations in the States, which admittedly are much more casual and superficial than those in Japan.
About the veil - I have two minds on this. On one hand I also don't understand why women have to be treated this way and be forced to accept this treatment, which in some (but not all) Muslim countries is enforced in law. At the same time I see the pressures Western(ized) women are under to maintain their looks and dress in a certain way and I don't see that much difference. Every woman will tell any man, when she's being completely honest, that pumps and other high-heeled shoes are terrible for the feet, are bad for the back and posture, and play a role in fatigue. Yet women themselves buy these shoes, under no force from men, because they "look good." Maybe the difference is that there's no law stating they have to do so, and while there are some men who might not like women not dressing this way and will publicly express it, Western(ized) women don't have to accept this treatment and have recourse to fight it if they're being harassed for it. I'm still not sure how empowered Muslim women are to fight this sort of thing in a sharia court.
At the same time some women have used this feminine style of dress to their advantage and turned it into a symbol and expression of power - think of the female CEO and the "power suit," which on the surface is actually very feminine but is also an expression of hierarchy. That sounds a bit stereotypical but we can see it. So perhaps the veil is being used in this way by some Muslim women - being reframed by women themselves from its oppressiveness into a symbol, even a weapon of sorts, of difference from men that isn't about inferiority but distinction, one that women themselves are placing a new kind of dignity on that is defined in their terms.
Here is Tsuyoshi's new reply to what I wrote above:
DeleteIt is curious that Facebook became one major social communication tool in the 21st century, and the human relationships became based on it. As I wrote, I did not use Facebook, so, I wonder, how the people will communicate the other people who had never met in real. Sometimes, I felt strange that they called like those people as “friends”! No hesitation to communicate with unrealistic people may be one characteristic in this society.
Also, veils contain the difficult trouble, because that custom is based on the religion, and for Muslim, to use the veils for matured women is justice without doubt. However, since 2001, veil has defined as one major symbol as the Muslim by the Christianity. I am sure that some Muslim women do not use the veil not only for the purpose of avoid the troubles but also for their independence from the male dominance. I wish there will be the society which the Muslim women will not suffer any trouble because of the reason that they used the veils.
Here is more of Tsuyoshi's excellent commentary:
ReplyDelete(As for social norms) As the Vietnamese- New Zealander girl said, it is hard to define what is social norm and what is social exchange. It is hard matter to define, I think, because there is no definition for it. The commons issues which the members were agreed to obey can be the social norm, in other word, the common sense. To obey to the social norm can be the one essence to consist the social organization, and the members unconsciously learned about them to live in there. Then, can they possible to change? If so, it will be the matter to change the common sense in there. The society has been changing based on the development of technology, and thanks to it, the people’s common notion is also changed. Thus, in that point of view, the old social norm should be changed, but in the meantime, there are several issue which should not be changed. For example, the females wear mannish clothes, nobody considered that is wrong. However, if the males wore the girlish clothes, everybody will considered that attitude as socially wrong. Or if the elder female could have the young boyfriend, the others will honour her that she is very young and nice beauty. However if the elder male did the same thing, the other will criticise that it was sexual crime. Because nobody can prove what is social norm, like these issues can be the big curiosity to talk. The social norm is consisted by the people’s unconscious agreements, so, it will be hard to define about it, so, hard to change.
In the case of Linh Do, the woman in the TED talk, she feels fairly integrated in her own terms into New Zealander society, yet she is aware that some people still see her as a foreigner, an outsider, and no matter how integrated she is in NZ she still has to look over her shoulder, still be aware that integration will be something she has to think differently about from people who don't have to think about it because they don't have the experience of being seen differently, have never thought about what is at the basis of social norms, and feel themselves to be in control of how social norms are defined when they actually didn't define it for themselves in the first place.
DeleteI suspect that Westerners who react badly to how they are treated by certain members of Japanese society, when such treatment happens, are those who are not minorities where they come from. That's not saying anything bad about the Westerners, nor is it saying anything bad of Japanese or the society here; it's that when we deal with something we have no prior experience with, something we have clearly been put into a disadvantage with, we don't know how to react. Yet the people who discriminated may not recognize that it is discriminatory; they may see that they are acting from within the boundaries of social norms. So what I got from the TED talk was that while we may not know how to define what social norms are, we still have to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable practices and what the difference of the basis is between the two.
I fully support the TED girl's opinion-"Fixing problems is not solving the problem. Changing an old sysytem is more important."
ReplyDeleteIt is necessary that we speak up what we think honestly without copying other people's opinions including media. Otherwise nothing's going to change.
After Lehman's fall, 9-11 and 3-11, people got to understand money is not everything. For example, we realized there are lot of things having the value which can't be described by money and need to care more for sustainability. For that new society, we should have open mind and listen to the opinion from the young or foreigners etc.
There are so many social and environmental problems on the earth right now so we, not only blaming on goverments or companies, must take them seriously. I hope each one of us starts to wonder whether this conventional rule is worth following without prejudice.
Chiharu
Couldn't agree more, Chiharu. To me, people so took wealth creation at its face value without looking at what was happening that enabled such creation, and who really benefitted from it. We can blame governments and companies all we want, and I agree they have their responsibility; ultimately, however, people are to blame because they allow these entities to wreak their havoc and do their destruction.
ReplyDeleteAmericans often like to say that you get the government you deserve. In some cases, that's true.