Undercover Boss

Having read a website about Undercover Boss and then being in the room while it was on.... tells me that either the entire website is a scam or ... people are idiots with no idea what they're watching. The whole show is simply stupid. The format is forced and obvious, the writing is tedious, and the story... I should say "story" because it's not a story in the sense of being interesting or having characters...

The website was all complimentary and gushing about how interesting it was to see a boss working in his own company. Like we were supposed to believe that any of this was real. And when I say real I should say "real" in the sense of being not set up in advance and mediated and programmed. Before I go into the problems with reality and representations and the differences, let me just say that this is really bad television. It certainly isn't art.

It's almost like we're supposed to believe that a CEO cares about his employees. For the sake of a good reality show.... he can act this way... so nice to see the big man have his heart break listening to his employee's hard knock life. Will he return to the board room and give his workers a chance to unionize or raise their wages? Please. This garbage is just set up to make us all think that someday a boss will listen to the workers. The real world is far more complicated than this. Real bosses would honestly replace every worker they have with a computer if they could.

It's nice to see a phone operator seeing the issue more clearly than the boss. His apparent "disappointment" with his Machiavellian customer service person is just a sham. Anyone who thinks this CEO "learned" all sorts of lessons needs to do a .... reality check.

I remembered one of my thoughts I intended to blog on...

There are now Elves on people's shelves? It has been explained to me that the elf watches the child and reports back to Santa on the child's behavior. The parent moves the stoolie elf from place to place to increase the illusion and the sense of Big Brother watching...

This sounds much like Jeremy Bentham's design for a prison, called the Panopticon. You can look it up... Foucault writes about Bentham's ideas in his book on punishment. I can't recall the title. Anyway, Bentham said prisons should be designed with all prisoners on the outer wall of a circular structure with the guard in the center. The prisoner would have what appeared to be constant supervision from the guard because he never knew if there was anyone watching, and the guard had total access and could hide from the prisoner's view.

My suggestion for truly effective Benthamite control of your children is to put an elf on the shelf with a voice in it that can scare the kid as well. As you see the kid misbehaving, the elf would say, I'm telling Santa!

We were driving down the highway this week and my daughter was disturbed by a billboard with a big nasty cop in the frame.... The words said something to the effect of "we see you when you're speeding" She was disturbed by the use of Santa as a law enforcement tool. But aren't we already using Santa as a law enforcement tool?

I would like to share an observation from Machiavelli's The Prince: "The Romans never liked the dictum we constantly hear from the wise men of our day, that time will take care of things... the Romans liked to take care of things... because time will sweep everything before it and can bring good things as well as bad, bad things as well as good" (14),

I'm not sure why I liked this so much, except to say that I often fall back on time as if it were my back yard hammock. If I don't want to bother with something, I avoid it, figuring that time will work it out in the end. Of course, I'm not much of a Roman. Like the wise men of our day, I am far more likely to let time take care of things.

Where was I?

The blog problem for me is that I often forget what I consider my best thoughts. If I could blog simultaneously while driving, I would be famous by now because I swear I am brilliant when I drive. By the time I get to my computer, the great thoughts are just so much pablum. Here I am trying to remember the great idea I was going to write about. Was it politics? Religion? Education? Who knows.

I must say, on the political side, I can almost bear to watch the news these days. For a while there I had pretty much given up any hope. The tax compromise that Obama signed this past week was pretty hard to swallow. Many commentators wondered if he was just too soft to do the job. And I started to wonder too. What happened to the guy who actually ran on a platform of increasing taxes? For the first time in my memory, a president said he would raise taxes and then went back on his word and didn't raise them (on the wealthiest Americans). His explanation for this was that it was good for the country and that was the best deal he could get with the Republicans.

Was this just a case of hard nosed pragmatism? Or was it something weaker and less noble? Can a person who actually looks out for the well being of most of us (a utilitarian) still govern today? I started to wonder. And then, before I knew what was happening, Don't Ask was repealed and they were passing the STAR treaty and they even managed to make commercials less offensive. One congressman who voted against this last measure was reported to have asked, "when are we going to stop... will we start controlling what can be advertised soon?" Moments like these really make one wonder if there should be a minimum test for members of congress.... Anyway, I have a bit of hope for the future of American Politics... for now...

Philosophy of Facebook

Today in philosophy class, we talked about my facebook observation... the one where I decided that facebook is a series of unrelated and pointless events lacking any cohesive narrative (no meta-narrative). My students explained that I am just clueless, which is probably true, and that was just my point. My cluelessness is evidence of the fact that I lack the context from which I can gather any significance regarding the events. On this same line of inquiry, and for the same reason, my sister in law said she had read a teenager's facebook entries and could make no sense of them. She had no understanding of the overlying (or underlying) narrative.

We also talked about blogging. One of my students (J) asked a fairly simple question: why would anyone blog? Another student asked what a blog was (J2). We determined that it is all about ego. Somehow, somewhere, the blogger must be saying to him or herself that what I have to say is so important, that it must be put out there for others to read. MJ was right about this (not Michael Jordon)- one must believe what one says is true to want to put it out there for people to read... even if no one else is reading it. At that point they all made fun of me because I told them that even my wife refuses to follow my blog...

Facebook rules

And yet, the only conversation I've had about the similarities between the Annales school and facebook was with my sister on facebook. I suppose I might say that what Facebook lacks in depth and seriousness it makes up for in exposure. Can't beat em?

The First Rule of Facebook

Thus, wars etc. have no more importance than whether I am writing in my bathrobe. I'm returning to the blog world... for a while...

This was an entry I made on facebook. I have to be honest- I can be honest here because there are very few people reading it, and if they go to this blog, it's their own fault.

Facebook is about the most superficial and shallow experience I can think of. You are limited to 420 characters, and so your thoughts have to be jammed into sound bites. Second, your "status" is pretty much a way of telling people how cool you are or sharing things with people that really don't matter.

I read the news feeds and think... I don't care if you're shopping. How is that significant? Yes, it is interesting because I know you, but that's about it. Of course, that's the point of a social network isn't it? My first paragraph above refers to an entry I made on face book. I had written some 900 words or so about the Annales school of history (French). I went to Wikapedia and pulled off a description of the approach they had to history in which all meta-narratives are called into question and deconstructed. Once you deconstruct all meta narratives, all events of history are of equal (or no) value. Thus, the fact that I am sitting in my bathrobe typing my status is of equal value to the fact that North Korea bombed South Korea.

Thus, facebook makes events significant to only my "friends" whether they want to see what I'm thinking or not. In the end though, there is a meta narrative even in facebook. No one wants to read what I'm thinking, and so I will probably lose all my friends because I am not staying within the unwritten rules of facebook. I think there is almost an unspoken rule much like the one in Fight Club... the first rule of facebook is that no one talks about facebook on facebook. Except newbies like me. Thus, I need to learn the rules of facebook, otherwise, my friend list will go down to zero and it will be more like blogging, except that I need to cut my posts down below 420 characters...