Gorra Research

From
Joseph E. Gorra,
Academic Content Developer,
Manager, Promoter, and Researcher - Curating Knowledge & Wisdom in the Interest of Flourishing Well.

On the one hand, academics - particularly those who teach - are seen as having a “caring” vocation, yet on the other they themselves are expected to be “care-free”.


Kathleen Lynch, professor of equality studies at University College Dublin, has argued that the idealised academic has no ties or responsibilities to limit their capacity to work. “To be a successful academic is to be unencumbered by caring,” she says.

(via giftsoutright)

(Source: timeshighereducation.co.uk, via giftsoutright)

Many people are drawn to academic life because they expect it will provide a refuge from the social demands of other careers: They believe one can be valued as a studious introvert, as many undergraduates are. But academe is a profession of opposites. Long periods of social isolation—research and writing—are punctuated by brief periods of intense social engagement: job interviews, teaching, conferences, and meetings. One reason that completion rates for graduate programs are so low—and unhappiness levels so high—is, I suspect, because students are not selected for the full range of aptitudes they will need to be successful in graduate school. And there are few if any supports in place for those students who struggle with the extremes of introversion and extroversion that academe demands.

Screening Out the Introverts - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education (via ayjay)

The real issue, it seems to me, is not whether Facebook makes us lonely, but whether Facebook is reconfiguring our notions of loneliness, sociability, and relationships. These are after all not exactly static concepts. Here is where I think Marche raises some substantial concerns that are unfortunately lost when the debate goes down the path of determining causality.

What Facebook offers is the dream of managing the social and curating the self, and we seem to obsessively take to the task. The asynchronicity of Facebook is rather safe, after all, when compared to the messy and risky dynamics of face-to-face interactions and we naturally gravitate toward this sort of safety. I suspect this is in part also why we would sometimes rather text than call and, if we do call, why we hope to get sent to voicemail. It seems reasonable to ask whether we will be tempted to take the efficiency and smoothness of our social media interactions as the norm for all forms of social interaction.

One last thought. It seems to me that we should draw a distinction among desires that are bundled together under the notion of loneliness. There is, for example, a distinction between the desire for companionship (and distinctions among varieties of companionship) and the desire simply to be noticed or acknowledged. C. S. Lewis, eloquent as per usual, writes:

Facebook and Loneliness: The Better Question « The Frailest Thing (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)

Over 100 Quotes from Q-Ideas Conference Presenters in Washington, DC: 4/10-12


Various quotes via Twitter from Q Presenters: David Brooks, Andy Crouch, Sherry Turkle and Gideon Strauss

Various quotes via Twitter from Q Presenters: Roberta Ahmanson, Jim Wallis, Richard Land, the Community Bible Experience, Chai Ling, Ed Stetzer and Byron Borger.

Various quotes via Twitter from Q Presenters: Amy Sherman and Ross Douthat

Various quotes via Twitter from Q Presenters: Miroslav Volf, Barbara Hagerty, Jenny Yang, Arthur Brooks, Mitch Hescox, Stephen Grabill, Anthony Bradley, Diane Langberg, Jeremy Courtney

Various quotes via Twitter from Q Presenters: Jamie Smith, Thomas Hinson, Bryan Stevenson, Jay Richards, Os Guinness

laphamsquarterly:

Victor Hugo might have been running a bordello on the side…

vintageanchor:

Literary bedrooms…

1. Victor Hugo : Dark, rich and red - Hugo’s bedroom at his home on the Place de Vosges in Paris is all that you would expect from a writer heavily influenced by the Romanticism movement.

2. Ernest Hemingway: Light floods the Nobel Prize-winning author’s bedroom at his Key West home.

3. Flannery O’Connor: The author did most of her writing at the desk in her bedroom. The aluminum crutches were used to help her get around her parents’ dairy farm.

4. Sylvia Plath: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author stayed for several months at the Barbizon Hotel for Women. This image is taken from an advertisement for the hotel and suggests what Plath’s room may have looked like at that time.

5. Henry David Thoreau: Intent on simple living, Thoreau furnished his 10’x15’ home with only the necessary basics - a bed, a table, a desk, and three chairs.

6. Virginia Woolf : Full of details — the bookshelves house the author’s artful collection of books, many of which she recovered with colored paper.

7. Emily Dickinson: Most of the poet’s writing was done at a small writing table in her bedroom.

8. Marcel Proust: A victim of asthma and severe allergies, Proust’s bedroom was a masterwork in shelter and seclusion. All apertures were shielded or sealed, and the walls and ceiling were covered in cork to protect the author from the dust and noise of the outside world.

9. William Faulkner: More of an office with a bed — the Nobel prize-winning author outlined the plot of The Fable on the walls of the room and then shellacked his notes to preserve them.

10. Truman Capote: The author’s bedroom at his Hamptons beach house is simple, but elegant.

More here.

Called to the Mundane

commentmagazine:

Quiet work is indispensible to a healthy understanding of Christian call.

1 month ago - 6

Researchers at Wellesley College and the University of Kansas investigated friendships at that 25,000-student institution and at four smaller colleges in the state. “People would expect in bigger and more diverse places you’d come into contact with a bigger and more diverse set of people,” says lead researcher Angela Bahns, a social psychologist at Wellesley. “But you find the exact opposite.”

The researchers gave pairs of friends separate questionnaires on their lifestyles (how often they drank, exercised, etc.) and opinions (on topics such as abortion) and found that the bigger the school, the more similar friends were to one another. In follow-up research, not yet published, Ms. Bahns and her team found similar results comparing big cities like New York and Chicago to smaller ones like Iowa City and Lawrence, Kan.

How can more people and more diversity lead to less diverse friendships? It’s simple, really: We like people who are like us. Social scientists call it the “similarity-attraction effect,” and it influences everything from whom we date and hire to where we choose to live. The bigger the pond, the more likely we are—consciously or not—to swim around until we find a group of like and like-minded people.

How Big Cities Can Lead to Small Thoughts (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

The Book of Changes, c. 350 BC (via laphamsquarterly)

Twitter is often mislabeled as a social network when it’s actually more of a real-time information network. Yes, people make connections, but they tend to connect based on shared interests and location above existing friendships. You don’t follow your friends from high school, or others with whom you have nothing in common; You follow people who have something to say. And-more importantly for Google-Twitter is the most expansive, real-time, searchable window to the world today.

Twitter and Facebook both have things Google needs if it wants to move into the post-web world. Facebook has social relevance. Twitter has real-time information. But Facebook and Google view themselves as competitors. And while Google and Twitter once had an arrangement, that deal fell through, for reasons neither party will fully disclose.

The Case Against Google (via ayjay)