I'll Be Right Back...

This is certainly a tricky blog post to write.  The question from our Comm 100 class is how I did on Wednesday’s quiz and what explains my performance?  There’s only one problem – I wasn’t there Wednesday.  Don’t get me wrong, I know class attendance is important.  It’s an important component of learning.  Life does happen though so I cut my first two classes that Wednesday simply because it was a hectic and stressful morning.

However to keep with the spirit of the question I believe the quiz basically asked us to identify people.  Generally speaking, famous people in the media were more recognizable than various government leaders.  The question then becomes is this a problem?  There’s two ways to look at this problem.  One is as an individual and the other is as a society in general.

Individually speaking, we should try to be better informed about life and government.  A well informed citizen makes for a well informed citizenry you might say.  As a society there’s also two ways to answer both of which we learned in class.  One answer would agree with Walter Lippmann’s position that this would just be further proof that modern life is too complicated every citizen to understand which would be why there needs to be an elite class of people that would fully informed and take care of all of this.  The second answer would agree with John Dewey’s position that it’s all right that some citizens are less informed on a subject compared to other citizens.  Those other citizens can take up the slack and you’ll still have a well informed society.  Besides, when a different subject comes up those positions might be reversed.

Another question to consider is why the media focuses on celebrities and not on so called hard news? Is it because the media doesn't care or is it that we just really want nothing more than to hear the latest gossip.  A cynical view of this can be found in Don Henley's song, "Dirty Laundry" included below in a clip from YouTube.

So, to get back to the original question of what explains my performance – it’s simple really, I haven’t found a way to violate the laws of physics and be in two places at the same time.  Until then it’s always a good idea to make it to class if possible.