The Argus

Erik Novak, Columnist

Love is a powerful thing. Some people base their entire lives on the pursuit of love in all of the wrong places, and others spend their entire lives in loneliness, believing love has wronged them.

Regardless of one’s perspective on love, you can’t escape it in the music world. We have been listening to songs about love and love lost as long as we’ve been alive.

This is how Frank Sinatra and Justin Bieber come to be essentially the same artist at their very core. They sing songs of love and how it is wonderful and awful.

I know there will be people reading this disgusted by the comparison. I’m a little sick myself, but whether I think Justin Bieber is a good musician or just a waste of everyone’s time is a completely different story.

What Justin Bieber has in common with Frank Sinatra he has in common with a multitude of famous musicians. Even critically acclaimed popular artists such as Adele sing largely about love. You’d be hard pressed to turn on the radio and not find a song about love on every station.

This is because everyone has either experienced love, or is waiting to experience love, and can easily relate to a song about it. Then come the easily remembered lyrics, catchy choruses, and processed instrumentation that heighten the attraction.

People are comfortable with love songs—it’s not likely to change anytime soon. Although, with comfort, eventually comes stagnation. In order to break free of this static the music industry is stuck in right now, people need to be able to accept something new and experimental that will break up the lull they are in.

Artists like Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, or the gross-out songs of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins are some of the early examples of deviation from the typical topic of love in modern music. But these artists aren’t all that mainstream.

Our society is afraid of change, or something completely original, and this fear keeps love songs at the top of the charts.

I encourage people to look past the superficiality of Justin Bieber, or even the classics of the great Frank Sinatra or The Beatles and see how many possibilities lie, untouched, in the music world.

While I don’t deny there have been many great songs written about love, the subject has become extremely stale and annoying. I find it hard to believe there are still fresh love-centered ideas to sing about.

Let’s face it; it has been done to death. Sinatra has done it, The Beatles have done it, hard rock bands like Led Zeppelin have done it, and even rap artists have attempted some songs on love. But Love is not the only subject worthy of being written musically.

Looking past our musical comfort zones will not only create a fresher take on music, but it will make us more well-rounded and accepting of change and experimentatio

Jonathan Gholson, Staff Writer

Even though it has only been about 20 years since the World Wide Web launched, I could go on about how the Internet has potentially started a new Renaissance—what with our new ability to instantly share news, art, and, in the words of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, “bring the accumulated knowledge of the world to your fingertips.”

But, instead, I want to talk about “cyberculture” – the various vocabularies, collective understandings and behaviors fostered by the Internet community.  They have begun to permeate into the “real world” and there are some implications that go along with that.

Just like the real world, there isn’t a dominant culture on the Internet. While there are many phrases, image macros, in-jokes, and abbreviations commonly understood by several online communities, it would be silly to say it’s all the same.

Individual communities will have their own cultures based on the collective interests of their members. Do a quick Google search (a prime example of how the Internet’s culture has permeated our culture) if you want to find a variety of examples.

Chances are, if you’re a student of IWU and have a Facebook account, you’ve seen the “University Meme” page for our lovely school full of image macros we can all relate to. And chances are you’re also familiar with terms and phrases such as “troll,” “rickroll,” “u mad,” “cool story bro” and “FFUUUUUU.”

I’ll bet a few of you cringed reading those. Don’t worry, I did too.

These terms are popular amongst young adults, mostly middle-class and fairly educated, in English-speaking countries. This is why I’m able to write this and most of you can follow along.

These phrases derive most of their humor from the feeling that the audience is “in” on a joke.  The really interesting bit, though, is that these “in-jokes” are shared among millions of people. They are “mainstream” in-jokes.

What makes things even weirder is that, just like traditional in-jokes, people are able to bond with each other using these as well. Complete strangers who may share nothing in common outside of their understanding of these Internet jokes will suddenly develop feelings of camaraderie upon meeting for the first time.

The Internet is already weird enough with its ability to mix anonymity and fraternity with these mutually understood concepts, but bringing it into the real world muddies up the whole thing even further.

I’m not saying the sudden melding of these isolated online cultures with mainstream culture is a bad thing. The purpose of this article is to bring this squishing and squashing of online and “offline” cultures to your attention. Whether or not the Internet should stay on the Internet is not something I care to worry about.

Mallika Kavadi, Staff Writer

Popular culture and social media today reflect an obsession with being different, standing out from the crowd whether you are nerd, jock, emo or goth.

On Facebook, every user tries to make their profile stand out as much as possible, and being “like everyone else” has turned into a stigma.

This is really ironic considering the origin of individualism.

Individualism emerged at a time when being a brick in a wall was the only socially accepted norm. Being different and thinking differently was abnormal, undesirable.

But during the Enlightenment, the individual started being empowered. The resulting culture gave us new heroes, whether they were revolutionary scientists like Galileo and Newton or philosophers like Voltaire or the Romantics that followed.

This group challenged the way people thought and brought a breath of fresh air into the world stagnated by religious and social dogmas.

But this cult of individualism has not flourished without distortions in contemporary society. It has not only given rise to an individual-centred and selfish work ethic but has also led to undue expectations.

But my purpose here is not to talk about the selfish tendencies individualism harbours, in the context of the current economic system. Even though it is true, I need not talk about it since there are many who would gladly criticise it.

My concern is the loss of the essence of individualism, which is reflected through two commonly prevalent misconceptions in society.

First, that being more cooperative and thinking about others essentially robs a person of his rights because then he has to compromise.

Second, that everyone has to be exceptional and unique to be special and valuable to the society. This is a cause of worry because it sets unrealistically high expectations to stand out in a crowd. Not that those who do are obnoxious, but those who do not are not any less either.

An article I read recently named “Why Einstein became famous in America” shows that Albert Einstein’s popularity in the mass culture of the twentieth century had more to do with the social context of the early twentieth century than the ingenuity of his theory.

Not that he wasn’t a genius or that his theory wasn’t as ground breaking as it sounds. It was in every respect. But that is not why he was named “Person of the Century” by Time magazine.

Most of the people who knew him during his lifetime were not even familiar with the concept of relativity. It was the aura that media publicity, accompanied with awe of him as a person who knows more than most other people do, that led to his glorified image.

The extreme approach in defining our fellow human beings either by glorifying their achievements or labelling them by their mistakes has resulted in undue pressure for everyone to fit into a specific mold, the exact thing that individualism was set out to replace.

Individualism is not inherently being selfish or proud. Individualism is supposed to be about respect and equality for every type of individual for being who you are, whether it is different from others or the same as others, this essence has long been left behind.

Editorial

Colleges often provide students with suggestions for maintaining physical health and well-being.

Illinois Wesleyan University aspires to the same ideal. A variety of foods are offered in the various dining areas, the Shirk Center is nearly always open for students, and the Health Services Center on campus hosts programs every so often to raise awareness of health issues.

But Illinois Wesleyan may have gone too far when it comes to their emphasis on dieting and weight management.

All first-year dorms’ laundry rooms have large posters above the machines listing tips to “keep from gaining that dreaded extra weight and staying fit!”

While this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the tips simply focused on eating and exercising in moderation, some of the helpful hints are excessive.

Take the suggestion to “Hit the gym on or off campus whenever possible,” or “Read nutrition labels carefully.” The poster goes on to advise, “Check serving sizes and the amount of calories, fat and sugar grams.”

Though this may be daily routine for many students, such behaviors actually border on being eating-disordered, according to National Eating Disorder Information Center (NEDIC).

Far more troublesome than the tips mentioned above is the table of meal suggestions that runs alongside the tips. Here, the poster gives an example of what would be an apparently appropriate amount of food for a college student to consume during a given day.

But the food listed is far from adequate. In fact, when the calories are calculated, the net intake advised by the poster comes to roughly 1,070 calories at most.

To put this in perspective, most doctors recommend a diet of around 2,000 calories for the average person. If that doesn’t give the reader enough of a perspective, here is an added fact: the human body goes into starvation mode when fed less than 1,200 calories a day.

While those in charge of such health information on campus didn’t mean harm, these nutrition posters have a potential hurtful effect on college students, particularly young women.

Students are already stressed by academia, relationships, and other aspects of college life. Such a hectic environment can easily produce eating disorders, or at least disordered eating.

The dieting mindset is already common among college students as it is.

According to the National Association for Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), 25 percent of college-aged women engage in bingeing and purging as a weight-management technique, with a smaller but still significant amount of male students doing the same.

Dianne Feasley, nutritionist at Illinois Wesleyan University Arnold Health Services, views suggesting dieting techniques as not only irrational, but harmful.

“Studies have shown that 95 percent of dieters gain the weight back and are worse off than when they started, while 2 percent succumb to eating disorders. If 97 percent of dieters end up negatively affected by diets, why would you recommend a diet to anyone?” Feasley said.

Sophomore nursing major Laura Woodsmall shares this opinion.

“These posters simply fuel our fire to lose weight quickly by increasing our desire to fit in with what is ‘normal.’ But all of my friends who have tried dieting wound up heavier and unhappier than before,” Woodsmall said.

In the end, while the college’s intentions may have been sound, the posters hanging on the laundry room wall have at least equal potential for harm as for good.

Though students need to be warned about health risks and learn about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, the way to go about it is not suggesting excessive exercise, constant counting of calories, or any other form of weight obsession.