Creativity & Technology

Yesterday President Obama in a commencment speech at Hampton University was quoted as saying:

"And meanwhile, you're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy."

The quote has caused a stir in the tech community as they have translated those words into a slam of their products. Here are the questions of the day:

Do you think he is slamming Ipods, etc in the above quote?

Do you agree with his statement?

I don't think he was slamming technology, I think it was giving a realistic take on how technology has caused a lot of creativity to go away. When video games first came out I always thought that it took away the children's ability to be creative. Instead of going oustide and turning two tin cans into a way to communicate the kids stayed inside and played video games. In my humble opnion that was the start of the loss of many creative programs in schools. Cutting drama and arts, for example.

Is creativity a lost art?


Today's Who Am?

I'm hurt because a lot of women that followed me have been featured in the Who Am Is and I have not been. Born in 1815 my writings at the first women's rights convention are credited with initiating the first organized women's suffrage movement. Before being a suffrage I was an active abolitionist. When I moved on to suffrage besides the women's right to vote I took on many issues pertaining to women. My concerns included women's parental and custody rights, property rights, employment and income rights, divorce laws, the economic health of the family, and birth control. I was also an outspoken supporter of the temperance movement. My commitment to female suffrage caused a schism in the woman's rights movement when she I declined to support passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. I opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men while continuing to deny women, black and white, the same rights. I was the eighth of eleven children. Five of my siblings died in early childhood or infancy. A sixth sibling died at age 20. My father was a prominent attorney who served one term in the United States Congress and later became both a circuit court judge and a State Supreme Court justice. Dad introduced me to the law and planted the early seeds that grew into my activism. As a young girl I enjoyed perusing my father's law library and debating legal issues with his law clerks. My mother was a descendant of early Dutch settlers. Unlike many women of my era I was formally educated. I studied Latin, Greek and mathematics until the age of 16. I enjoyed being in co-educational classes where I could compete intellectually and academically with boys my age and older, which I did successfully, winning several academic awards and honors, including the award for Greek language. When my brother died I tried to comfort dad, telling him that I would try to be all my brother had been. My father's response: "Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy!" Upon graduation I received one of my first tastes of sexual discrimination. I watched with dismay as the young men graduating with me, many of whom I had surpassed academically went on to Union College which only took men as students. I went to a women's college and remember being strongly influenced by Preacher Finney. He made me feel damned. I credit my father and brother-in-law with convincing me to ignore Finney's warnings and after a rejuvenating trip to Niagara Falls, my reason and sense of balance were restored. I never returned to organized Christianity and, after this experience, amaintained that logic and a humane sense of ethics were the best guides to both thought and behavior. I was married in 1840 to a man who would go on to be a legal eagle. I requested that the phrase "promise to obey" be removed from the wedding vows. I wrote, "I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation." We had seven children, the last born when I was 44. Throughout my marriage and widowhood I took my husband's surname as part of my own but refused to be addressed as Mrs. Our marriage lasted forty-seven years ending with his death. At the first suffrage convention I wrote a declaration modeled after the United States Declaration of Independence. My declaration proclaimed that men and women are created equal. At my death the great Susan B described me as forging the thunderbolts that she fired. Unlike many of my colleagues I believed organized Christianity relegated women to an unacceptable position in society. In my later years I wrote books, documents, and speeches of the women's rights movement. Among my most popular speeches were "Our Girls", "Our Boys", "Co-education", "Marriage and Divorce", "Prison Life", and "The Bible and Woman's Rights". I made an unsuccessful bid for a U.S. Congressional seat in 1868. I was the primary force behind passage of the "Woman's Property Bill" that was eventually passed by my state. After nearly five decades of fighting for female suffrage and women's rights my final appearance was before members of the United States Congress. I spoke of the central value of the individual, noting that value was not based on gender. I said "The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear — is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself" I died of heart failure in 1902, twenty years before women were allowed to vote. I was commemorated in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church . Who Am I?