In our grandparents’ time, intelligence was associated with memorization. In order to excel, one had to be well versed and able to recite formulas, historical dates, and concepts, because when the time came to apply it, it would take hours to travel to the library, find the necessary books, and then sort through them until you found the desired information.

But today that process has been simplified. Instead of traveling to the library, a user can access search engines and academic databases in an instant. And then, at the drop of a hat, the document can be searched through with a click. Knowledge by memorization has become a thing of the past. “The skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis will become the hallmarks of a good education, just as absorption of knowledge once was,” said the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University. This new process is called information literacy and is the basis for what we now define as knowledge.

Information literacy has cultivated increasing awareness and backing since technology started to change the way we consume information. In 1989, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, Final Report states, “To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” These changes have also resulted in Governor Schwarzenneger establishing a California ICT Digital Literacy Leadership Council and an ICT Digital Advisory Committee by Executive Order in 2009, and President Obama designating October 2009 “National Information Literacy Awareness Month.”

The remarkable thing is that with such access to knowledge, education is now placing its focus on critical thinking. We are now teaching students to ask questions like, should I believe what I am reading? Is this reliable information? Is it accurate? What is its source? Without understanding and asking these questions, we educate people who are unable to separate good information from the bad.

One of today’s greatest intellectuals, Christopher Hitchens, said, “…it matters not what you think, anyone can have thoughts. Many people content themselves with feelings. It matters how you think.” These words ring no more true than today. While it may be a cool party trick to memorize that the Battle of Thermopylae took place in 480 B.C., I guarantee your friend’s iPhone finds the answer quicker than your brain. Because there is now such a wealth of information, matched with fast technology, what matters is not who can recall information the quickest, but who can critically evaluate and interpret the information they consume. The informationally literate.

The post Searching for Knowledge appeared first on Chase Fleming.

This story is not unique to Jasmine, she is among the 100,000 who try out for American Idol every year. These kids all believe that they are destined to have their name in shining lights, but it is not until an awakening like Jasmine’s that dreams of fame become nothing but a dim memory.

Jasmine is a member of Generation Y — a generation who earned not only a birth from their mothers, but a second birth on the internet. Each of their identities has been designed so that the world can be constantly apprised to every minute detail of their lives, as if anyone cared. They believe everyone wants to hear what they think, do, and see at any given moment, so their stream of consciousness is on display in Facebook and Twitter and you can find their video responses to Kanye West’s new video on YouTube. They have become masters of self-promotion, even before they developed a sense-of-self.

Generation Y members — also known as Generation Me, millennials, and echoboomers — were born between 1982 and 2002, and are seen by many as over self-entitled whiners who believe they deserve at least a B for showing up to class, and a trophy for simply participating in events. Hara Estroff Marano, editor of Psychology Today, calls them “a nation of wimps.”

In the previous generation, celebrities were famous for actually doing things. The names that made the paper were Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, Bruce Springsteen, songwriter, and many others who built something valuable from the ground up. Today, with shows like, Survivor, no-talent celebrities like Paris Hilton, and opportunists like the Balloon Boy parents, viewers learn to associate fame with people who do absolutely nothing of value.

Mike is a 20 year old “man” who spends his time playing poker on the internet. He is subscribed to 13 different get-rich-quick blogs and he believes he will make his first million by 25. Mike is no different than most other guys his age. Just like Jasmine, they represent the entitlement generation. A generation that was told they could have it all. They were told to expect big things, because they deserved it. Their parents told them so. As did their teachers. As did the media.

Meals are microwavable, blogs are books, music is free, and software is customized to their needs. Even relationships are only a click away. Big breasts, Asian, teen, it’s up to them and their mouse. With all this at their fingertips, they believe they have the control, whatever they want is theirs. So what will happen when they inevitably find out they have so very little?

Jasmine and Mike will soon be graduating college and they believe — no, they know — they will “find a job that’s not just a job, but an expression of their identity, a form of self-fulfillment,” as Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a Professor of Psychology at Clark University puts it in his book, Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties.

But Jasmine and Mike will soon enter into a world where they will quickly learn that they are not the center of the universe, that they are not entitled to all they thought they were promised, and that they are not as important as they were told. They will walk into job interviews expecting big salaries and an office overlooking the city. But what is more likely, is that they will move back in with their parents while they spend a year trying to find a job that isn’t much more than an internship. These same kids, who were too good to work at Starbucks a year ago, will be fighting for pennies in a down economy, struggling to understand how they can be so under-appreciated.

Even the financial crisis we find ourselves in is partially a result of the overvaluing of self-worth among people today. Research psychologists, Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, detail in their book, The Narcissism Epidemic, a growing rise in clinical narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) among Americans in their 20s. In fact, one in 16 Americans have experienced the symptoms at some time in their life. In an interview with US News and World Report, Twenge noted, “Narcissism contributed to the economic crisis. Many people had narcissistic overconfidence [when they said], ‘Yeah, I can afford that million-dollar house,’ and lenders said, ‘Sure, I know you’ll pay off that loan.’” Overconfidence is making it increasingly difficult to distinguish dreams from reality, and the results are catastrophic.

In 2009, a study found that the top three career aspirations of children were to be a sportsman, a popstar, or an actor. So what, you say? Kids have always wanted fame and fortune. This is actually not true. The study compared the results to the ambitions of pre-teens from 25 years ago as well. During that generation, the top three career aspirations were teaching, banking/finance, and medicine.

There is a survey that has been asking kids since the 1950s, “Am I important?” Back in 1950, 12% of teenagers answered “yes.” Today, that number is 80%. And of course they feel that way. After all, the recent development of the commercial tween market has shown that the children are the actually the consumers, not the parents. Tweens dictate, and over-indulgent, baby boomer parents, follow orders. And as our kids get louder, fatter, and more demanding, so do their egos, sense of entitlement, and sense of importance.

So, where are the parents, their supposed role models? If you thought “me, me, me” social networking was just an infatuation with youth, think again. It turns out that the over-25 crowd is the fastest-growing demographic of Facebook users, and people over 35 make up more than half of MySpace’s 110 million users. Parents have fallen for this “reality” of the world as well. While magazines like Newsweek and Time have seen their circulation decline, magazines like People and Us Weekly have been on the rise. It is all about the frivolous details of peoples lives — not what they do of worth — but what they wear, what they buy, who they know. Celebrity voyeurism.

If parents are too preoccupied with Perez Hilton’s latest post, then who is going to teach our children the counter-lessons of celebrity culture: that fame should not be born of self-humiliation, and that self-respect is NOT earned by 15 minutes of empty self-esteem. Once the culture bomb does its final damage on these youth and the personal post-traumatic-stress-disorder passes, they will have to learn to pick up the pieces of their sorry selves, and build something of value.

Michael Kimmel is a sociologist and author who has written a book, Guyland, devoted to discussing the male sense of entitlement. Kimmel describes how rage takes control once a person feels their entitlement is threatened. Kimmel gives an example of a group who are consistently stripped of their entitlement: bullies. He points to research by William Coleman, who is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Coleman says that bullies are a prime example of a privileged group in school, but once they leave this arena, they become shocked at how much they overestimated their prestige. And this overestimation typically leads to substance abuse and violent crime.

Generation Y’s focus on self has brought collateral damage on others as well. Another recent survey found that empathy among students is nowhere the figure it used to be. In fact, researchers found that the ability to empathize has dropped almost 40% since 1980, with the biggest drop occuring after 2000.

Our society is overly selfish, and like Bengel’s wide receiver, Terrell Owens, once said at a press conference, he is fine with that. We are inconsiderate. A bunch of assholes and douchebags, as we so like to call each other.

We have inflated our expectations. The media and society in general offered us false dreams. They said we could be stars. Among the 500 TV stations, we thought there was surely a place for us. But we are not as important as we thought we were. Tyler Durden said it best, “You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake, you are the same organic decaying matter as everything else.”

The only question is, what now?

It starts with not updating our Facebook status at dinner. It starts with reading a news story rather than Lohan’s latest tweet. It starts with asking someone how their day is going. And it ends when…well a recovering Generation Y’er can dream, right?

The post The Age of Self-Importance appeared first on Chase Fleming.

The push for its comeback is no more evident than in Stallone’s upcoming movie, The Expendables, which is said to be a revival of ’80s flicks and stars Stallone, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis — just to name a few. Growing up with my eyes glued to these action movies, I have to say I’m slightly excited to relive my childhood up on the silver screen; but only in the same way Adam Sandler found the humor in sticking a grown man back in elementary school in Billy Madison. At some point, the time has passed.

But while movies like this may be a childish thing for our culture, it may also be answering just what society is asking for. Michael Kimmel, a sociologist, depicts in his book, Guyland, an entitled generation where men thought the world was theirs, but they awoke to a much different reality when women began moving up in the workforce and many of their privileges they once felt were inherited, had now gone missing. But it is this confusion, Kimmel says, that is causing guys to take an extra decade to grow up and become men. Movies, like The Expendables, could likely help fill that void by re-establishing hypermasculinity as a dominating force.

Paul Solotaroff is one man who was caught up in the masculine ideal of the glory days, that is now recognizing the downward effect it had on his life. He is a contributing editor at Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone, as well as the author of his new memoir, The Body Shop — which details his obsession with bodybuilding and weightlifting in the ’70s that tore his body apart, led to him becoming a stripper, and signed him up for lifelong health problems.

Recently, in an interview with Salon, Solotaroff opened up and discussed some of the changes in muscle he sees today. For instance, yoga has replaced lifting as a healthy alternative, which he describes as for the better.

Muscle is no longer the kind of freakish totem that it used to be. You don’t have to be an iron head to get noticed anymore — I think there are lots of muscular guys who don’t lift weights. Yoga muscle is the real elixir these days. If anybody’s a pimp these days, it’s the guys who are at the front of classes at Crunch who have that long, really dense, righteously earned muscle from doing four and five hours of postures every day. I think that’s really healthy, because that’s really useful. My muscle is useless. It’s much more grown-up muscle, more about inhabiting your body intelligently as a man rather than still doing what I do, which is carry around this adolescent fantasy of masculinity.

He also details what he sees as the cause of this change:

Well, muscle got so commodified in the ’90s — action-flick stars, massively built ballplayers and the gorgons of professional wrestling — that it stopped being a freak show and became a lifestyle, or the adjunct, at least, to one. Where once it was the banner of blue-collar macho men, suddenly wealthy men were flocking to gyms and putting on size like a pair of British wingtips. They got what Schwarzenegger was selling all those years — that muscle, properly packaged, radiates power. And when women of style stopped being repulsed by brawn and found that they actually liked it, the stampede was on at high-end health clubs and the mass-market chains. The owners of Crunch and Equinox should send Ah-nuld a monthly check — not that the bastard needs it.

Some of it is probably cyclical. You go from the kind of wispy Williamsburg paradigm to its polar opposite and then back again. In this country we go from electing a Bush to an Obama. These cycles used to have 20-year arcs. Now the oscillation is much faster. I also think they’re much more fractional. I think there’s one body style that rules the day in Brooklyn, and then another in Bayonne, and a third in Short Hills. I just feel that everything now is so segmented so we’re really living three generations at once.

As for popular culture, Solotaroff sees muscle culture taking over in sports:

If you really want to talk about what’s happened in muscle culture, the place you really have to turn to is sports. We took muscle out of the comic books and we put it on the football field. All you’ve got to do is go to ESPN classic or MLB where they’re constantly showing games from the ’50s and ’60s. Look how skinny and skeletal those guys who threw a ball and swung a bat were and flash forward to utility infielders in the last generation. It’s like we’ve populated sports with a new species. We got rid of all those gifted but hopeless losers with their 175-pound frames and the natural cutting motion of their fork ball and replaced them with these 6-foot-6-inch mastodons who routinely throw 95 in the seventh inning. Sports became less about beauty, grace and the human consequences of athletic endeavor; it became this Roman spectacle in which the fantasy was right there in front of us.

Solotaroff discusses his generation around the time of Arnold Schwarzenegger:

We all came out from the same paradigm, I think. We all came out of this lonely boyhood fantasy of what constituted manhood that had been bubbling up for 20 years. It all grows out of this subliminal idea that America was suddenly this muscular place. We’d won the war. America as a superpower is only an idea that’s 50, 60 years old. We don’t really become this kind of military empire until the age of Eisenhower, the tipping point being winning the Second World War and doing so by ramping up this enormous military-industrial complex on a shoestring — people bringing in their pots and pans to make fucking Howitzer rounds and build submarines. But we did it. And the America that comes out of the Second World War is an enormously prosperous, proud and expansive place where everything is possible.

Solotaroff also discusses muscle as a way he could prove his masculinity and be recognized by his father. In addition, he discusses how the use of steroids makes other drug use inevitable as a way to balance out its high strung effect.

With problems like Solotaroff described, we must ask ourselves if an American muscle revival is really necessary. We can think back on the glory days for a fond memory, but anything else, does us no good. Mira Nair, Indian movie director, said, “I know what it’s like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it’s like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis.” Stallone can push for its comeback as much as he’d like, but with all the progress towards the quiet strength of the new-and-improved masculinity, I doubt many wish hypermasculinity to be more than a punchline on a reality TV show poking fun at a culture in which we once lived.

The post The demise of American muscle and the few who want its return appeared first on Chase Fleming.

His article, Pray for Hitch? Christian healing for believers, atheists, in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post (don’t ask me how this seriously became a section), notes two celebrities recently cancer stricken: Christopher Hitchens and Christian disability advocate Joni Eareckson Tada.

Contreras goes to wonder if Hitchens illness “could be the result of God’s judgment?” But as for Tada, no questions are asked. The hypocrisy must be noted. For the record, I do not believe there is such a thing as God’s judgment — but for sake of argument let’s say there is — then if Hitchens is considered stricken by God’s judgment, shouldn’t Tada be as well?

He goes on to say how belief in God has intense healing powers. But Contreras’ lack of reason is not hard to bash, so I’ll go easy on it. What is baffling though, is how a doctor who should have gone through intensive education relating to research, passed up an article posted in his own paper, the Washington Post, just some years ago that refutes his claim.

The article, clearly titled, “Prayer’s Power to Heal Strangers Is Examined,” could no more clearly state:

“Praying for sick strangers does not improve their prospects of recovering, according to a large, carefully designed study that casts doubt on the widely held belief that being prayed for can help a person heal.”

So what kind of practice could Contreras be running with this medical degree of his? Turns out, he works at Oasis of Hope Health Group, which we’re pretty sure is his daddy’s company. Their main treatment for cancer patients at their facility is “integrative regulatory therapy with Vitamin C.” And we all know, Vitamin C can’t even cure a common cold.

So Contreras, we ask you: put the keyboard down, pick up a book, and let the big kids do the thinking.

The post If anyone could use a prayer, it’s Francisco Contreras. appeared first on Chase Fleming.