Closing Remarks

It's often difficult to understand how much of your identity is dictated by where you come from.  Even someone like me, who isn't particularly nationalistic or ethnocentric, didn't realize how much of who I was came from being raised in the United States, even down to the cadence of my speech and the way I move.

In the end, I suppose I have changed little from the person that I was when I began my stay in France.  Many of my views and outlooks are still the same.  I'm still a secularist, I still think that cultural differences are less significant in understanding someone than motivation, and I still believe national origin should be a source of neither shame nor pride.

Then again, I wonder if this would be any different had I gone even farther away from my natal context.  Would I  be more changed if I had gone to Iran, or Japan, or Russia?  I don't know, but even though there are some big differences between France and the United States, many of their core, underlying values are the same.

My biggest regret is not taking the time to try and get to know more French people, real French people from everyday life whose identities flowed naturally from the place they lived in.  I followed politics and listened to lectures from academics, but I wonder if the picture that I drew of France and its citizens would be different had I been exposed to the people more often.

This is my only regret though.  Even towards the end of my journey, the only time when I truly missed the United States and the connections I have here, there was the creeping fear in the back of my mind that I would never be able to return to Europe.  This fear isn't misplaced.  I will be completely on my own soon, with loans to back back and responsibilities to attend to, and the idea that I will be able to rustle up a few thousand dollars to cross the ocean again and stay for an extended period is seeming more and more unlikely.
 
Though I am mostly unchanged, I now know that I want travel to be a regular part of my life.  I like being in strange places where I know nothing and no one, and I like to challenge myself in adapting to new expectations and perspectives.

Despite all of the links I have to my surroundings, their influence only goes so far.  In the end I can only speak for myself.  The university tried to feed us nonsense about representing Ohio State when we were abroad, but I found, with the exception of one or two incidents, that most people thought of me as Nathan first, and an American student second.  I've always tried, both before and during my travels, to approach each person as an individual and to take as much time as possible to listen to them and try to understand them before I made a judgement.  My voyage has helped to further dispel the illusion of homogeneity from my mind.

I hope that no one reading this or other posts in this log takes my musings, predictions, and observations at face value.  Everything I say is filtered through my own experience and bias.  I encourage everyone who reads this to travel, or if not travel then try to put yourself in new contexts with new people.  Find out for yourself what the world is like.  Even now, when everything seems so packed and hurried, there's still lots to see and learn.

Go outside and play.

-Nathan Granger
February 12th, 2012
West Chester, Ohio
United States of America

Last Day in Dijon

That's it.  It's over.  Well,... the study abroad program itself is over.  There are still many adventures to be had in the coming weeks, both in France and in the United Kingdom. 

Still, it's an eerie feeling leaving the city.  I suppose it feels like this anytime one leaves a place where you've lived for a while.  I like Dijon.  It has the history and atmosphere of historic France, without the clutter and commercialism of the larger tourist hubs like Paris.  It's a town in which I could easily see myself living in the future, though realistically this is highly unlikely.  It's quiet, and I will miss the old architecture and serpentine, cobblestone roads.

I will miss the people, as well.  I've meet some interesting folks, both in the program and outside of it.  I think that people here appreciate friendly company a great deal.  No one's in a hurry to keep appointments.  Sure, there are problems with this, but I think that the American hustle and bustle could learn a great deal from the French way of taking their time.  Then of course, there's the international students from the program that I've met.  Those who have different perspectives from me and different ways of presenting themselves.  All of this I will miss.

At the same time, it will be good to go back.  I miss my friends and family.  Furthermore, I feel that I've improved the best I can in this sort of context.  There's only so far you can go living in a residence with other students who speak English.  I am not fluent, but I'm less bothered by this inevitability than when I came.  If I return, it will have to be in a context of true immersion.  

Thus, the academic part of my journey comes to a close.  It was far from perfect, and frankly I'm glad that I'm not taking classes here for a full year.  I would probably bore my eyes out with a pen from the boredom, but I've learned a lot, and I know it will serve me well as I continue my studies.  

What happens from here?  Travel and frivolity!  I depart the residence tomorrow to wander about Europe for eleven days.  I hope it will be as enlightening as the academic part of my journey.  

See you back in the States, where I will render my final thoughts on my entire journey.  

SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and the Changing Nature of Intellectual Property Rights

Earlier this week the House of Representatives and Senate of the United States postponed their votes on the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act respectively.  This is largely attributed to the amount of people who took issue with the bill, manifesting themselves in the form of internet petitions and protests in Washington.

Protractors of the bill espouse it as a way to combat internet piracy of copyrighted works.  It's no secret that it is now easier than ever to get music, movies, and books on the internet quickly and without paying.  The bills would require search engines to divert users from viewing websites flagged as pirate havens.  It would also allow the government to monitor and prosecute sites that have numerous complaints from intellectual property holders as infringing on their right to profit from their work.

Detractors of the bill claim that it, like the Patriot Act before it, contains language that is too broad and, therefore, easy to exploit.  Even the smallest provocation of someone who believes their rights are being circumvented would give the government free reign to shut an entire site down.  In short, the bill would make it too easy for the government to censor websites that it or anyone else finds even the slightest bit objectionable.

Really, it's perfectly reasonable for people who spend hours and hours working on an album, movie, or book as well as those who produce and distribute said works to want to be compensated by the people who benefit from experiencing them.  It's also perfectly reasonable to worry that the government would use legislation to gain sweeping, inappropriate powers to enforce social agendas.

Before I tell you what I think, I want to look around at your desk.  Bet you have a flash drive or some other kind of USB drive device lying around.  Take at a good look at it because that is the format of the modern world.  It's not the format of the future.  It's the format of now, of this world.  To understand the conflict of SOPA and legislation of its ilk, one must understand how art will be transferred and spread both now and in the near future.

Paper bound books will disappear within the next decade or so.  What's that, too hasty, you say?  If anything it's not hasty enough.  A digital copy of a book can be produced for next to nothing and copied for even less, as opposed to printing books which costs hundreds of amounts of additional time, resources, energy, space, and money.  The same goes for music and film. Furthermore, you can store a whole library's worth of novels, thousands of songs, and hundreds of hours video on a device about the size of your thumb.

This can hold a thousand copies of War and Peace, or hundreds of copies of all the Beatles albums before Rubber Soul, or all of Ed Wood's movies.  You know,.. if you're into that.

 Why would you waste so much time and energy on producing hard copies of things, when it's so much more economical to convert your products to digital format then produce and distribute them for next to nothing?  You wouldn't.  This ease of transfer is also the reason that it's so easy to get entertainment without paying.  Anyone can upload a file and send it to whoever wants it.  No need to waste your time going to the store or dealing with the producers.  It's all there at the click of button.  Like a lot of things in human behavior, the old ways of distributing artistic works are being felled by the all powerful forces of incentive.  

This march towards digitalization has been happening for a long time.  More importantly, it won't slow down, a point which leads me to the SOPA and PIPA bills.  The question should not be whether the government should do more to enforce copyright, or how we can reconcile the digital format with long-established property rules.  File-sharing is so easy, and in many ways it dominates the spread of entertainment, from bit-torrenting to youtube.  This is such a massive change from the way it was before, that it will eventually reach a point that traditional publishing and production will lose their monopolies on their respective industries and become one of many equally viable paths for artists to release their work.  You see stirrings of this already in the literary world, where you have large numbers of authors who never print a single book, opting instead to publish all of their work electronically online, sometimes for free (though admittedly not very often).  

The question that should be being asked is how can artists and their benefactors adapt to modern trends in such a way that they can still make a living because, quite frankly, if a work gets published, it will be file shared.  It's too easy; it’s impossible to avoid.

Unfortunately, governments aren't thinking in this way and neither are large industries that back bills like SOPA and PIPA.  What's even more frightening is that it's apparent that government isn't about to wait for legislative justification in an effort to enforce copyright.  Even after the delay of the SOPA and PIPA voting, the government went ahead and seized megaupload.com, one of the larger file-sharing hubs on the internet.  As usual, the government will handle things like it usually handles things.

FUCK IT!  WE'LL DO IT LIVE!

Nathan sure seems to be talking a lot about the States in his French blog.  Well, this isn't a problem limited to US (see what I did there).  The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act is a multinational treaty signed on the first of October, 2011 by eight nations, including the US and Canada.  The EU is expected to sign the act in the near future.  It is similar in structure to SOPA and PIPA and would grant similar powers to participating governments, including broad sweeping powers to monitor and prosecute sites that they find suspicious.   The act also tries to address the proliferation of bootleg, generic medicine that go around pharmaceutical companies' patents.  The bill would create an ACTA committee that can operate independently from the participating nations, the UN, and the WTO without being subject to judicial review.

I think that these sorts of efforts are a waste of time.  Even if you make the argument that artists are suffering and having their work stolen, an argument that I think you most certainly can make, they give too much sweeping power to government entities and corporate supporters to arbitrarily infringe on privacy and dole out punishments.   I look at this legislation, and I can’t help but be reminded of the screaming fiasco that is the American war on drugs, an operation that has cost millions of dollars in resources, created unnecessarily harsh punishments for code-breakers, and has done absolutely nothing to stem the tide of drug use.  Sure, drug addiction is bad.  But people get high, and they are going to continue to get high regardless of how much effort short-sighted legislation tries to stop it.  

I felt this subject was appropriate for this blog because it's an international effort.  Remember those problems that I speculated about in one of my earlier posts about globalism.  This is one of those problems, roaming bands of nebulous security forces with multinational resources who answer to no one.  Sorry, as someone who hopes to get something published someday, I don't need an Orwellian police-force to make sure that my benefactors and I get paid.

FAIL Week (Also, Cheetos)

After travelling a lot for last few weeks and having both exams and a long week and half of travelling coming up, I figured I'd lay low this weekend.  Relax.  Study a bit.  Maybe catch up on some reading.

Yet, there's a point in your weekend when you realize you may have misappropriated the creeping, destructive potential of a lot of free time.  For me this was a few moments ago when I realized that instead going to out to buy more fruit, I had decided to dip a second granola bar into the nutella jar and use that as a garnishment for my dinner.

No really; that just happened.

The only really productive thing I did this week was completing my application for the TAPIF (Teaching Assistant Position in France).  I did this yesterday.  It was due today.  I've been working on the draft for the statement for a few weeks, but I didn't actually complete the application until the day before it was due.  

It's not just this weekend either.  All this week, my once exuberant discipline on learning in France has all but wilted.  I skipped class for the first time this week, which is something I usually never do, even in the States.  I also decided to forego both of my martial arts classes this week.  Why?  Because mind you own damn business, that's why!  Furthermore, I've stopped the courtesy of listening to my music headphones , a habit that I'm still surprised to find hasn't elicited any complaint from neighbors.  

Typed "angry man" into the Google Images search bar to find  a funny picture to illustrate the comment about my neighbors' potential complaints.  This came up instead.

What happened?  I felt like a paragon of studiousness and initiative at the beginning of the program, and now I feel like useless goo.  I could say that one of the culprits is the semester time frame.  Usually, I'd be well into a new quarter by now, replete with new classes, interests, and challenges.  Instead, everything is still the same, and I am a person who gets bored without some variety in his life.

Nathan with variety in his life. 

Nathan without variety in his life.

I could also say that the weather is to blame.  It's cold now, and I've officially retired my spring jacket for the year.  In addition, there's no snow, one of the things I've always liked about winter.  There's only the sylphic cold biting at your nerves.  It's hard to get motivated with something like that flitting about.

Hell, I could even tell you that my reason for skimping on my typical duties this week is due to the fact that I've deliberately stayed in to study for exams that are coming up.  Indeed, this was what I told myself at the beginning of the week.  Need to buckle down for those pesky tests.

Too bad I haven't studied one bit this week.  Not a minute.  And why would I?  They don't begin until Monday the 23rd (except for that one this Thursday, but we won't talk about that now).  Why study when you read Cracked.com for hours on end or listen to your copy of Secret Treaties or your B-52s greatest hits album again?

They are in my library.  I am not shamed.

Clearly, the problem isn't extenuating circumstances.  The problem is my lack of motivation.  As to why I'm unmotivated, I suppose there's no particularly reason.  I experience bumps of gooey uselessness every now and then, but that fact that it's in France, where there certainly isn't a lack of variety, the weather isn't really all the bad, and continuing to procrastinate even after you've cleared time to study is still irresponsible, makes the   feeling all the more pervasive and draining.  It's amazing how exhausting getting up at 2pm can be.  It's not a good thing.

I didn't have any resolutions for the New Year, but I think that I will make a resolution for this week.  No more laziness and putting things off.  It's time to get things done and go outside.  There's only a few weeks of this left, and there's no time to waste. 

But then again.

Runnin' Around'll Do That to Ya

I've traveled a lot in the past few weeks.  I went to Barcelona for six days to visit my friend Maria, I went to Paris with my study abroad group and some friends we made in the residence for the new year, and this weekend I visited my old French teacher in Rennes (who is teaching English at the university there now and has her own travel blog that you can read here).  I realize that I haven't really talked about these travels much, or at all rather.
I'm going to keep my word and avoid the "I went here and did this" syndrome that so easy to fall into.  If you want to see what my experiences were like you can look at the pictures on my facebook page.

As I've traveled about and seen how others live, I'm reminded of the impact that place has on a person's identity.  Especially in France, where people really don't move around that much from where they were born, I'm reminded of the importance of small scale perspectives in peoples' lives.  I can talk and muse and rant about abstract, large-scale speculations on the future of humanity, about the dissolution of national identity, about the integration of political and economic policy, and the proliferation of a common yet pluralistic culture,but it's easy to forget how much of many people's personalities and outlooks are dictated by where they are from.

My first though when I see this is that perhaps my ideas about the nature of humanity were premature, if not out right false.

Then after I think about it more, I realize that instead I've simply overlooked a part of the equation that was always there but hiding behind the largesse and detachment of rational observation.  I've ignored the more intimate parts of human life, the parts that are truly defining for many people.  I've ignored the power that setting has in creation.  Take a newborn and put in one place to live for the rest of his life, he will turn out differently from the person he would become had you placed him in a different place.

Even now, my mind retreats to statistical data about human development.  Identical twins who are separated at birth and raised in different families are likely to develop the same sorts of mannerisms and personalities as their counterparts, even when they assimilate the values, customs, and languages of their adopted families.

Even now, I must yank my mind from the perspective that sees human experience as a set of moving probabilities and  quantitative data.  Even when these things reflect sweeping truths, understanding an individual person or even a given group of people is much deeper and more difficult.  For me, however, it's in many ways more interesting.

In this way, I'm very pleased with my travels, even if specific experiences may not have been particularly pleasant.  I've seen how other people are like, and I've seen different outlooks and opinions that sometimes in conflict with mine, but that are so ingrained into a cultures' collective psyche that I'm hesitant to make a value judgement on them.  After all, who knows how they might of felt had they been born elsewhere.

I was once very much attracted to the idea that everyone really is the same, and that cultural differences are superficial at best.  I now find this idea to be too simple.  Yet, I find the idea that a person from one culture could never understand a person from a different culture because they are so radically different to be equally oversimplified.

Instead, I'm finding that while cultural things may dictate how a person acts or even sees the world, it's easy to understand someone when you learn their honest motivations.  In this way, even if identification with a person from a different place is impossible, empathy most certainly is not.

Here, I feel like I'm meandering back into the detached, rational side of myself, which is not what I want.  I feel like a balding, tweed-wearing academic in an armchair reflecting on the world in his office without actually being part of it.

Yet, I know that I probably would not have come to these conclusions had I decided not to study abroad or at least travel around and see things.  I suppose there's always interesting people to meet and interesting things to see if you take the time to get lost.

Meditation #2 (For the New Year)

December Dirge

This month seems to deny its age--like an old, white-faced dog that, despite its cracking arthritic joints and cataract-cloaked eyes, insists on chasing the trucks that putter down the streets.  I guess its warm in other places too this year, and I admit that its an odd and even unwelcome sensation when I move about outside knowing the water that creeps into the mesh cloth of my shoes is from rain puddles instead of snow drifts.

Of course, even as the year refuses to let winter's bony fingers stretch over it, most everyone else seems to welcome its end, seems eager to celebrate its death, or rather what they perceive as its death, and wretch the new year out into what will surely be a cold January.  I suppose it's natural for everyone to welcome new changes and new beginnings on their own terms.  It's understandable to want to escape from the regrets, indecision, heartaches that strode through 2011, whether they be personal or broad in scope.

I'm hardly an exception to this ritual.  In the past, I've welcomed new changes and new opportunities.  It's nice to get a fresh start every once and a while.

Yet, time is weary for the impatience of those who try to bottle it.  Events and their memory cannot be scraped from the mind like one scrapes frost from a windshield.  And now, in the 22nd year of my tiny little corner of perception, I am less eager to escape the past twelve months.  Though, I'm in no hurry to try and relive them either.  

I'm pleased with myself that I'm finally finding it easier to accept the events of my life with tranquility and not waste time in a fruitless quest to forget or ignore.  Try as I might to forget this year, it certainly isn't going to forget me.  

Happy New Year.

Classes in Dijon vs. Classes in Columbus

How many of you can guess which nations have the best universities?  Usually when I think of the higher education, I think of the long European intellectual tradition, the tradition that gave us Sartre and Kant and Newton.  It makes sense that the best universities are to be found in European nations, right?

Well... that's only partially true.  US News and World Report in their annual university ranking survey ranks the United Kingdom, having four schools in the top ten, and the United States, having six schools in the top ten, as the best countries in which to seek higher education.

The rest of the list is dominated by both the UK and the USA, which, as you can see based on my assumptions, surprised me.  I think that there's a stereotype among Americans that European universities are prestigious and glamorous, but evidently, the data suggests that if you want to get a good education, it's better just to stay in the States.

In fact, my adviser from the Office of International Affairs at Ohio State told me before I left that most French universities "sucked."  I was skeptical of her assertion; I'm not one to take things on here-say, but the research seems to confirm her idea.  France is on US News' list only a handful of times, and lists from different sources show a similar trend.

At the University of Burgundy, I actually don't take classes in the university proper.  I take classes in a program called the CIEF (Centre pour des Edutiants Internationaux de Francais), which is a special program designed specifically for international students who want to learn French.  My class time is split up between language classes, where they simply teach us the raw basics of French, a civilization class about the basics of French history and politics, and culture classes which teach more specific subject areas like economics, literature, and philosophy.

I wonder how much of my experience here is the result of the structure of the CIEF, as opposed to the general university system itself, because much of it is set up very differently from the United States.  Firstly, I'm noticing a much larger focus on classroom rapport and accountability.  At OSU, there are numerous classes in which the teachers never take attendance and in which in the only grades are the exams.  Here, there is homework almost every day, and the teachers grade every aspect of your work, from grammar to expression to handwriting, even if the assignment has nothing to do with these things.

That being said, the work load is actually quite a good deal less than that of my classes in the States.  There are no long reading assignments, and most of the homework is in the form of worksheets that can be completed in a hour or two.  The teachers ensure that the students learn by grading hard and monitoring our progress closely.  In the US, the teachers expect us to take responsibility for ourselves and be disciplined in keeping up without prompting.  I've frequently heard professors at OSU say, "You're adults now.  It's your job to make sure you do well."

This is hardly the attitude here.  One must keep in mind that a much larger percentage of the American population goes to college than the population in France.  There's less of an emphasis here on university being the primary medium for ensuring the well-being of one's future.  As a result, American universities take in more students with a wider range of abilities, and I think that the American university would benefit if its teachers were to suddenly decide to grade harder and scrutinize mistakes.  I think that this would ensure a greater accountability from the students.

Still, the amount of busy work and the hovering over shoulders in France is off putting.  There are days when I feel like I'm back in high school.  Two weeks ago, one of my professors noticed the way I was taking notes in her class and proceeded to harangue me about bad study habits.

I admit that I took it a little personally.  I don't think that many people would find me unreasonable if I were to say that it's none of her goddamned business the way I take notes,  all of which were completely in French and have served me rather well in the past, thank you very much.  Of course, after I calmed down, I realized that there no way of her knowing that I found them effective.  Yet, the fact that she felt the need to monitor my habits lingers in my mind as needlessly invasive, and based on what I've heard about other teachers this attitude about monitoring our progress is pretty pervasive.

I'm also finding the teaching style to be more disjointed and less focused than in the US.  It's not uncommon for teacher to go off on tangents and jump around between subjects.  The culture classes, which are all lectures, are sometimes difficult to follow and discussion of the ideas being presented, that is asking questions of the students or asking for input, is rare.  That's not to say that there aren't teachers who ask for discussion or encourage us to question.  However, these things are such prominent parts of American educational pedagogy, that their relative absence is bizarre.  Even if a subject itself is interesting, a course can make it boring or difficult to understand without active participation from the students, and if there's something that I don't understand in a class, it's never because of the language barrier.

Again, I wonder if this is due to the French university system itself, or if it's the result of the CIEF.  I imagine that a lot of the classes are deliberately slowed down in hopes of accommodating for language skills. I've been tempted to sneak into a lecture hall during one of the regular classes and observe to see if it's any different.

I'm not trying to sound ungrateful.  I've learned a lot during my time here, and my language skills have improved.  Still, the classes here aren't nearly as rigorous as the ones at OSU, and I wish more than anything that the teachers would give us a little credit.