2017 / 2018 TACOMA COMMUNITY COLLEGE -01 Una Voce
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UNA VOCE 2017 / 2018 TACOMA COMMUNITY COLLEGE -01 Una Voce Layout and Design Victor Henley Cover Art Victor Henley A special thanks to Mary Fox, faculty advisor Scott Earle, co-founder Sakura Moses, TCC publications coordinator TCC Office of Student Engagement Una Voce Letter from the editors Complete understanding could only be achieved by…memory transfusion—a miracle still beyond the reach of science. —Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas Why read Una Voce? By opening up this magazine, you are doing something revolutionary. We live in a time of deep cultural and political divisions. Political pundits on television shouting at each other until it results in physical violence has become entertainment. Its hard not to identify with one side or the other, and join in the shouting. There is a lot of encouragement to “open the discussion” about charged topics that hit home for us. But let’s stop and think for a moment what a discussion is. It is not just talking and expressing ourselves. It involves listening carefully. It should be at least half listening and half talking. Now more than ever, we need to listen to each other, tune into each other, and make everyone feel heard. So much of the discord we see around us might be averted if everyone felt heard. We can never fully understand another person’s perspective. This can only be accomplished, as Virginia Woolf remarks, by “memory transfusion.” But until we can get a memory transfusion, we must do the next best thing: listen to sincere voices and give them our attention. This is something that, as editors for this year’s edition of Una Voce, we have had to develop as we read the student submissions. We read things we passionately agreed with, and we read things that enlightened us about topics we had either previously been uninformed about or even perhaps disagreed with. In the end, the process of deciding what to include because of limitations of space was nearly heartbreaking. Every student who took the courageous step of submitting their paper has a place in Una Voce, and if space was no issue, we would have included them all. So this is why you should read Una Voce. This is why you picked it up in the first place: you want to listen to other voices. You want to be informed about what your fellow students are thinking and writing about. Too few people—especially people in leadership positions—are doing just that, and when you depart from your comfort zone and make the commitment to listen, you are becoming one of a wave of informed and compassionate people who will change the way problems are solved and disputes are settled. And this is both revolutionary and necessary. Complete understanding could only be achieved by…memory transfusion—a miracle still beyond the reach of science. —Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas Why read Una Voce? -03 Voices from 2017 Student Editors 2017 Fatima Alsinai Marco Flores Angela Hankins Artell Kelly Dennis Le Madison Lecce Jonathan Mcquerter Nguyet Nguyen Autumn Russell Derik Schindler Malia Shaw TyAsya White Una Voce Writer: Donovan Writer: Donovan S. Boyle Collective Social Consciousness and Confirmation Bias Donovan Boyle: I am a 23-year-old grown man (though my inner child wants to debate that last part) who loves superheroes more than anything and wants to write superhero comics for a living. Many re- gard superheroes as childish nonsense. Nothing more than silly kid’s stuff. I see them differently. Superheroes are a means of presenting ideas that nurture the good in humankind. I believe above all else in propagating ideas of kindness and compassion towards each other. -05 In July of 2016, two internet celebrities by the names of Trevor Martin and Tom Castle were accused of lying to their audiences when evidence came to light that the unregulated gambling website they were promoting was owned and operated by the two men, meaning that they had complete control of the outcomes of all the gambling on their website, with no oversight to en- sure that they acted correctly and treated each exchange on the site fairly. While many of their fans left the two behind, frustrated at being lied to, many others still support them to this day, using the fact that they were able to avoid charges as evidence of the two celebrities’ innocence, all the while ignoring the fact that they got out of the charges because of a technicality, as the gambling on their site was for items in a video game that they did not have any connection to but could be traded for real world money. This is a clear example of confirmation bias, as the fans who still support the two celebrities ignore factual information in order to suit their world view. The habit that fans show is an incredibly dangerous threat to our society, as it makes it very hard for major issues to be addressed in anything close to an efficient manner. Think of all the people who voted in the last election who ignored the flaws of the candidate they supported while demonizing their opposition for their flaws. Confirmation bias makes it hard for people who have made it into a habit to see the position of their opponents, and this is only exacerbated if their opponents also practice confirmation bias, as neither side is willing to dis- cuss their positions reasonably. In recent years, confirmation bias has gradually been made more common by the vast amounts of unfiltered information on the internet. In his 2014 article for the website The Guardian on this subject, Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic states, “Given that it is impossible to attend to even a fraction of the information that is available on the web, most individuals prioritise information that is congruent with their current values, simply ignoring any discrepant information” (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2014). Simply put, because the internet re- quires the individual to filter information themselves, it becomes natural for people to filter out information they disagree with. Confirmation bias skews what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called “Meme Theory”in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Meme Theory is essentially the idea that human thoughts and ideas have their own form of natural selection. The strongest ideas overshadow the weaker. For example, in the Cold War, it could be said that the idea of capitalism beat out the idea of commu- nism. However, confirmation bias, made rampant by the internet, leaves no room for this natural selection. In the words of Japanese philosopher, writer, and director Hideo Kojima, from a video game he wrote and directed about this subject, “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty,” “A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on, not unlike genes, really. That’s what history is. But in the current digitized age, trivial information is accumulating every second. Never fading, always accessible. Preserved in all its triteness” (Kojima, 2001). Kojima then goes further and refers to the internet as a “sea of garbage [humans] produce” (Kojima, 2001) that must be waded through in order to retrieve valuable truths, rather than skewed, biased rhetoric. Because confirmation bias has become so common since the creation of the internet and social media, it has led to an era where reporting information skewed by bias in order to draw attention is all too common. Thanks to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, news sources aren’t legally required to report the whole truth, encouraging them to develop clear political leanings in order to cater to those with clear confirmation bias toward those leanings. For instance, several major news organizations including BBC News, Fox News, and CNN have a tendency to interview only those experts who support their claims that video games cause school shootings, despite the vast majority of peer reviewed work on the subject showing no correlation between video games and aggression whatsoever. This is done to appeal to the beliefs of those who get their infor- mation from these sources and believe video games are dangerous, most of these people coming from generations that existed before the advent of video games. This is potentially dangerous as it means fewer people will be focused on discovering the real reasons behind school shootings, instead believing such abhorrent acts are inspired by video games. Una Voce This is made even worse when recent studies have shown that a major cause of school shootings is sensationalist news reports about previous school shootings. Dr. Park Deitz, America’s leading forensic psychiatrist, has tried time and again to warn CNN not to report on school shootings us- ing sensationalist headlines, but has never been able to convince them to stop. He is often quoted as saying; “Because every time we have intense saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week.” (Deitz, 2009). Because confirmation bias encourages the media to report in such a way that it draws the attention of their specific audience, they poten- tially cause far more harm than good. Because of the accelerated rate that confirmation bias is spreading, and the fact that this issue is a deeply psychological one, it may seem a somewhat overwhelming task to counter confirmation bias. In the end, each person must break their confirmation bias themselves, but that does not mean that others cannot help. Towards the end of the story in “Metal Gear Solid 2:Sons of Liber- ty,” Hideo Kojima says through his game’s protagonist that “life isn’t just about passing on your genes.