Undergraduate Admissions

It’s Spring Break (for me…starting a day early) and I’m at my girlfriend’s house in Tennessee. She had to work today, unfortunately, so I’m relaxing at her house. It’s pretty nice though. I’ve been using her laptop to surf the internet while also watching TV pretty much all day. I don’t have one, but using a laptop is fun to me, because I think somewhere along the line I got really sick of sitting at a desk and using a computer. (It’s probably a result of the fact that my job, my internship, and 1/2 of my classes involve sitting at a desk and using a computer.) I’m not really sure why I got sick of the desk aspect before I got sick of using computers in general, but that doesn’t really surprise me. I was thinking about buying a MacBook soon anyway, and this only makes me more inclined to do so.

I actually have a fairly decent reason for watching TV all day. This is pretty surprising for some people, but I don’t have cable in my apartment. Because of this, the only time I watch TV for anything other than to kill time is when Family Guy and American Dad are new. I mean, I do watch random garbage at least a few hours a week, but that’s just watching whatever sitcom isn’t completely intolerable or finding something that isn’t a judge show. I had cable when I was growing up and when I lived in the dorms at UB, so going back to watching a bunch of cable TV is like returning to some culture that I left long ago. It’s also pretty enlightening, because lately I’ve felt like having cable would be nice, but from watching all day today I’m reminded of the fact that even with over 100 channels, there still isn’t really anything very interesting to watch.

One thing that I was especially interested in seeing was cable TV news. I’ve been reading a lot of news since the primaries have been going strong, but I haven’t watched any on TV. I’ve been curious how they were presenting things. I watched CNN, CNN Headline News, and MSNBC for a few hours today, and being that I was never really a fan of TV news to begin with, I was left unsurprised in the worst way possible. It’s so simple and repetitive, but even worse than that is how divisive it is. There were so many discussions about “winning” and “losing” and about pointlessly vague concepts like “momentum”. Not once did I notice anyone mention that delegates are split proportionally according to voting percentages. Someone who wasn’t already aware that that was how things work (which is probably a lot of cable TV news viewers) would just hear these incessant conversations about recent “victories” and not realize that the actual delegate counts haven’t changed that much. It’s a clear misrepresentation, and I could rant about this for days, but I just don’t get why it goes on. Like I said though, I’m not really surprised at all.

What I find even more frustrating than this is how they keep dividing people into groups and telling them what to think. Anytime any results are discussed it gets broken down into white, black, Hispanic, men, women, old, young, rich, poor… I’m all for analyzing things through extensive data, but this isn’t how politics should work. This kind of “news” supports the idea that you need to pander to each group separately instead of appealing to everyone through ideas, principles, and policies. Worst of all is that it gives an impression of predetermination. They seem to subscribe to a theory that if you can nail down every separate demographic, you can use these generalizations in combination with demographic statistics from various states to predict the outcomes of future primaries. I guess if you’re gonna be talking about something for over 12 hours a day, you have to find something to say, right?

Wow, I got into a serious rant there. Time to turn off the TV and the computer and have a good vacation!