A Mordern Sacrificial Virgin

What’s with Miley Cyrus? Ok, we all remember the Britney Spears drama, yes? Why on earth are we creating another Britney train wreck? What on earth is wrong with us?! There has to be something wrong with a society that is so hung up on seeking out a pretty young girl, casting her in the role of cute but hyper virginial maiden, only to wait with baited breath for the moment that she will be cast as the fallen angel lured by the temptation of sex. It’s sick, that’s what it is. Are we stuck in a vortex of Victorian restrictions, are we turned on by the thought of the forbidden virgin? Lets be realistic, teenagers are going to want to have sex, duh. Their bodies have matured and their emotions are in flux, so it’s just damn wrong to castigate this Miley whateveryacallher, just because we, for some damn odd reason, seem to think any hint of sexuality in teenagers is mortifying. Ya know what? I think society needs to grow up, really. Since when is Disney the moral dictator of America? Disney makes cartoons for God’s sakes, not laws. Miley, if you want to wear a blanket covering you, go for it. The point is you WERE covered up. If Disney and the other tight laced critics had their way, you’d be wearing clothes up to your ears and down to your ankles. Express yourself, don’t be ashamed to explore the art of being a teenager. Poor Britney should have taught you that lesson… read the quotes below. During the shoot by Annie Liebovitz, everyone, including Miley’s parents, thought the photos were appropriate. What happened to change all that? Or should I say who has a stick shoved up their (fill in the blank.)

“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” she tells ET. “I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.” Miley Cyrus

“Miley’s parents and/or minders were on the set all day. Since the photo was taken digitally, they saw it on the shoot and everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait of Miley. In fact, when BRUCE HANDY interviewed Miley, he asked her about the photo and she was very cheerful about it and thought it was perfectly fine.”

A Cloud of Confusion

For my master’s class, Writing for Electronic Communities, the class read Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work, which focuses on how we inhabit an information flooded world. Eilola further discusses symbolic-analytic theory and articulation theory in an effot to point out how we weave our way through technologies and remain of the edges of dense texts and masses of information. I was most fascinated with the final chapter of Eilola’s book, Coda: A Text in Fragments where what appears to be (as described) fragmented pieces of information: quotations, images, website shots, a total mish mosh of information which doesn’t seem to make much sense – at least not to me. This last chapter is split into segments but all of these pieces of information obviously allude to technology in some way or another. What is Eilola trying to point out? That a deluge of information, as we are often confronted with online and with new technologies, just leads to confusion and a lack of comprehension? Or is he trying to be clever and point out that fractured texts lend to new contexts and avenues of comprehension that a linear presentation of text could grant the reader/user? I don’t know, I just don’t know…..