Posts Tagged Under ‘Woodland Hills High School’

3-0

That was the most relieving end to a football game in a long time.

And they even name-checked Woodland Hills. (Though from what I’ve read lately, it’s probably not a place to be proud of anymore. Be sure to read the part where a student tries to excuse his punching a cop because he thought he was only punching a security guard.)

Class Divide Online?

Drop Internet knowledge, you say.

Alright.

I just read this interesting article (thanks, Jeremiah) from the BBC about how the Facebook - MySpace divide among teenagers also mirrors American class divisions. There’s certainly something to this. Not to prove a point from my earlier Jason Taylor post, but when I search high-school classmates on Facebook, I only get 11 results; on MySpace, I get 121. I tried this same thing searching for my college classmates to get the upper-crust perspective (let’s face facts about the majority of peeps who attend Northwestern), but Facebook won’t return more than 500 search results.

You can take the analogy even further than that: the craziness and totally unfiltered atmosphere of MySpace and the guideline-driven, orderly approach of Facebook in some ways mirrors the way our capitalist society works: the people at the top are a smaller group who tend to be more comfortable working the system and staying within a certain set of rules while building a secluded and idyllic existence, leaving everyone else who can’t or doesn’t want to join in to fend for themselves in a Hobbesian-type wizorld. Most people are on the outside looking in, kind of similar to how MySpace has a far larger customer base than Facebook.

But while you can make the outside-looking-in argument against Facebook, it’s equally easy for Facebook to make the basic marketing appeal of “come join our pleasant world, away from the noise” against MySpace: the social-networking world of MySpace outside the refined, neat, well-laid-out confines of Facebook is cacophonous, confusing, vulgar and, mostly, really damned stupid. (Also browser-crashing. Can’t leave out browser-crashing.) In a mirror of conservative critique of modern culture, if principled web design stands in for societal culture, then MySpace is setting the culture back faster and faster every day. When you want a break from the clatter, sometimes you just have to clutter together with like-minded people. Enter Facebook: the U Street of the Internet. For those of you who don’t live in DC, that’s a fast-growing neighborhood with lots of cultural history and cool places to chill, but suffering a potential influx of gentrifiers who can partially appreciate the appeal of the place but will kill that appeal by their growing presence. Kind of like Facebook opening up to high schoolers.

Finally, there’s the way both sites are run. Like the upper reaches of society, Facebook isn’t afraid to crib coolness when it sprouts up from the ranks of the masses, so long as that coolness can fit into its defined limits. (Think new Facebook apps.) And the guys with the power over the MySpace masses know that they probably should do better with restricting the negative consequences of the free-for-all, like porn-site friend-invite spam and the massive amounts of junk, but too many people are clamoring for the freedom to put junk onto their pages that restriction would just invite massive rebellion. (Think the drug war or Prohibition.)

I’m a Facebook man myself, though I also have the neglected MySpace account when I want a nod toward populism. But I gotta admit, that clean layout and crap-free functionality—even if it’s just the manufactured invention of some web designer—is just so freakin’ appealing. I guess that makes me a social-networking latté liberal? Either way, coffee tastes like dirt. And I mean that with no connection to my analogy at all, because coffee really does taste like dirt. It’s disgusting.

Knowledge dropped.

P.S. - Sorry, Friendster.

Sports Illustrated: Run by Snobs From Mt. Lebanon

Hey, Internets.

Don’t hate.

This week, Sports Illustrated had a big piece about Miami Dolphin and Pittsburgh native Jason Taylor. Not only did the article improve my opinion of Taylor a great deal (check out the part where a pro athlete puts sports into perspective with politics), but Woodland Hills H.S., the alma mater of JT and your resident author, even got a name-check. (Taylor was home-schooled but played senior year football for the school team as a district resident.)

That was cool, and I was pumped reading the article. Then I got to this part:

Yet as much as Taylor, in this instance, is guilty of stereotyping his fellow pros, he bristles when others’ expectations of how an athlete should act are used against him … And don’t get Taylor started on the notion some have that his unabashed ambition makes him something of a sellout to his roots. (He grew up in a largely underprivileged neighborhood.)

Huh say what???

Woodland Hills has its nasty areas (shoutout to Rankin and Braddock!) but it’s otherwise smack dab in the middle of American socioeconomic strata. Both Jason Taylor and myself are from Wilkins Township, one of the municipalities in WHSD (read this old Akron page), which I don’t know how someone could see as being “underprivileged”. (Peep these housing prices).

Woody High has a pretty battered rep in the local media, and it’s true that I have plenty of weird stories that I probably wouldn’t have gotten at Upper Middle Whitebread High. But some writer-reporter here is painting the whole district with a pretty broad brush that makes for a better story, but isn’t quite true.

What more can I say: The streetz is a mutha.