About
So you want to know what we are about here at BRIANHEWLETT.com?
Have you ever been told that you shouldn’t talk about certain things at the dinner table? It has been said that politics and religion should never be spoken about during dinner and I have also heard that sex and money shouldn’t be either. The historical taboo around these and other topics is so great that many people seem to be almost afraid to voice their opinions. This fear or suppression of opinion equates to having no voice or the death of your voice.
In the 1980s, in relation to the AIDS crisis and apparent ignoring of it by the political leadership of the era, gay activists in New York formed the SILENCE = DEATH Project and began a campaign that involved plastering posters around the city featuring a pink triangle on a black background stating this manifesto in order to draw parallels between what they saw as oppression by silence and the oppression of gays, lesbians, Jews, academics, clergy, and others during the Nazi occupation of Germany.
This campaign was designed to spotlight and protest conversational taboos and the unwillingness of some to resist societal injustice and relative indifference and control of leadership. The same six men who created the project later joined the protest group
As a social scientist, I am well aware that the Social Psychologists like myself have noted for a long time that institutions and their organizations have used fear and other emotions and reason to stifle the voice of the individual. Classical sociologists like Durkheim, Weber, and Marx all noted the manner in which structural patterns were continuously used to suppress and devalue the subjective voice of the people and to uplift the popular or mainstream voice, which is considered to be the voice of objectivity or reason. However, we are being continuously reminded by contemporary researchers, theorists, philosophers, politicians, educators, and even entertainers, such as Michael Moore that the voice that is often tauted as that of the people is really on the voice of a few, mostly elite members of the society.
One of the fundamental rights of the United States Constitution is the right to the freedom speech. In fact, it is the First of all of the Amendments that offers that right. It states that:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Therefore, this website is aimed at featuring the subjective voice. The voice of millions in the United States and the billions of other individuals around the globe.
As of December 2009, the Earth’s population was estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 6.802 billion. The world population has been growing continuously since the end of the Black Death, or the plague, around 1400. The fastest rates of world population growth above 1.8%) were seen briefly during the 1950s then for a longer period during the 1960s and 1970s. According to population projections, world population will continue to grow until at least 2050. The 2008 rate of growth has almost halved since its peak of 2.2% per year, which was reached in 1963. World births have levelled off at about 134 million per year, since their peak at 163-million in the late 1990s, and are expected to remain constant. However, deaths are only around 57 million per year, and are expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050. Because births outnumber deaths, the world’s population is expected to reach about 9 billion by the year 2040.
Ethnography, which is derived from the Greek words ἔθνος ethnos or folk/people and γράφειν graphein or writing, is a branch of study that crosses anthropology, psychology, and sociology. It is a methodological strategy used to provide descriptions of human societies, which does not prescribe any particular method (e.g. observation, interview, questionnaire), but instead prescribes the nature of the study (i.e. to describe people through writing). This type of study is also often called a "field study" or a "case reporting".
This website has as its intention the use of social media in the performance of ethnography in order to present human understanding about the human experience. By this I mean, using social media in the systematic process of describing human societies based on human and scientifc inquiry. Earl Babbie argues that all inquiry stems from the nature of humanity. He says people seek a general understanding about the world around them and much of what we know about the world we know by agreement and less so by experience. We take much of our understanding or knowledge from tradition or from the words of those we give authority. He further aruges that when we understand through experience, we make observations and seekp patterns of regularity and we often make mistakes based on them. Science, he maintains, is one of the buffers that we have for these misunderstandings because it allows to get information that we would not otherwise have to make conclusions based upon.
Being in agreement with him, this site is designed to foster and develop inquiry, both human and scientific, and to collect data of human experience that can then be used to determine patterns of social behavior and conceptual thought that can serve as the basis for understanding and predictions versus assumptions based on agreement with heuristic or taken-for-granted non-experienced phenomenon.
So in sum, the purpose of this website is to:
- Foster and develop topics of human and scientific inquiry, many of which are seen as taboo and hence are not encouraged to be the focus of conversation at the dinner table
- Record and document experiential reality to serve as true data for understanding in order to lesson assumptions about the human social experience
- Utilize social media in the process
It is my sincere hope that you will join us in this bold endeavor that should take us into some of the most far reaching individual minds on the planet and should allow us to put “in your face” the experiences of everyone else so that you can truly be proud of the uniqueness of your own.
Thank you!
Brian N. Hewlett, Ph.D., M.A.
