Marlowsphere (Blog #154)

Question: 

What happens when a young person, especially a young female person from a conservative South East Asia family and country, comes to study at a college in the United States where the values concerning male and female roles, dating and marriage are out of step with the more liberal values surrounding male and female roles, dating and marriage in many American colleges?

Answer:

They hit a cultural wall, not necessarily with their new found student peers, but with their own family and country-of-origin traditions.

It is a difficult and stressful situation for the female student. On the one hand, the female student wants to do well and achieve a higher learning status. On the other hand, the parents, especially the fathers, are more concerned about marrying the daughter off, regardless of the daughter’s intellectual potential and prowess. It is a about individual freedom of expression vs. adherence to entrenched adherence to hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of immovable cultural traditions.

This cultural conflict of values—essentially a double standard: one for male and one for female with South Asian backgrounds—was brought home to me late last year when one of my students who is Pakistani approached me seeking help with this familiar story. It is made worse by the context of the pandemic. Many people from this region of the world believe the COVID-19 vaccine is for controlling people.

There is a strong correlation between these “beliefs” and illiteracy. Pakistan—a nuclear-armed nation—has a literacy rate of about 62 percent—out of 227 million people. This means millions of Pakistanis are illiterate, especially women. Innovation, for example, in Pakistan is very low. Little is invested in education.

What follows is the interview I conducted with this student. Her name has been changed to “female student” (and abbreviated to FS:) to protect her from possible harmful consequences meted out by her parents or her cultural community.

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To Vaccinate or Not To Vaccinate

EM:  Let’s start with the story you were telling me a few weeks ago about your family and their response to vaccination mandates.

FS: It’s all about the fake news and the people. People in my family look more to the videos on YouTube and they believe those stories. For example, some of my relatives came from Pakistan two months ago.  We tried to convince them to be vaccinated, but they were hesitant because they believed the vaccine had a chip in it and then it could get injected in our bodies and they can control us and we won’t have any control over our minds. It was frustrating because the situation is getting worse and their son was also sick. We tried to convince them, but they were adamant that the vaccine is not good.

Last summer (2021), I went back to Pakistan and there were many people who think the vaccine is there to kill people, to depopulate the world.  They had that firm belief. Even if we tried to convince them that we are vaccinated and nothing has happened to us and they will be fine too, they say, “No, we don’t believe you.”

I realized then it’s not only word-of-mouth that shapes their beliefs on the vaccine but also social media. YouTube especially has very much more to do with it.

My father follows a YouTube channel called Haqeeqat TV. The host just posts a video on YouTube talking randomly about anything and none of his claims make sense. For example, when we got infected by COVID last year, my mother was in hospital. Her condition was very serious. We were sitting in the living room and my father clicked on the video and that host was saying “There is no COVID. There is nothing like that, it’s just propaganda to shut down the world. America is fine. Nothing is happening there.  People are living their lives. It is just us [in Pakistan] who are suffering because of it.” My father wasn’t convinced that guy’s claims were false!

EM:  Are you vaccinated?

FS:  Yeah, I’m vaccinated.  My whole family—father, mother, two brothers—is now vaccinated.

EM:  The relatives that came from Pakistan, they were not vaccinated.

FS:  Yeah, they were not vaccinated.  Do you remember that I told you that I skipped two classes because I found out my friend tested positive and I maybe I was having symptoms and I wanted to get tested?  When I told these relatives that I think I am COVID positive too, they were kind of scared. What I did is scare them more. Then they said they should get vaccinated.

EM:  What part of Pakistan does your family come from?

FS:  Punjab.

Finish Your Degree So We Can Get You Married

EM:  Please tell me the story about your friend who was about to turn 21 and her father wanted to send her back to Pakistan to get married, so she’s hurrying up to finish her college.

FS: One day when we were discussing about majors and she said, “I’m an accounting major.” She said she was taking summer and winter classes. She was trying to finish college early. I asked her, “why?” She said that “My parents will get me married soon so I don’t want my degree left unfinished.” I was shocked at that time. I thought “Your husband won’t allow you to study if you get married? That is why you are hurrying up?” She was hesitant. She didn’t really reply. She is going to turn 20 in January 2022. She is hoping to complete her bachelor’s degree by 2023. It isn’t clear that she is facing pressure from her family, that she won’t be able to finish her degree after she gets married.

I do know some people from Pakistan where it is common for girls that if they get married then they aren’t allowed to continue their education. Or if they’re working, they aren’t allowed to continue their job. I tried to talk to her about that later too, but she didn’t respond.

EM:  Are you facing a similar situation or is it different with your family?

FS:  In my situation, there is no pressure that I wouldn’t be able to continue my studies. My father, however, wants me to get married after I graduate and he wants me to marry in 2024 or 2025.

I don’t want to get married so early because for me, my age should be 26 or 27 to get married. I believe I will be more responsible and more ready then to get into marriage. I disagree with my father. He thinks you should get your children married at a certain age, for example, 22 or 23.  He is adamant.  He talks about it every day. “Once you graduate, I want you to get married,” he says.

It’s Not the Same for Boys

EM:  Is it the same for your brothers?

FS:  I don’t think so. My brothers are young.  One is three years younger than me. The other is six years younger than me.  One is going to get into college and the other just entered high school.  I’m about to finish my college.

I don’t think they’re going to have the situation like I am. I realized this a month ago.  My f was in a relationship with a Pakistani girl.  He hid that relationship from all of us, but then we went to Pakistan and he told one of my cousins about it who told everyone my brother was in a relationship with a girl.

My mother got to know about it. I was not shocked because I was expecting this because of the kind of behavior he showed.  But I wasn’t as shocked as my mother was. He had normal behavior, but we really didn’t know how my father was going to react. My father was here [in the U.S.] when we were in Pakistan so when we came back, my mother told him.  He didn’t react well.  He just shoved it off.

EM:  So, it’s different for boys?

FS:  Yeah, it’s different for boys.

The next thing I’m going to tell you is much worse. The girl my brother had this relationship with is also from Pakistan, from Punjab.  Her parents eventually learned about the relationship, here’s how. Let me tell you about her brother. Her brother is a college freshman. He has a lot of girlfriends. You could call him a playboy. Everyone knows about it in his house, even his father, his mother, his sisters. He has one girlfriend that he introduced to his parents, his family. But when that boy catches his sister in the relationship with my brother! What he does he do now? He tells this to his parents.

My brother’s girlfriend faces the wrath of her parents. They come to our house and they threaten my mother, my father. My brother was in school. I was in college. They talk to my father and say “Tell your son never to contact our daughter again.” My father was much calmer because he realized the situation my brother was in because he is also from the same background.  So, he was much calmer and he apologized to the girlfriend’s parents.

Then they came again. They said they wanted my brother’s phone to read all the messages, all the pictures of their daughter. My brother said “I won’t give them my phone.” They threatened to go the police. Realizing the situation, my father said that we needed to give them the phone so they can just check it out and they will give it back to my brother. They checked the phone and deleted all the pictures and then deleted all the messages.

On that day, I realized what parents think and believe for their daughters is different from what they want for their son. My dad was outside our home talking to the girl’s dad and I went to my brother’s room and said “You know what. It doesn’t matter that this happened to you but I can realize what the girl’s going through.” Her parents emotionally blackmailed her to cut all ties with my brother. I realized it must have been a horrible situation for her.

I talked to my brother and said “I’m really angry because I know what she’s going through. If I would have been in that situation, the scenario in our home would have been different.” My mother was now calmer, my father was calmer, but if it had been me caught in a relationship, oh my God.

The Culture Clash

EM:  Are you of the Muslim faith?

FS:  Yes.

EM:  Do you have a sense that other young women like yourself of the Muslim faith in places like Pakistan are in similar situations? That when they come from those countries to the United States where the cultural mores are different, where young men and young women behave differently?

In the west there are women in their mid-twenties and even thirties who are still single but they have careers. Do you feel like you’re running into a cultural clash because you’re coming from a culture that has very different values when it comes to how a young woman should behave and how much education a young woman should get?

FS: I think yes.  I 100% agree with that. There is not only a culture clash in the United States, but also in Pakistan. The area where I come from, people are not that well educated. They are very narrow-minded. That narrow-mindedness is what my parents took with them when they came here. The people who are from a different area in the same country who have a different mindset, they also have a clash with people who are very extremist regarding their beliefs. Not only about religion, but also about how they want the woman to live like. You can say that 45% of the people want to stand up for women and 55% or 60% of people want to control them.

It’s not only when you come from Pakistan or India to here. It’s also other countries. It’s about the mindset, where they have lived and how their mindset is shaped. That belief then comes in the form of decisions and how they behave with other people. There’s a lot going on. Not only here, but there too.

I have friends there and some of them are married. Half of them quit their education and half of them are continuing their education. Some are continuing their education without getting married. Some of them are getting married by their own will to the person they like and they are completing their education. They are not from the same area.  Some of them are from Lahore, Karachi, some from Islamabad.  Some of them are from the part where I came from.  Each one of them have different lives. They face different situations in their lives and face different hardships.

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In Part II of this blog (which will be posted next week), Female Student (FS) tells us how she relates to her parents and  plans to navigate the next chapter of her life after college.

NOTE: The images in this blog are from Creative Common License stock and do not reflect any of the individuals mentioned in the blog.

Eugene Marlow, MBA, Ph.D., © 2022

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Marlowsphere Blog (#121)

Practioners in the creative arts are in trouble.

According to author Scott Timberg in his recently distributed book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press, 2015):

The creative class is melting. . . .

Record shops and independent bookstores close at a steady clip; newspaper and magazines announce repeated waves of layoffs. Tower Records crashed in 2006, costing 3,000 jobs. The bankruptcy of Border Books in 2011—almost 700 stores closed, putting roughly 11,000 people out of work—is the most tangible and recent example. One of the last video rental shops in Los Angeles—Rocket Video—closed soon after. On a grand scale, some 260,000 jobs were lost in traditional publishing and journalism in the three years after 2007, according to U.S. News & World Report. In newspapers alone, the website Paper Cuts tracked more than 40,000 job cuts in the three years after 2008. (p. 15).

Timberg’s latest offering seems to be a counterpoint, a bookend to Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (Revisited) (Basic Books 2014), described as follows on Amazon.com:

Initially published in 2002, The Rise of the Creative Class quickly achieved classic status for its identification of forces then only beginning to reshape our economy, geography, and workplace. Weaving story-telling with original research, Richard Florida identified a fundamental shift linking a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing importance of creativity in people’s work lives and the emergence of a class of people unified by their engagement in creative work. Millions of us were beginning to work and live much as creative types like artists and scientists always had, Florida observed, and this Creative Class was determining how the workplace was organized, what companies would prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities would thrive.

In The Rise of the Creative Class (Revisited), Florida further refines his occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic profile of the Creative Class, incorporates a decade of research, and adds five new chapters covering the global effects of the Creative Class and exploring the factors that shape “quality of place” in our changing cities and suburbs.

Timberg takes fellow author Florida to task in terms of the definition of “creative class” when he writes:

“. . .a more useful understanding of the creative class would include anyone who helps create or disseminate culture. So along with sculptors and architects, I mean deejays, bookstore clerks, theatre set designers, people who edit books in publishing houses and so on.” (p. 10).

The balance of Timberg’s 310-page book is essentially a description of what has happened to the so-called creative class—Architects, Dancers & Choreographers, Graphic Designers, Multimedia Artists & Animators, Music Directors & Composers, Musicians & Singers, Actors, Photographers, Craft & Fine Artists, Film and Video Editors and Camera Operators, Writers & Authors, Editors, and Reporters, Correspondents, and Broadcast News Analysts—especially since the beginning of the “Great Recession.” It is not a pretty picture, especially those in the legacy print and electronic media: Writers & Authors, Editors, and Reporters, Correspondents, and Broadcast News Analysts.

A closing chapter attempts to provide a solution to the problems inculcated by the newer media, namely, the Internet and other social media, but it is akin to attempting to stop the forward  movement of a glacier during an ice age: the results are inexorable.

It would not be fruitful to attempt to argue with Timberg’s analytical descriptions of what has happened to the creative class in terms of societal value and economic consequences. Even cursory, anecdotal evidence supports his perspective. In this blog, therefore, I will look to the future for some answers. In this context, I looked at the employment predictions from the Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, namely its “Occupational Outlook Handbook.”

 

Following are the numbers for 13 categories in the “creative class” for the decade 2012-2022 with respect to job growth and job prospects:

The Overall Picture: 2012-2022 Job Growth/Job Prospects

• Architects: +17%
• Dancers & Choreographers: +13%
• Graphic Designers: +7%
• Multimedia Artists & Animators: +6%
• Music Directors & Composers: +5%
• Musicians & Singers: +5%
• Actors: +4%
• Photographers: +4%
• Craft & Fine Artists: +3%
• Film and Video Editors and Camera Operators: +3%
• Writers & Authors: +3%
• Editors: -2%
• Reporters, Correspondents, and Broadcast News Analysts: -13-14%

To put this in a larger context, the average job growth rate for all occupations in the same period, according to the Occupational Outlook Handbook, is 11%!

Clearly, according to these projections, architects and dancers/choreographers appear to have the best (positive) prospects for job growth over the period 2012-2022. On the other side, editors, reporters, correspondents, and broadcast news analysts have the worst (negative) prospects for job growth in the same period.

What is not so apparent is that these numbers do not reflect the (perhaps) unintended consequences of the new media, specifically the Internet. According to Jaron Lanier’s book Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Shuster 2013) the few success stories distract from what has really happened: The Internet has destroyed the livelihoods of the creative class’s middle tier—musicians, photographers, and journalists—but that it will move on to undercut other middle class jobs.

In many places Lanier’s posits that the new economy “. . . is good for whomever owns the computer server.” This perspective points to the dramatic shift with respect to the creation of content. Take several of the leading Internet web sites: YouTube, e-bay, PayPal, Spotify (and a host of online music distributors), Google, and Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other lesser known web sites, such as cdbaby.com. None of these web sites create content. All these web sites provide a platform for content created by users. Users create the content. Meanwhile, each web site makes money from users use of the web site.

The next blog will take a deeper look at the job prospects for those in the fine and performing arts. A subsequent blog will look at job prospects for those in other “creative” professions, such as architects, on the one hand, and reporters, on the other.

If you have any questions or comments about this or any other of my blogs, please write to me at
meiienterprises@aol.com.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
May 4, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

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The Marlowsphere Blog ( #111) 

There are two kinds of record labels in the world today: the majors (of which there are only three) and the small, independent (or indie) labels, of which there are thousands globally.

These are the three remaining “major” record labels (since 2012):

• Universal Music Group (part of EMI’s recorded music division absorbed into UMG)
• Sony Music Entertainment (EMI Music Publishing absorbed into Sony/ATV Music Publishing)
• Warner Music Group (EMI’s Parlophone and EMI/Virgin Classics labels absorbed into WMG on 1 July 2013) 

The consolidation in the music industry—which is now global in terms of distribution—parallels similar mergers in the oil, accounting, and media industries. For example, Exxon bought Mobil and is now Exxon/Mobil, the largest oil company in the world. There used to be eight big accounting firms, now there are four. There used to be 80 media companies, now there are six with their fingers in all sorts of print, electronic, and live entertainment activities.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. Mergers & Acquisitions have become prevalent in the last several decades in numerous industries as the wave of electronic media has become a communications tsunami of sorts. From a management perspective, the growth of electronic media has provided managers with a greater span of control, thereby enabling consolidation across the board.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In the context of this blog it is the growth of independent music labels despite the apparent domination of the big three music labels.

The growing power of the indie music industry was profiled in a New York Post article earlier this year. In part, the reporter, Claire Atkinson wrote in January 2014:

“The rise of streaming music services, where the major labels’ control is weaker, and the decline of FM radio, where the labels’ control is powerful, has had a clear effect on the power of indie.

In 2007, indies controlled 25.8 percent of the music business, No. 2 behind Universal Music Group’s 28.8 percent share. By June 30, 2013, indie — a universe that includes Taylor Swift, Jason Aldean, Bon Iver and Mumford & Sons — leapfrogged Universal by growing its market share to 34.5 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Universal was at 28.3 percent.”

The growing influence of the so-called “indies” was articulated by Peter Weber, a senior editor at TheWeek.com, who wrote (also in January 2014):

In the first half of [2013] alone, people listened to 50 billion songs on streaming services, like Spotify and Pandora, or on YouTube, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That’s a 24 percent increase over the first half of 2012.

Revenues from streaming services are also increasing: Record labels and musicians got $1.1 billion from ad-supported and subscription streaming in 2012, a 40 percent jump over 2011. That’s still a fraction of the $28.7 billion the global music industry pulled in in 2012, but as Hannah Karp at The Wall Street Journal notes that money will only grow as an explosion of new streaming services hits this year.

The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) helps independent music labels improve business by promoting access and parity through advocacy, education and connection-building with one another and affiliated businesses.

According to their web site: A2IM serves the independent music community that, according to Billboard Magazine, comprises over 34.5% of the music industry’s market share in the United States (and approximately 40% of SoundScan digital album sales).

Here are six reasons, then, why you should support an independent label: 

1. Independent labels look to at least cover their costs, turn a modest profit, and market a product to as wide a niche market as possible. The major labels market in as many ways as       possible to dominate the music industry—they care about making as much money as possible given the investment they make in new and extant artists.

2. Independent labels, given the smaller, niche markets they serve, reach for a higher intellectual and aesthetic level. The major labels reach for the lowest common musical
denominator.

3. Independent labels take chances/risks out of which comes experimentation which, in turn, leads to innovation. Very often, though, innovation occurs by accident. The major
labels want guarantees of success. This attitude breeds musical conservatism.

4. Independent labels support musical self-expression that allows for new ideas and sounds to be shared.

5. Small, independent labels allow artists greater freedom of creative expression.

6. The small labels are where larger movements come from. Smallness has a major role to play in growing fresh musical expression. Many a large industry grew out of someone’s
garage. The airline and home computer industries are two that come to mind almost immediately.

The small labels are where larger movements come from. Smallness has a major role to play in growing fresh musical expression. Many a large industry grew out of someone’s garage. The airline and home computer industries are two that come to mind almost immediately.

Overall, while the big three music labels create the perception that they are the only game town—with their promotion of rap, hip-hop, rock and pop; and if you buy the myopic public coverage of the Grammys—the larger universe is the growing presence of so-called independent labels, helped along by the expanding digital universe.

The irony is that in the last 100 years success in the music business has evolved from live performance (prior to recordings) to recorded performance (78s, 45s, LPs, CDs) back to live performance (Live Nation didn’t become a monster company for nothing). There was a time when Barbra Streisand was just a recording artist, but in recent years she has come of the recording booth to perform live again. Today, a recording for a very few makes money, but it is the live performance where the fans are created, the venue and performers make money, and physical CDs are sold.

Recording has also evolved. Early on an artist recorded one piece, given the technological limitations at the time. The LP enabled the recording of a multi-track album. And in the digital age, musicians, for various reasons, have gravitated to single track releases again.

What goes around, comes around.

If you have any questions or comments about this or any other of my blogs, please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
November 10, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

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