Conformity in Today's Age, by Jed

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, "Self-Reliance," tells people to listen to their own intuitions regardless of how society perceives those actions or words, good or bad. Emerson, early in his essay, illustrates this point when he says, " Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it" (1165). Emerson believed people do away with their own thoughts and intuitions to conform to the beliefs of societies, for it is far easier to do so. In America today, individuals have the opportunity to isolate themselves from society with relative ease with the invention of the personal automobile, but most cling to television, internet, and cell phones for a constant barrage of information on how society looks, acts, and thinks. Though America is far more diverse and reaches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, individuals are more than ever influenced by society's rules by way of instantaneous mass media an communication.

The oldest form of visual electronic media, the television, has become a member of the household in America; it has taught people what behaviors are appropriate and which are not for the last sixty plus years, and many emulate what they see believing it is the proper way to fit into society. Twenty-four hours a day three hundred and sixty-five days a year it has shoveled information of proper society into children, old people, and everybody in between. In "Self-Reliance," Emerson writes, "Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religions we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us" (1175). Americans can see the influence television has had over the years by the fads of fashion, the diction of language, and their ambitious, if not delusional, ideas of success and progression. The television, in the year 2009, is only a small percentage of the visual electrical media people see and use everyday, for it has been overtaken by something more powerful.

The internet, regardless of where it is accessed, whether it be by computer or cell phone, is the instant tool to help conform people with access to not just their society, but to the world's. In today's world there is no place to hide deeds; individuals can be recorded by any person with camera, cell phone, or computer and uploaded to the internet for the whole world to see and be shunned by. Emerson writes about people in the community, for example, when he says, "The bystanders look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor"(1167). Emerson knows no scale that people are accustomed to now that everything in the world is only as big as a computer screen and Blackberry. This phenomenon has ushered in a new age where distance is irrelevant to being forsaken by society. A man in Iceland with internet can cast down his judgement upon an individual regardless if he is in Baja, California. Thus, the internet has become the most powerful issuance to conformity than any predecessor.

Easy and immediate access to the world community and society will continue to conform people with the mere pressing of a button and eyes on the screen of a television, computer, and cell phone. Distance has continually become more irrelevant to conformity. Ethnicity and sexual orientation are immaterial; the media and communication of today have conformed them to that particular society and perception of others of those individuals. Emerson, I believe, would be disappointed to see that nothing of what he wrote has had any effect on society, and in fact, it is worse today I imagine then in his time.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self-Reliance." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 7th ed. Vol. B. New York: Norton, 2007. 1163-1180