Stephanie Chen – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Mon, 18 Jun 2018 18:35:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Stephanie Chen – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Chen: The moments that make us https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/18/chen-the-moments-that-make-us/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/18/chen-the-moments-that-make-us/#respond Mon, 18 Jun 2018 18:35:15 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1142431 I by no means lived the Perfect Stanford Experience™, that's for sure... But what I do have is vital.

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I think about things a lot. Maybe it’s in my genes, maybe my parents instilled it in me, maybe some god or other flipped a celestial coin and decided to make me the way I am, but I can’t stop analyzing everything around me. Some subconscious process is always running in my brain, tracing back the reasons things are the way they are, testing possibilities of what they could be, building up and tearing down a million million decision trees to find the one that leads to right here, right now.

The problem with thinking too much about the things that were and the things that could be is that you can spend literal eternities doing it, and meanwhile, the things that are — friends, schoolwork, the delicious In-N-Out burger sitting right in front of you — pass you right by. Life itself passes you by, and by the time you realize, it’s become just another speck of infinite past for you to pick apart in some sad and vicious cycle. It took me far too long to realize this and to tell that part of my brain to just, like, chill every once in a while. I’m a lot happier for it.

Now that these four years have passed, though, it seems appropriate to look back for a moment and ask myself: What do I have here? What did lead to this moment, right here, right now?

I by no means lived the Perfect Stanford Experience™, that’s for sure. The graduate of the Perfect Stanford Experience™ walks out of this place with a long list of honors and student groups, a GPA to make a Bay Area mother cry and a set of indelible memories of Stanford Life with the perfect balance of serious and fun. She walks out with a group of beautiful and equally accomplished best friends that scatter across the country in exactly the optimal distribution for semiannual best-friend get-togethers, and in their graduation photos, the sun lights up their hair with the radiant glow of blissful success.

I have nothing that leads to anything like this. But what I do have is vital.

There are the high points and the low points — the acceptances and rejections, the celebrations and losses. There are the nights that felt like riding a wave that never seemed to crest, going up and up and up until I thought I might crash through the sky, and the nights that felt like endless spirals of frustration, down and further down into pits I knew I dug for myself. But the funny things about extremes is that they’re not representative of the overall experience. I barely register the highs now, having lived all the ordinary days that came after, and I look back on the lows and know that they’re past me, that in the end I’ve come out pretty alright.

So what I’ve come to treasure is all the moments in between. Late nights spent fixing commas at The Daily. Even later nights spent tracing through endless race conditions and segmentation faults. The distinct smell of Wilbur omelettes. R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix).” Plastic bagging a wet bike seat on a rainy day. Golf carting through Nomad. Falling off the Meyer Library fence and bruising my back for two months. The strange wave of community I felt at rush for an organization that I never really fit. The death of self in alcohol, sweat and an endless beat. Writing papers in French. Dissecting an entire human body. The wind through my hair biking down the Row on a gorgeous spring day.

And Stanford, the place, runs through all of this. This campus, its palette of sandstone on blue sky, is inseparable from these four years of my life. Sometimes I still can’t believe that all of this happened in this perfectly color-balanced painting of a place.

I didn’t have the Perfect Stanford Experience™, and if I wanted, I could probably figure out the reasons why. But these moments that I do have are what define my time here, and even if I could change them, I don’t think I really want to. If there’s anything these four years have taught me, it’s that drive and contentment can exist hand in hand.

Thanks, Stanford. To be entirely honest, I’ll be back next year — but it won’t be the same.

 

Contact Stephanie Chen at stephchen ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Late-night blues https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/09/24-hour-inequality/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/09/24-hour-inequality/#respond Wed, 09 May 2018 12:00:24 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1140718 I’m a night person. Most days of the week, you can catch me up until 3 or 4 a.m. — usually doing work, sometimes hanging out, occasionally going on a cool and refreshing post-midnight run. Late nights are peaceful; there’s a lovely stillness that sinks in once all your friends have gone to bed, and […]

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I’m a night person. Most days of the week, you can catch me up until 3 or 4 a.m. — usually doing work, sometimes hanging out, occasionally going on a cool and refreshing post-midnight run. Late nights are peaceful; there’s a lovely stillness that sinks in once all your friends have gone to bed, and it’s during these odd forgotten hours that I find myself most focused, most creative and best able to get work done.

Finding somewhere on this campus to get said work done, however, has been a perpetual issue. The discussion over late-night spaces on college campuses is nothing new, but Stanford feels exceptionally poorly designed for anyone up past 1 a.m., whether they be habitual night owls or just those caught unawares by a harder-than-expected problem set.

Most libraries on campus close at 10 p.m. or earlier Monday through Friday, with Law and Lathrop open until midnight and Green open until 1 a.m. Arrillaga Dining, Lag Dining and TAP are open until 2:30 a.m., if you like writing papers to the smell of grease and faint, stale memories of Saturday nights past. When it comes to round-the-clock access, the only advertised space is the creatively named 24-hour Study Room, located in Lathrop — as if its designers had asked themselves, “Where on campus would be nice and easily accessible to students looking for a late-night study spot?” and then picked the farthest possible location from that.

There are a few lesser-known locations. Old Union has a room where you can work all night as long as you enter the building before it closes; likewise, if you get to Huang basement before doors lock around midnight or 1-ish, you can set up shop there as well. Some departments give after-hours building access to declared majors, and the Daily building is open to staffers all night long. But in terms of general-purpose, easily accessible late-night work space, there’s really not a lot on this campus.

This issue is magnified by the lack of work spaces in Stanford’s residential areas. I’m lucky to live in a Row house this year with an extended study area in addition to a dining room, but most students live in dorm-style housing, and I have less-than-fond memories of deciding between working in the dark next to a sleeping roommate or working outside on the lounge floor. Computer clusters rarely seat more than a few people, filling up rapidly during peak midterm season — the one in CroMem had three or four desks serving nearly 200 residents — and lounges are furnished with couches and coffee tables, which is nice until you need to write things down on paper. Unless you live in FloMo, dining hall access is inconsistent at best.

I don’t think dorms should be turned into offices — it’s nice to go home and just hang out — but if living spaces are to be for living, then it’d sure be nice to have some space for working. At Harvard, UC Berkeley and USC, at least one of the two or three primary libraries is open 24 hours. MIT has three large 24-hour study spaces in addition to an all-hours student center. Yale, like Stanford, only advertises a single smallish 24-hour study room, but Yale undergraduates live in residential colleges, each of which comes with a library and extensive common areas. If our peer institutions can handle the logistics of securing, staffing and maintaining these spaces for students, then Stanford should be able to too.

A common response goes something like, “Uh… why don’t you just, like, sleep earlier?” Another common counterargument says that providing 24-hour access promotes unhealthy habits and incentivizes students to pull all-nighters. But when student groups often hold meetings and practices past 10 p.m. and sometimes past midnight, and when core major classes can run over 30 hours a week of work, a pattern of working nights feels a little unavoidable, or at least symptomatic of a deeper college culture. Expanded late-night access to study spaces doesn’t cause all-nighters; it alleviates them, benefiting natural night owls like myself along the way.

Stanford should match its peer institutions and open up Tresidder or Huang, or add card readers to Old Union, or expand the hours in Green (or even just the Bing Wing) — there are lots of ways to make this campus more friendly to students after 1 a.m. Not everyone operates on a shifted schedule or regularly stays up late, but when that unexpectedly long p-set or paper inevitably hits, access to a quality working space goes a long way.

 

Contact Stephanie Chen at stephchen ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Rest in peace, social networks — social media is here https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/22/rest-in-peace-social-networks-social-media-is-here/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/22/rest-in-peace-social-networks-social-media-is-here/#respond Thu, 22 Mar 2018 07:30:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1138285 Stephanie Chen discusses the transformation from social networks to social media, where the brand we present to the world is of prime importance.

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As we enter the final stretch of the quarter (thank god), I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking beyond finals to what comes after: that American institution, spring break. A time for relaxation at home, or tanning on the beach or drunken bacchanals on yachts in Cabo — and, whatever the speed, a flood of Snapchat stories and Instagram posts detailing all the fun we’re having.

Some of us will spend hours picking out the perfect shot, editing it until it matches our #aesthetic. Some, because we’re “brand ambassadors” for some Fun Clothing Label, will pose in cute swimsuits by that label in pictures that aren’t ads per se, just #sponsored. Some will do neither — we’ll just scroll through our feeds, probably judging everyone else for their vacation destinations or outfit choices.

All this is part of a shift in recent years from what used to be “social networks” (remember that movie?) to “social media.” Aren’t those the same thing, you ask? Well, yeah, effectively, but there is a kind of distinction in mindset and purpose, if not the actual services involved.

Social networks are connecting with old friends you haven’t seen in a while, making plans to hit up cool events, discovering cool people with common interests and hanging out — all the same things you’d do without a computer but easier and faster. Social media is your “aesthetic,” your #sponsored posts, your “quality content” — a thousand words replaced by a single photo, released to the masses to be (mostly) passively consumed. It’s the Color Factory, the millennial pink cafes, the rainbow bagels that look cool on Instagram but taste like cardboard.

Networks are about connections with other people. Media is your content and your brand — it’s all about you.

Having an online brand or aesthetic isn’t in itself a bad thing — in many ways, our online aesthetics are extensions of the visual aesthetics we already build up in our everyday style choices. We’re fundamentally visual creatures, and the ease of transmitting visuals on the internet has accelerated some really cool developments in fashion and other kinds of art. It’s unsurprising that out of five social media services analyzed in a 2017 report, the two most visually-oriented — YouTube and Instagram — ranked highest for positive impacts on “self-expression” and “self-identity.”

Just because we’re wired to love visual content, though, doesn’t mean we should be bombarded with just visuals all the time. We also crave fat and sugar, but nobody’s saying we should eat McDonald’s all day. In the same report, Instagram and Snapchat — another mostly visual platform — ranked least positively for “community building” and most negatively for “FOMO.”

But these problems — the links to depression, the addictive gamification — are all well documented. The real issue is that nobody knows how to fix it. Focusing on content, not interactions, is the only proven way to generate revenue, and visual content is the most effective. Instagram (by which I mean Facebook) has figured this out, as have all the brands paying us (and “Bachelor” runner-ups) to shill swimsuits, shimmer highlighter and subscription snack boxes. And yeah, making money off a product you already enjoy is kind of cool, but the idea of a city of human billboards has always been a dystopian one for a reason.

The problem of monetization is one that the internet has struggled with for a while now. Newspapers and new-media sites know it well, and they’ve discovered that paywalls are the only way to support an online service without overloading it with ads, especially since Facebook and Google eat up all the ad revenue on their platforms. Internet advertising is a broken model, and everyone knows it.

The big tech companies understand this, too. Facebook announced recently the not-at-all-shocking discovery that passive social content consumption is awful for your mental health while active interactions with friends are good. Notwithstanding the underlying message that the solution is to use Facebook even more, it’s telling that two of Facebook’s only remaining useful functions — Groups and Messenger — are the two where the content is generated by people, where the draw is interactions with people, where there are no ads (but not for long!).

Likewise, Snapchat recently tried to separate friends’ content from paid media content in its UI — which was the right move, just executed with the ugliest, most unfortunate design choices of all time. (PSA @evanspiegel: You can’t jam that many features into a single app without some kind of easy-to-use menu bar-ish thing. Also, you’re not a “camera company,” but I digress.)

Maybe I’m just refusing to catch up to reality. I miss the stream of stupid Facebook posts from early high school (“hey i’m behind you in class,” “hello poop”), but that kind of public-private conversation is untenable now at the scale of most people’s friend networks. But I think it’s significant that today we have finstagrams and private groups and that the way we communicate is still primarily through old-school texting and basic messaging apps.

One day, someone might come up with a way to do it — a free social network that’s fun to use and encourages real connections with friends. I think Snapchat was close for a bit. The brilliant thing about disappearing photos had nothing to do with nudes; it was the fact that you could share stupid shit and silly moments in your daily life with your friends and laugh about it without worrying about your “brand” or “profile.” But unfortunately, that alone doesn’t make money.

I guess nobody’s figured out how to monetize human connection. But what’s new, right? In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to the spring break pics. May we all find ourselves cute outfits and good lighting.

 

Contact Stephanie Chen at stephchen ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Ideas worth engaging: A reflection on last week’s Cardinal Conversations event https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/28/ideas-worth-engaging-a-reflection-on-last-weeks-cardinal-conversations-event/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/28/ideas-worth-engaging-a-reflection-on-last-weeks-cardinal-conversations-event/#respond Wed, 28 Feb 2018 12:00:07 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1137458 Stephanie Chen considers the Charles Murray Cardinal Conversations event, and considers the event and conflict surrounding it in the frame of considering alternative ideas.

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Last week, as we all know, social scientist Charles Murray was on campus to discuss “populism and inequality” with Stanford professor Francis Fukuyama, as part of the new Cardinal Conversations initiative. Murray’s invitation was deeply controversial, sparking debate in student publications and a protest outside the event itself.

I am on the student steering committee for Cardinal Conversations and am therefore responsible in part for inviting Murray to campus. I don’t align with most of his views, and like many others, find offensive and unproductive his belief in immutable genetic differences between ethnicities. I don’t think it was necessary to invite him, specifically, to speak on populism and inequality; if I had been more familiar with conservative political scientists as a category (or political scientists at all) when we drew up lists of potential speakers, I would have pushed harder for an alternative.

I disagree with the reasons presented by some of my fellow committee members for inviting him. Those on the Review’s editorial board, for example, have decided to take Murray at face value, unnecessarily disparage protesters and, generally unproductively, provoke for provocation’s sake. But some really interesting conversations have come out of our differences, and some disagreements are not worth letting get in the way of common goals.

I would not have invited Charles Murray, but I stand by the invitation that was extended and the event that was held. Here are, as best as I can articulate them, my reasons for doing so.

First off, to get the free speech question out of the way: If students on the committee — though the committee is not perfect — want to hear a speaker and the speaker isn’t someone who actively incites violence or spreads hate speech, then, as the President and Provost have written, they should get to hear that speaker and those students who disagree should get to speak out in opposition. Setting wide latitude in this way is the right thing to do. As the administrators of a well-known educational institution, what the President and Provost do has far-reaching consequences, and overlimiting is far more damaging than underlimiting.

But this isn’t an issue of free speech, really — it’s a question of engaging with ideas, of what kinds of ideas we present and exchange and of the ways in which we do that. So let’s talk about that.

I care deeply about the critical thinking process: the way we take in and analyze information to shape our beliefs and search for answers. It’s important to me to be able to hear an idea presented in a convincing way and understand how to support it if I agree, refute it if I disagree or shift my viewpoint because I’ve learned something new. I think it’s valuable to be able to question my basic assumptions about the world. If I’m not willing to think about my core beliefs and discuss them with people that disagree, then how can I expect others — like those in my family who oppose trans rights, or the guys at work that don’t believe sexism exists in tech — to do the same?

I learned a lot last week. I read through most of “The Bell Curve” and picked out some flaws — the dependence on IQ score as an intelligence indicator, the lack of consideration for variance in culture, education quality and resources — and then read some critiques to learn more. I argued with a friend about the merit of having Murray on campus and had to figure out why I felt how I did. I had a fun discussion with another friend about whether Malcolm Gladwell or “Freakonomics” author Steven Levitt (just as abusive of statistics, less probably racist) would have inspired the same intellectual opposition. I thought about how similar misuse or misunderstanding of data might affect us through tech, as we give more and more weight to AI-driven decisions. And I went to the event itself and got to hear some interesting and less controversial ideas in the exchanges with Fukuyama; I don’t usually get a lot of discussion about politics and inequality in 2x-speed CS lectures. For me, this was an interesting and challenging exercise in my personal beliefs, which is something I came to Stanford to take part in.

The core idea behind this — that everyone comes from their own place and is searching their own way, that we should engage with each other to help that process along — is so often replaced by a sense of righteousness on both the right and the left. On the left, especially, there’s this sense that we don’t have to listen to those we disagree with, especially those bigots on the fringe, because the arc of history is on our side. But the kind of subtle, insidious racism underlying Charles Murray’s most controversial ideas is not a fringe phenomenon, in the U.S. or the world, and pretending otherwise doesn’t accomplish anything. You can’t just get tired, ignore the people who believe those things and expect things to turn out the way you want. It’s not fair, but fairness isn’t really the issue. The arc of history doesn’t move your way unless you go in, engage and bend it.

The critique of the event I find entirely valid has to do with the way Murray’s ideas were presented — the “platform” he was given. It bothers me that what I gained from the event came at the expense of some nonzero sum paid to fund the spread of ideas I don’t support and of pain and anger from other students who don’t deserve to feel delegitimized.

But I don’t know how to fix this. I would love to have had this discussion in, say, a class environment, based on readings and not speaker fees, but the whole point of events like these is to provide exposure to debate to, among others, students who don’t have the time to take the relevant classes. If anyone has suggestions — especially those that can be implemented in the existing program, like improvements to moderation or student input — I and the rest of the committee would love to hear them.

In an ideal world, the principle of the free exchange of ideas would never come into conflict with the principle of the dignity of our classmates, because we wouldn’t need to even entertain the idea of racial superiority. But the reality is that ideas like Murray’s are enormously impactful and present in this country and our world today. The way to fix that isn’t to ignore them; it’s to confront them head-on.

 

Contact Stephanie Chen at stephchen ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Repeatable but not for credit https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/14/repeatable-but-not-for-credit/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/14/repeatable-but-not-for-credit/#respond Wed, 14 Feb 2018 13:00:40 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1136732 I’ve always been a little obsessed with memory, with records, with the tangible remembrance of things long past. Four years ago, when Stanford asked me what mattered to me and why, I answered records: “They’re moments lifted out of life and preserved in ink and pixels — reality made transferable for comparison.” One reason why, […]

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I’ve always been a little obsessed with memory, with records, with the tangible remembrance of things long past. Four years ago, when Stanford asked me what mattered to me and why, I answered records: “They’re moments lifted out of life and preserved in ink and pixels — reality made transferable for comparison.”

One reason why, despite three years at this newspaper, I’ve published fewer words than many fall-quarter freshman writers have: I’m afraid that these thoughts on my current reality, when held up for comparison, will look silly in hindsight, having failed the test of time.

But then I realize that few people here really notice the record at all. The crazy thing about a university is the way we bring in thousands of students from around the world who know nothing about each other, and then recycle that population in its entirety every four years. We come in, we figure some things out, and we leave — just in time for the next class of wide-eyed freshmen to start it all over again. It’s a lovely machine for churning out the world’s next leaders, or whatever, but on the inside, to the professors and the palm trees, it’s “same shit, different day” taken to a whole new level.

Take the alcohol policy as an example. Here are some things we’ve said in defense of our god-given right to get hammered:

In 1990, after proposals to ban alcohol purchases with dorm funds: “[The policy change would result in excessive drinking] behind closed doors, and that can only increase the problem tremendously.”

In 2003, after Stanford banned alcohol in freshman dorm common spaces: “I think this new policy will make a kind of introverted drinking culture that could potentially be more dangerous, because it’s behind closed doors and you can’t see what’s going on.”

In 2012, after Stanford banned hard alcohol during summer session: “I think [the policy] is really detrimental to the staff-resident relationship.”

In 2016, after the newest ban on hard alcohol: “Alcohol consumption behind closed doors … takes away from the resident-staff trust that defines dorm communities.”

I co-wrote that last one — like most of us on campus, and as a senior who still hasn’t reached that mythical age of 21, I quite like the freedom we have to crack open a cold one, as they say, without fear of the law. But it is kind of silly, how we get worked up in the exact same way every few years and how nothing really changes — we probably still love our RAs, and we’re definitely still drinking. Alumni tell us that this place is nowhere near as fun, compared to its glory days in the ’80s and ’90s, but it’s not like anyone here remembers.

We find ourselves in these same arguments over and over again. Engineering students have been complaining about humanities grade inflation since at least 1983. We’ve been debating free and quality speech in the context of “political correctness” since that term swept the nation in the ’90s. And Full Moon on the Quad has been endangered (or at least vulnerable) for a decade and a half.

Revisiting hot topics isn’t a bad thing in itself. Situations and people change over time, and it’s always worth rethinking the things we’re used to, from new perspectives and with new nuance. (It’s also an easy way to boost the ego — catch me making fun, “original” arguments on said same shit every other week for the rest of this year!) The problem is that we don’t acknowledge that we’re revisiting at all.

In a sense, it feels like we’re trapped in a bubble of frozen time, the endless sunny days marked only by the same annual events. But you only have to look at the unending controversy of Row and Greek housing — your house probably used to be someone else’s — to realize that it’s not Stanford that doesn’t change, it’s us. We don’t pay attention to the record, and so all the lessons we each learn individually are lost in four years, and so nothing to us ever changes, like we’re retaking the same dumb class a hundred times.

Being an administrator, looking down at all of this, must be pretty exhausting.

I’m not really an activist, but if you want to get anything done at this school, consider going a little back in time. See what’s already been tried and done (how many failed student events and University initiatives are cloned each year just because nobody remembers they failed?), and then whatever you end up doing, write it down as well — maybe someone down the line will find it and learn from that.

Or nobody reads it — there’s some irony in putting this down as a Daily column, like yelling into the student-journalism abyss — but to be honest, that’s kind of comforting too. Does it matter if my thoughts don’t stand up to future judgment if nobody (except future employers — hello!) dives into these archives to judge them?

Either way, it does feel good to put it out there; adding to the record is its own kind of fun.

 

Contact Stephanie Chen at stephchen ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Why The Daily matters: Institutional legacies https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/09/why-the-daily-matters-institutional-legacies/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/09/why-the-daily-matters-institutional-legacies/#respond Sat, 10 Dec 2016 01:33:53 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1120889 I never intended to actually write for The Daily; frankly, I never intended to get involved with this paper at all. Coming into Stanford, I was initially drawn to its wide range of academic journals and bloggy lifestyle magazines — all of which I then forgot to apply to, swept up as I was in […]

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I never intended to actually write for The Daily; frankly, I never intended to get involved with this paper at all. Coming into Stanford, I was initially drawn to its wide range of academic journals and bloggy lifestyle magazines — all of which I then forgot to apply to, swept up as I was in the magnificent tragicomedy that is freshman fall (see: MATH 51, all-campuses, Wilbur Dining).

So I ended up joining The Daily anyway, as a copy editor. Though I rarely even read the paper, it did hold for me an undeniable appeal as the only campus publication dedicated to the news — reporting life as it happens, without focal constraint or editorial interference.

It doesn’t matter if you think The Daily is actually good at that or not. It has its flaws, and there are ways to improve. But I’ve grown to appreciate it as an institution, one supported by and indebted to a centuries-long legacy of print journalism.

Institutions have gotten a bad rap lately. From the government to the church to the mediaespecially the media — our confidence in authority is at an all-time low, no matter where we sit ideologically. According to some, in a fascinating and terrifying development, we have apparently stopped believing in truth itself.

So let me explain why I’m still a believer.

I really do think that institutions still matter, especially in journalism. It’s undeniable that media institutions have undergone massive failures in responsibility — but so have their readers and viewers. Trust is a two-way street, and the burden on publications to produce accurate and relevant content is matched by the burden on audiences to critically evaluate that content and hold those institutions accountable to it. This implicit contract has fallen apart on both sides, for too many reasons — financial, cultural, technological — to possibly enumerate in one column.

But the way to fix it is not to shred it (or overturn it, or disrupt it, or whatever it is we’re doing now). That contract exists between teachers and students, scientists and the public, any two people communicating, and it’s underpinned by the inevitability that one day, no matter how “post-truth” we purport to be, we’ll have to contend with facts. You can’t disrupt reality.

The framework to repair this contract already exists. It’s based on principles already present in the fabric of every newsroom — that of The Daily included — and, I believe, more in traditional papers than in anywhere else.

These are principles like accountability: There’s something about the finality of printing a paper that makes you think twice about what you’ve written. Even as journalism moves online, where errors can be fixed in seconds, most traditional news institutions make an effort to publish formal corrections and post publicly available codes of ethics. Most new-media sites don’t.

These are principles like specificity: More than ever now, it’s crucial to be explicit rather than implicit — to reconsider our assumptions about what people know or think, to restate what we ourselves know and to persuade rather than exclude.

These are principles like engagement: The best way to report content that is real and necessary to a community is to go into that community and talk to, not at, its members — something not quite accomplished by aggregators and commentary sites. Effective engagement depends fundamentally on diversity of background, experience and thought in a paper’s staff and leadership, and there’s much to be done in that respect at The Daily. Nevertheless, almost every editor here has at some point been a reporter, exposed to communities and viewpoints across campus, and that kind of staff-wide cultural impact can’t be underestimated.

And these are the reasons why, at the end of the day, I so often find myself back at The Daily. It’s an imperfect paper, one run by college students juggling other priorities with production nights, one that has a lot of room to grow, but it’s a reflection in miniature of practices in journalism at large. It’s an institution at a time when we don’t trust them, and it’s a flawed institution at a time when we need them to be better, but I believe, now more than ever, that it’s something we can’t ignore. I’m glad I didn’t.

 

Stephanie Chen is the current managing copy editor. She’s a junior from Cupertino and, like all the rest of you, is majoring in computer science. Contact Stephanie at stephchen ‘at’ stanford.edu.

This piece is part of the Vol. 250 Editorial Board’s “Why The Daily matters” series. Read the rest of the editorials here.

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On division and dialogue: A response to the Editorial Board https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/09/on-division-and-dialogue-a-response-to-the-editorial-board/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/09/on-division-and-dialogue-a-response-to-the-editorial-board/#respond Wed, 09 Nov 2016 10:31:11 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1119566 Let me say first that I stand fully with the rest of the Editorial Board in condemnation of Donald Trump. I believe that he is unfit — temperamentally, practically, morally — to lead this nation. His lack of awareness of or interest in policy worries me; his blatant disregard for our democratic institutions and the concept […]

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Let me say first that I stand fully with the rest of the Editorial Board in condemnation of Donald Trump.

I believe that he is unfit — temperamentally, practically, morally — to lead this nation. His lack of awareness of or interest in policy worries me; his blatant disregard for our democratic institutions and the concept of truth itself shocks me; his rhetoric — towards women, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, ethnic minorities and many more — appalls me. His words have incited violence and mainstreamed hatred; his campaign has encouraged and exploited divisiveness beyond any in recent memory.

And yet we, the people, elected him. Donald Trump was elected yesterday by us — not by bigots, not by racists, but by nearly 60 million Americans who connected to some promise in his candidacy that many of us at Stanford did not recognize.

I find myself dissatisfied with the Editorial Board’s tone in today’s piece and with its choice to reassure instead of question. To reassure is to comfort, to soften grief with reaffirmation, a warm sense of unity in a cold, unfamiliar place — in an America that “may not feel like home today,” as the Board put it.

It’s troubling to me how easily we at Stanford might resonate with this picture. It’s a view that takes for granted an “us” and a “them.” We hug ourselves and we hug our friends and we forget that this cold, unfamiliar place is the country that 60 million Americans finally feel is home.

Whether you are terrified, frustrated or exhilarated by the result of this election, we should all be profoundly disturbed by the depth of the divisions that it has exposed in this nation. We are the ones who generate today’s political climate, and we bear responsibility for it. Every time we share Republican jokes from “The Daily Show,” every time we declare things like “if you vote for Trump, tell me so I can never talk to you again,” we contribute to the growing American divide — one that has split not just our politics but our media diets, our core values and our individual understandings of what is, in the end, a shared world.

I’m not asking you to understand the other side. I’m asking you to try working past even the idea of an “other side” — to try talking to instead of making assumptions about the real, multidimensional people around you, some of whom may have supported Donald Trump. The word “empathize” comes to mind.

Maybe I’m being an idealist. I write with the privilege of being less immediately targeted by Donald Trump’s rhetoric; maybe I’m failing to fully comprehend the fear that some of us feel. But I ask that if you disagree with me, you tell me. Help me inform myself. And if you, like me, would like to minimize the impending damage I’m afraid Trump’s presidency will cause, I ask that you take action — not to protest blindly or reassert what you’ve heard a thousand times, but to ask questions and listen to answers, to persuade, to vote, to build coalitions, to demonstrate with informed purpose, to engage in politics at its core: with people.

 

Contact Stephanie Chen at stephchen ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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