Liberal Identity and Limitations

When I was in high school I had an uppity kind of attitude because I considered myself to be a lone liberal amongst the ignorant Republican mob and my vegetarian, Obama promoting, human rights advocating person walked around with a "sure sense of self" (read: the kid who thought she knew everything). Since then I've come down from (been thrown off) that high horse and I realize that not only do I not know everything, I actually know very little. And of the little that I know, all of that information derives from a source that can't be purely "factual" (in a conceptual sense) because, as this class has taught me, facts don't really exist.
Our reality is based on theories that we take for grated as factual. I don't think this is a bad thing though- if we couldn't just take some things as facts, we would never be able to move forward and would always be stuck in a "what is real" land that's ultimately futile (I think). I really enjoyed our discussion about the question "do you believe in reality" and juxtaposing that with "facts" and "situations" that are IN our reality that simply seem... unreal. It's total chaos, but I think that that is our reality. I absolutely believe in reality but I think our reality is composed of a menagerie of complications:

For example, something that may seem simple: GMOs. The science behind it is somewhat complex, but generally undestandable. However, the result of GMOs is a total clusterf because the "facts" about GMOs are completely unreliable. They come from biased sources that only analyze the parts that they want to. 

The result of situations like this (see: every scientific issue in science studies and otherwise) is that we are never given the totality of a situation. This is a problem that is addressed in many cultural studies courses, I think, but never really solved. I think we ran into that problem in this course as well... that there truly is too much going on to be able to truly analyze what the "truth" of "reality" is. We covered a lot of theories though, and it was a breath of fresh air to be able to apply the theories to situations that actually exist (as I've found a lot of CSCL courses are totally up in the air, conceptual, whatever). When we boiled down the theories and applied them to people I think there was a resounding idea of people as groups... people as forming identities. Robin's article addressed this very well: people are comfortable and safe when they're in groups- not necessarily physically in groups, but when they can mentally or emotionally align themselves with other like-minded human beings, there's a happy result of security.

This brings me back to my first anecdote about who I was in high school. Being that person allowed me to group myself with other like-minded people who I looked up to and who I could look to for guidance in a scary world. My sense of identity provided me with security and, although I may not have realized it, a lens through which to look at the world. This lens is different for everyone and it's this universal lens (that exists for everyone, but for everyone in a different form) is what causes our reality(ies) to be so confusing and sometimes seemingly nonexistent. It's through taking this course that I have been able to really be aware of that, and try to shape it into being as least biased as possible.