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An Army Of One-Me Analysis

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Nowadays, some people have strong opinions on the increasingly problems caused by the Generation Me because of their high self-esteem. Jean Twenge analyzes the self-esteem in her essay “An Army of One: Me”, and she sheds light on the difference between baby boomers and the generation me, making us to rethink why self-esteem is such a severe problem to the generation me, but benefit the boomers. Though it may sounds hard to understand what causes the difference, but by viewing Maggie Nelson’s essay “Great to Watch”, we can get some new ideas. Nelson points out the importance of making “slow thinking”, which means thinking carefully before rush into taking actions. The reason behind slow thinking is that people are too easy to be distracted from …show more content…

One typical example in Davidson’s essay “Project Classroom Makeover” is the iPod experiment, and we can see how creative and brilliant the generation me can be under the stimulus of the “immediate context” in this experiment. Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the “immediate context” in his essay “The Power of Context”. He describes immediate context as people receive small signals from the environment and make response due to the small signals, which helps us to understand the high self-esteem’s behavior. By using the idea of “slow thinking” from Nelson, we can better understand why the generation me have some problems dealing with their high self-esteem, and then with the help of Gladwell’s “immediate context theory”, we can think about the role of small signals in the context that works on the generation me. Finally, Davidson’s iPod experiment inspires us to find a better way to raise self-esteem, and rethink whether high self-esteem is such a severe problem or …show more content…

A misleading immediate context can give false sense to the GenMe, while a positive immediate context can give solutions to problems. When saying “immediate context”, Gladwell claims it as “Specific and relatively small elements in the environment” (162). These small elements, or signals, are serving as tipping points, which shows that changes are always possible if we can simply change the immediate context. That is, we should always notice the both sides of immediate context. For example, when the crime rate was extremely high in the New York, David Gunn realized that graffiti in the subway system is one of the small elements that send disorders to the public. On the one side, “The graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system” (Gladwell 152). On another side, the graffiti also gives a solution to the crime problem that if we clean up the graffiti, signals of disorders will be changes immediately into good orders. Similarly, most of the GenMe misunderstand the meaning of high self-esteem because they received wrong signals from the immediate context. Twenge lists some examples of the educational immediate context by saying that, “In the United States, office stores have started carrying large stocks of purple pens, as some teachers say that red ink is too ‘scary’ for children’s papers” (499). The change of colors is one small signal, and students will respond due to this signal automatically. Instead of feeling

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