ESC: English Studies in Canada

We have another kind of freedom of choice in modern society that is surely unprecedented. We can choose our identities. Each person comes into the world with baggage from his ancestral past—race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, social and economic class. All this baggage tells the world a lot about who we are. Or, at least, it used to. It needn't anymore.

Barry Schwartz
The Paradox of Choice

I'd like to think that this short paper has its roots in the moment when I decided that I wanted to go to graduate school in the fall of 2014. I knew for sure that I wanted a slice of the pie that we call academia. There was no question that I wanted to further my education, but also I admit that there was a certain appeal to the fact that obtaining a postgraduate credential meant that one was smarter than someone who had only completed an undergraduate degree. I also knew for a fact that I would have regretted it if I had not applied at the very least. Besides, the master's program would only take up a couple of years at most, I thought. Nevertheless, by February of the following year, I had received offers of admission with competitive funding packages. Choosing which institution to attend, of course, was no easy task. I can recall all too well the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty [End Page 18] that plagued my every waking moment during the couple of weeks when I had to make a decision regarding whose offer I had to eventually accept.

Fast-forward to January of 2016, when I found myself not only trying to keep up with my school work at the University of Victoria but also staying on top of my swiping game on the popular dating app, Tinder. For those unaware, Tinder is a location-based social discovery service application where users swipe to choose between the photographs of other users: you swipe to the right for a potential match, and you swipe to the left to move on to the next user.

Although Tinder logs an impressive 1.4 billion swipes per day, 26 million matches per day, and more than 10 billion matches to date in 196 countries, the app does more than facilitate dates and hook-ups. Tinder, according to Alicia Eler and Eve Peyser, "is a metaphor for speeding up and mechanizing decision-making, turning us into binary creatures who can bypass underlying questions and emotions and instead go with whatever feels really good at the moment." Faced with a multitude of faces, once you have been swiping for a while you would probably fail to notice when someone you swiped right does not swipe you back. There needs to be a certain amount of emotional dissociation to play the game, Eler and Peyser argue, and "the only criteria [sic] is to choose and choose fast, choose as many as you want, choose so many you're not even making a choice." Arguably, technological advancement in this sense has made it impossible for us to keep up with anything.

Today, the proliferation of choice no doubt plays an important role in the academy itself. In The Paradox of Choice, the social theorist Barry Schwartz observes that today the modern institution of higher education has become a "kind of intellectual shopping mall" (14), the highlight of which is the fact that each student today is not subject to the rigid university curriculum which aimed to educate people in their civic and ethical traditions a hundred years ago.

My colleagues in the Philippines do not have the same degree of freedom as we do in North America when it comes to choosing which classes to take. Upon enrolment, they simply have to declare their major, and then their classes for the entire four years of their program are already selected for them. For them, agonizing over which classes to take is virtually unheard of. In a similar line of thought, arguably my parents had it even easier than anyone I know: this is because their own parents chose their programs for them.

Now...