How to Live Forever

Analytic post on How to Live Forever

Fortunate blog authors who get sent off to exotic places for interesting writing assignments – it’s difficult not to feel jealous about them. Well, while browsing a collection of blogs, I chanced upon a certain Jason Wilson who wrote about an Italian island by the Mediterranean Sea, where centenarians purportedly formed a large proportion of the population in an isolated region. (I Googled to find out more about him but stopped when I came across his byline for another blog article, this time set in Iceland. Envy got the better of me.)

What drew my attention to his blog article was the mention of “Sardinia” (because it is one out of a long list of places I wish to see before I say good-bye to this earth, hence my envy). A group of Sardinian researchers involved in a study named “the Akea project” claimed that they had found a “longevity hot spot” in an isolated region. The blog writer wrote that his mission, as articulated by the magazine which sent him, was to visit very old Sardinians there and to ask them for practical tips to live long lives.

It was an interesting read as the author described his meetings with elderly Sardinians and the lead researcher and compared the research to a similar studies done by the Japanese on Okinawan centenarians.

Near the beginning of the article, I was under the impression that the writer was trying to instill the reader’s confidence in the Sardinian study by contrasting it with another report that turned out to be a hoax. He wrote:

“I remember, for instance, a widely reported tale of men in the Caucasus Mountains who lived to the ripe of old age of 120 by subsisting solely on a diet of yogurt. After gorging myself on yogurt, it was soon reported that whole story was a hoax. The men’s birth records were wrong. Faulty data. Sorry.

But in Sardinia, the story is different. This time, after rigorous study, all the Sardinian centenarians’ birth records checked out. The demographers on the case confirm that the age data are perfect. No hoaxes, no inaccuracies.”

At this point, I had expected some form of explanation that would convince me, the reader, that the “age data are perfect” as claimed by the author. Granted that this is a blog article and not a journal article, I feel that the guidelines that Smagorinsky (2008) laid down for the establishment of credibility of results should nevertheless still apply e.g. description of the method by which the birth records were verified.

Later on in the article, I was given indications of the author’s distrust of the Akea project through his description of his meeting with Lucia Deiana, the lead researcher on the Akea project. One of the indications was how he ended his description of the meeting:

“Later, two of Deiana’s fellow researchers asked me if he’d demanded money in exchange for arranging meetings with centenarians. For the record, I can say that Deiana did not ask me for money. But I can also say that he didn’t introduce me to any centenarians, either, which he had promised he would do.”

The author devoted a portion of his article to the Okinawan study, which he described to be “one of the most comprehensive and high profile studies on longevity and lifestyle”. If the author had adopted a parallel of the case study research approach, one might say that the Okinawan study acted somewhat like a contrasting case (LeCompte & Preissle, 1993) to the Akea project.

Regardless of whether the author is trying to persuade the reader of the trustworthiness of the Akea project or otherwise, I felt that more information of how the Sardinian study was conducted needs to be provided so that I could draw my own conclusions. Perhaps it was because he was not able to obtain any of such information? In any case, we were not told that was the situation.

By the time I reached the end of the article, the question of what the Sardians did to live long lives was largely unanswered as most of the elderly folk he interviewed replied that they led very “normal” lives. The article left me wondering about the writer’s true purpose behind what he wrote. Was it as simple as interviewing centenarians in Sardinia to find out the secrets behind their longevity? Or was it meant to be a critique of the Akea project? If so, why? I guess this is a reminder to me that it is important to engage in some kind of “self-disclosure” in terms of explaining one’s aim in a study and helping the reader to understand one’s subjectivity in academic papers that I write in future. The same does not necessarily apply in writing for blogs, of course, but I just couldn’t shake off the feeling that the author is holding something back in this article. Ah well, in any case, I’m sure he enjoyed his travel into the remote village nestled in Sardinia.

What other learning points may I draw for my proposed research study on TPCK? I'm reminded of the need for reflexivity in one's writing - asking myself what the reader will feel to be a gap in my study and answering questions that may arise. It is the need to balance between optimism for possibilities in one's area of research and skepticism for its significance. The integration of technology has been studied by so many researchers before me that I feel that I might need to look for ways to make the familiar strange again, just like what McDermott (1996) did for learning disabilities. Do I really need to labour till twilight before the Owl of Minerva wings its flight? I guess so! :-)