We need to start much further upstream and concern ourselves with fundamental stories about “us” and “them,” for instance, with the figure of a certain rainbow-colored elephant named, in most cases, Elmer —who is a symbol of accepting difference, and the possibility of identifying with, indeed even becoming (for a day) the other. Well, he’s Elmer in English, the language in which the author David McKee first composed him, and allowing for a slight vowel change, he’s the same in various other languages. He’s Elmar in German, for instance. In Hebrew, however, he is “Bentzi,” short for “Ben Zion,” or son of Zion, and in a quite literal way, the most Zionist name one could possibly give or be given. Not only was the rainbow colored elephant’s name hebraized, it was changed to make him a Hebrew figure, i.e.an exclusively Hebrew, exclusively Israeli, figure. To be “Bentzi,” doesn’t only mean not to be Elmer. It also means to be the kind of being that can only be “in the land of Zion.”

It is noteworthy, indeed, worrisome, disappointing, imprudent and counterproductive that powerful voices within Israeli political culture, including Israel’s Parliament, want to change the narrative. These voices want to undercut Arab claims on East Jerusalem (mind you, not Palestinian, as they deny that there is such a thing as Palestinian). Repugnant as this is, I think the change from Elmer to Bentzi is even more significant.

Why? It seems to me that whatever magical powers naming might have, such powers are especially forceful for the youngest among us. When the unquestioned authority of a parent (or, perhaps a bit less so, of a caregiver or other “competent adult”) says, “This is Bentzi,” the Bentzi-being of this particular patchwork elephant is established as an absolute truth. The appropriateness of this categorical naming is my concern. Most of us, after we pass the unbridgeable chasm into the land where there’s no tooth fairy (I understand this happens roughly between the ages of 5 and 8), no longer hold such a truth to be true. I fear the new Hebrew name for the elephant is as foundational as a fairytale.

The narrowing of the world, then, and the self-enclosure of the social group that consists of  those who know ‘Bentzi-the-patchwork-elephant,’ in opposition to all those “others” who call him by a different name—just one different name, crucially—go quite far in ensuring that the next generation(s) of Jewish Israelis adopt the “changed narrative” of East Jerusalem, and “Eretz Israel” writ large. Bentzi takes them much further, I would say by a wide margin, than how the news agencies and the municipal authorities “officially” refer to neighborhoods located there. Call these districts by Jewish names or by Arabic names, as you wish, so long as we, the Hebrew-speakers all know Elmer as Bentzi, as “the son of Zion” and thus “ours alone.” There’s precious little space to conceive of “ourselves” as an enlarged “we,” the truth of Elmer, the “we” which is able to live in a state alongside another “we,” together sharing the territory that rests between the river and the sea.

It’s true that hebraizing the names of East Jerusalem neighborhoods will make a two-state reality harder to envisage or enact. But if we focus on these kinds of controversies, we let the deeper problem continue to get worse. The real battle of ideas isn’t over the “downstream” political exclusions like these. It’s over the much deeper cultural exclusions that transpire every moment, in every home and every kindergarten, far “upstream” and much harder to set right.

‘Skin in the game’ is a widely used and imperfect aphorism of uncertain origins. The political meanings of the phrase have been used by all sides in political debates, and each side seeks to appropriate its meaning to connect with people on an informal level. The political application is relatively new compared to its application in business, finance, betting and war. ‘Skin in the game’ has become part of the rhetoric in debates on taxes, deficits and entitlements, and its use is likely to increase as the debates heat up.

‘Game’ is a metaphor for actions of all types, and ‘skin’ is a metaphor for being committed to something through emotional, financial, or bodily commitment. Skin is also a synecdoche representing the whole being. Taken together the phrase implies taking risk and being invested in achieving an outcome. The late columnist William Safire sought the origin of the phrase and didn’t resolve the issue, but he did dispel one widely held explanation. It was not the billionaire investor Warren Buffett who coined the phrase. Buffett likes executives in companies in which he invests to also have their funds, or their skin, invested in the firm. Safire learned from a money and investment specialist that the expression is much used to “convey financial risk in any kind of venture, but you could stretch it to mean some kind of emotional investment. Can you have skin in the game of your marriage? Well, you ought to.”

Ever since humans first walked the earth, our skins have been in the game as hunters, gatherers and cultivators. Over time, animal skins were used for trade and as currencies. For instance, buckskins were monetized, giving us our current buck and the use of the word skin as slang for money. The aphorism has been widely used in informal everyday language and increasingly has become popular in political speech. Safire observed in his New York Times column that ‘skin in the game’ has penetrated the U. S. Senate Chamber. He quoted Senator Tom Coburn in his advocacy for healthcare spending accounts as saying, “H.S.A.’s give consumers some ‘skin in the game’ by putting them in charge of health-care dollars.” When interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, President Elect Barack Obama explained that a long-term fix for the economy would demand sacrifices from all Americans, “Everybody’s going to have to give. Everybody’s going to have some skin in the game.” And the Republican Representative David Camp is on the books as saying, “I believe you’ve got to have some responsibility for the government you have. People have co-payments under Medicare, and everyone should have some ‘skin in the game’ under the income tax system.”

Democrats tend to say that the wealthy aren’t paying enough taxes, and Republicans frequently lament that around 45 percent of all households pay no federal income taxes. Similar arguments are applied to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and public pension and retirement programs. Democrats seek to preserve these programs without making major changes to them, and Republicans insist that to preserve these programs, substantial changes are needed, and more skin needs to be put into the game. These opposing views will dominate public policy discussions through the 2012 elections and beyond. Ultimately, public policy will resolve whose skin should be in the game, and how much of it should be committed.

Evidence for penetration of ‘skin in the game’ into everyday language is abundant. When googled, the phrase pops up 13,200,000 times on the web; there are 615,000 finds in images; 3,360 in books; 283 in news, etcetera. By focusing on a micro aspect of an issue, it is possible to access issues from another perspective. I would encourage you to explore the Web and The New York Times archives. It is another way to use a micro approach to gain perspective on macro issues. It taught me that Democratic Senator Warner has a skin in the game approach when developing a solution to bring down the US deficit: “there’s no option but to push ahead. A way forward won’t be found unless there’s a grand enough bargain that everybody feels they’ve got some skin (in) the game. And also on the world stage there is skin to be put in the game. When discussing U.S. military action in Libya and the need for United Nations authorization and involvement from neighboring countries, a senior administration official noted that, “It’s not enough for them to just cheer us on. They have to put some skin in the game. The president has made clear it can’t just be us.”

If invoking the phrase wasn’t effective, I don’ think it would have migrated into so many aspects of our lives. I doubt that it would have shifted from personal and interpersonal micro concerns to collective and macro issues. ‘Putting skin in the game’ touches us on an elemental level and reaches beyond reason. It is this characteristic that makes it attractive for political rhetoric for those promoting shared sacrifices, and others seeking personal investment in solutions. The next time you hear the expression, you might want to stop and ask: what is being asked by whom, and for what purposes?

I find that the change in descriptive language about social connections that she observes is more in the eyes of the beholder than in lived experience.  Life continues as before, full of human connection, with new tools to carry out the same processes.

When Facebook was founded in 2004, I was a senior in high school and accepted early to college with the prerequisite educational e-mail address to join Facebook’s earliest members.  As a member of the Millennial Generation (defined by the Pew Research Center as Americans born after 1980), I am a member of the first class of college students not to ever go to college without Facebook. In fact, I had Facebook before I even graduated high school, and I “met” my dorm-mates months before my first week of school.

That means I never made a college friend that I didn’t connect with online. I never dated someone without looking at their online profile. I also never had a boss or a professor who couldn’t look me up and see what I was about. When I graduated last year, mid-recession, I was warned to “take those personal details offline.” Take them offline? I never thought it was a private space. They were never there.

I’ve observed, in my life, my work in publishing and my research in sociology, that with each passing year, the social worlds of young people are increasingly entrenched in social media. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t use the word entrenched at all. The rest of my generation, particularly those who had Facebook as high school freshmen (or even earlier), learned who they were while using Facebook. Not because of Facebook.   Our lives are lived in and through social media, as they are lived in and through face-to-face interactions.

Imagine how the milestones of adolescence are changes (or exactly the same) when lived out in a world wrapped up in Web 2.0. Your high school chemistry club calls meetings on its Facebook page. Your first boyfriend asks you to go steady via a Facebook relationship request. Your most embarrassing high school moment? The unflattering photo posted of you after your first big spring break trip.

Facebook didn’t create these moments, and the social fabric isn’t tearing at the seams. Regular life happens online all the time for these teenagers. They aren’t referring to their school cliques as networks, but still as friend groups. David Brooks may have used different terms for his analysis, but that doesn’t mean that language is carrying over into everyday life.

I say these things to both comfort and caution: the language of relationships isn’t going anywhere. It’s just growing in complexity and variance. As a sociologist, this poses myriad questions to the expected changes in the way this generation will become adults. The change to collective memory alone: These “networks” are instant archives.

Facebook and other social networks aren’t just changing the way older generations think about social relationships.  They also, more fundamentally, are providing a medium through which a younger generation is growing up, revealing the way we now live.

And this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece titled, “The Crossroads Nation,” that illuminated something about the networked-world phenomenon that I hadn’t clearly seen before. The column’s ostensible topic is the capacity of America to be the most globally networked nation for the 21st century and thus Brooks advocates an economy built on continued digital integration.

Bland and unassailable as a premise (satisfying both more left-leaning infrastructure-building advocates and more right-leaning champions of individualistic success stories)the interesting thing about Brooks’ column is a subtle shift that occurs in the way it narrates human relationships.

“The Crossroads Nation” column is itself constructed by way of interesting shifts in the terminology it uses to label human groupings. Brooks imagines a young person finding her voice and her metier by migrating from a small town to a metropolis and connecting with other creative individuals and groups in the process. Describing this trajectory Brooks begins with traditional words like “country,””place,” “circle,” “group of people,” and switches decisively mid-column to “networks” and “hubs.”

He concludes with a paeon to America’s network capacity: “The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power.”

Brooks does not reflect on the significance of this shift, or of the consequences of abandoning these traditional ideas about social and political collectivities. But reading the column made me realize that my diffidence toward on-line social networks has something to do with this transformation in our understanding of groups.  I realized that I do not see myself as part of networks, that such a self-identification is actually anathema. Rather, I think about my life as one that is embedded in a world of families, communities, neighborhoods, workplaces, institutions and social classes.

This stubbornly off-line relational imaginary may have a generational foundation – born in the mid twentieth century I am stuck in its world of relationships. But perhaps it entails some inchoate political resistance to re-imagining myself as a node of a network, a kind of collectivity without face-to-face enduring ties or without a clear connection to a particular historical formation.

What does it mean, after all, to be part of a network? I don’t think we have even begun to answer that question.