Big Brother?

In George Orwell's novel 1984 "Big Brother" is everywhere. It controls how the characters act, think and feel. One wrong move and you could be vaporized from existence. What is Big Brother to Orwell's character's? The physical establishment is the ministries, that control all aspects of the citizen's lives, including being able to erase and/or rewrite history.

 This is probably going to sound weird, but Big Brother in our society today, I believe is very similar to Big Brother in 1984, the government. I don't want to sound crazy or paranoid, but with the amount of technology that is in our world today, do you ever wonder if someone may be checking up on you? Big Brother could also be as simple as your boss at work watching the video feeds while you're working to make sure you're doing your job right. Privacy I think exist to an extent, in your own home you can do whatever you want, but when you step outside your front door, privacy goes out the window. I think that some people would give up basic freedoms to feel safe, myself NOT included. Freedoms have be fought for and won over the years, I feel safe in my environment and would never give up the freedoms that I have. 

Carpe Diem

"O Captain, my Captian." A quote from a Walt Whitman poem that is referenced numerous times in the Robin Williams movie The Dead Poets Society, which we were shown a clip of on Tuesday in class. The theme of the entire movie is similar to that of the readings of Emerson and Thoreau. Live live to the fullest, "Carpe Diem," for you never know when you'll lose the opportunity to do so forever. 
Could I live shut off from society for a year in a cabin in the woods? This is a tough question for me, I am a very social person so I don't know if I could do it purely on that idea. To give up technology for that length of time I think would be very easy, there are so many different options out their besides a computer or a smart phone are not the only forms of entertainment in our world today. People have seem to forgotten about things like reading a book for fun, or just going outside and enjoying a nice day, which can easily substitute for going on Facebook, or playing Angry Birds. 
In the novel Feed, a world is presented to the reader of a world consumed by technology. The characters have a "feed" implanted into their brains so that whoever is in power can download into these peoples brains what they thing is important. The characters are so reliant on technology that without it they are basically dumb. Would these character be able to go to the woods and live deliberately? I don't think so.

A Citizen of the Dumbest Generation?

I was appalled but the statistics that both articles present about Bauerlien's novel "The dumbest generation." To realize that members of my generation do not know, or remember what they learned, about things like Pearl Harbor or Vietnam was a hard realization. Great things have happened in and to our country of the course of it's short history that need to be remembered and even learned from for the future. If our generation, and the generations after us continue to focus more on social networking sites than news media the prospect for our future as a country is scary to think about. 
in the Newsweek article, however, the author wrote about how it is not only the individuals fault, but the school system as well that has failed them. I agree with this to a point, let me make myself clear, The school system in America today could use some work (as an understatement) to help the children in the system learn more about the world, however, it is also the individual person's choice whether or not to retain or even learn the information as well. If the school system were to improve, whose to say that it will improve what the students learn and retain? 

Slipping into a Virtual Reality

The documentary “second skin” shows a glimpse into the lives of the online gaming world, and it's really just that—a world all of its own. The film shows how this new form of social interaction can envelop the lives of the participants that turn on the game everyday when they come home from work or school. The people who play are consumed by the game play and social world that they “live” while playing the game. To me this kind of addiction (and I'll explain the use of that word later), both surprised me and didn't at the same time. I have had some exposure to games such as W.O.W., but never really understood the appeal, which is the reason that I was semi-surprised and the fever that some people had about the game; but at the same time I have known people who were very into those sort of games, which is why I was partially not surprised. I used the word addiction in a previous sentence because for some of the people that play the game it is truly that, an addiction. For some of us ours may be a TV show, cigarettes or alcohol, for some with addictive personalities that play interactive games such as World of Warcraft, that is their addiction.

In Culture Jam, Lasn writes about how technology is changing lives, and the documentary proves that point. 30 years ago such interactive computer games were just figments of imagination, and today there are people spending their hard earned, real life money on the same computer games, relationships are being made, and lost because of these games; which brings me to another point that I wanted to discuss. The change in social relationships because of technology is fully seen in the documentary. Take the couple that met in the game, Everquest 2. The woman flew multiple states away to meet a man that she had fallen in love with over a computer game. Can it work for some people? Sure. Others? Maybe not. Is it for me? Nope. But for some, and this is where the full breath of the technological impact on our lives today can be seen, the online social world is a place where they can be someone completely different from themselves and no one will ever know any different. At one point in the documentary an interviewee used the example of someone that was overweight and stuck at home because she had to take care of her mother, going into an online game and changing her appearance to portray herself as the “angle within.” For many I think this may also be true, however I think a lot of people take the “virtual world” to an extreme when they let it overtake what is happening in the real world.

A Corporate American Takeover

“We pasteurized,

we processed,

we manipulated this cheese until it suited our purposes,this was engineered cheese...”

This is an excerpt from the poem we read this week, “ America, its gotta be the cheese” by slam poet Aton Kadosh.In the poem he makes the unique observation that American culture is similar to pasturized American cheese. And, as odd as the comparison is, I agree with him, we as Americans believe that our “cheese” which is our culture, is the best in the world, even though many of us have never ventured to expose themselves to another culture. This specific quote speaks to the fact that we have engineered our culture to broadcast to the world what we want them to see American culture as. American Culture has been manipulated by the corporations to suit its purposes, which is something that was spoken about in Culture Jam as well. Kale Lasn talks specifically about how corporations in America have taken over our lives as citizens and dictated what we are supposed to like and dislike. I agree with him to a point about this, I think that there are many Americans out there who focus only on what mainstream media tells them they should and should not consume. However, there are some people, like myself and my friends and others in our country, that do no care about mainstream media and what some corporate hot shot says we should be wearing this week.

The part that I found most interesting in Culture Jam was the chapter titled “your corporate connection,” that Lasn uses to talk about the influence of corporate America on young, and even older, American's views of themselves. He talks about how “objectification distorts a person's sense of worth (p.74).” This quote and chapter goes back to the idea that both Lasn and Kadosh are trying to get across in through both prose and poetry: that corporate America has been slowly taking over American's lives and dictating what they should eat, wear, watch, listen to and act like.  

Media Source: 

http://www.pitchengine.com/brands/strategyone/images/115439/Corporate-America.jpg

All About Me

Hello Cyber World! My name is Kaye, and i'm a social work major at Shippensburg University with (hopefully) a minor in women's studies. After I graduate I want to go into the child welfare field. I am dating a wonderful man named Aaron who means the world to me. I love to act, and have been preforming since i was in elementary school, including singing and dancing. I love music, including singing and playing music, and will listen to pretty much any kind. I like to watch movies, I have a collection sitting in a 400 CD case in my room. Again I'll watch pretty much any type of movie at least once. I love to be active and doing things, I'm not very good at sitting around doing nothing for a long period of time. I've played softball, as a catcher, was on swim team for 6 years and danced. I also love to be creative through art, I love to paint and draw as well. Well, until next time....