Prestige Worldwide

In class this week, we talked about prestige and how our American society uses it rather than in different countries. You can earn it in respect or reward, go higher or lower in rank through occupations, and its determined by pay, education and abstract thought. Prestige is very prominent in the American culture. As we grow up, we learn that we must aspire to work hard if we want to live and enriched, rich life. Sometimes, people are born as heirs or born in the ghetto. With the diversity in class, people can achieve to be whatever they want to be to contribute in society. We learn to want to be a doctor or a lawyer because of what rank in society we are born into. Socialist and Communist countries don’t work because of this. We need someone to be the leader and someone to be poor. If everyone earned the same amount of money, no one would even try to work harder and push themselves to be better. Every society needs prestige to function. I’m talking prestige worldwide!

The Magic of Photoshop

Today in class, our teacher assigned us to look through some ads or articles from the Internet and magazines and point out some negative attacks on people, especially females. We see it all the time: weight loss diet ads, supermodels, hyper-sexualized images, and so on. We may not realize it at a first glance, but it is still there, silently torturing us. And yet, we fall for it, trying to compete with it or living up to it, the ideals, the visuals. It discriminates and kills. So as an assignment, we found one of these ads and wrote out a complaint letter. Our teacher gave us an option to send off the letter. One source we used was the website about-face.com, a site used to help females of all ages to see how the media distorts in ads to make the visuals extremely, in a way, unrealistic. Photoshop tends to make the unrealistic-ness appear to look realistic. Images, such as the one you see here, start off with a very normal looking person, posed in the “Vogue” way, with make-up and what not. With a little help from the magical Photoshop touch up kit, she now looks flawless: smaller waist and belly, even complexion, no stretch marks or cellulite is visible, thinner legs, and, of course, perfect hair with no fly-away’s. If magazines showed what she really looks like, then maybe women won’t have to go to drastic measure to compete with the images. Note: Not even the women in the magazines look like those images in real life. Food for thought!

Evolution of the Looking-Glass Self

Earlier this week we learned a bit about the social construction of ‘self’. One theorist was Charles Horton Cooley and his “looking-glass self” theory. It states that we view the self we think we see in the behaviors of others toward us. This means we think what we think how they think of you”. People worry and think of how others think of you. We constantly manage our image to appear friendly, socially desired, competent and skilled, principled, attractive, not conceited, etc. The most modern way we manage our images is through the Internet. We continuously update our Facebook statuses and profile pictures, we check if we posted anything considered “bad” or risqué, trying not to give wrong impressions, for example, seeming as if you’re online all the time to show you have no life, etc. This is known as the online looking-glass. We are shaped by expectations and influences of a strict society. How far will this go and to what extremes? What will the outcomes be? Food for thought!

Wild Child

This week, we learned about feral children. These children are raised in the wild, which prevents society telling them how to act. We all have heard of stories about children all over the world in different cultures raised by wolves. But, I never really thought about it. Would children learn to speak? Get to know humanity? Understand and mimic our ways of living? We watched a movie of popular cases regarding feral children.
One is the case of Oxana Malaya, a girl from Ukraine who spent eight years of her life living in a kennel, practically raised by neighborhood dogs since her alcoholic parents couldn’t take care of her. She learned many dog-like habits and learning language was difficult for her. What’s very surprising is that she was born in 1983. It’s incredible to believe that occurrences such as this happen today.
Another interesting case is that of Genie, who spent thirteen years trapped and isolated and strapped to a potty chair in her Californian home. She never learned language or how to socialize. Genie’s mother ran away from the house in 1970 after a physical argument, taking Genie with her. Charges for child abuse were on both parents. Still alive and deprived from the childhood she deserved, Genie still has questions and much to learn about the world
Questions we must ask ourselves are: What can we do to prevent this? How many more are out there? How can we help them? How do they survive? How do they come to understand about society?
Food for thought!

Headlines' Facts With Hidden Third Variables

Last week, our class was given a packet with headlines of different articles. Data was written underneath each headline to support or abandon it. If the data didn’t support the headline, it was due to a “third variable” to basically throw off a reader.

Example) Headline: “Diet of fish ‘can prevent’ teen violence.” The facts said:

Participants were a group of 3-year-olds given an ‘enriched diet, exercise, and cognitive stimulation,’ assuming that the enriched diet included fish. They were compared to a control group who did not go through this same program. By age 23 they were 64% less likely than a control group of children not on the program to have criminal records. The media article doesn’t include what other kids ate or did.

The data, here, does not support the headline because the data doesn’t specifically say how fish at all aids to the prevention of teen violence. The data only says that one group of toddlers were given enriched diet assuming fish was in the diet. Along with the diet was exercise, which is what young, growing bodies need to get energy, and cognitive stimulation, which is the awareness and understanding of surroundings by utilization of planned stimuli. Wouldn’t cognitive stimulation have a larger impact on whether kids grow to be violent or not rather than an enriched diet that may (or may not) include fish?

Food for thought!

Men Vs Women

Last week, we read a short article about the differences between men and women. I found it particularly interesting and quite true for what I found out:
- Women apologize so much not to put herself down, as most men would think, but to make it so that they were still are at the same “rank” as the other person, on equal footing, even if it is the other person that may have done something wrong. Same goes for “thank you’s”; women do it to stay level with people, even though it may really be unnecessary.
- Women’s brains can multitask; men’s brain’s can only work one thing at a time without losing focus.
- Women give soft criticism; men are straight, to the point.
- Women see the “bigger picture”; men focus narrowly on a specific task.
- Women link all information of various topics (relationships, stimulus, emotions, etc.) in their brains; men separate the various topics in theirs.
- Men’s dominant sense is sight; women have more finely tuned senses then men do.
Obviously with this research along with much more out in the universe, women and men are different, even if we are a part of the same species.

The WoW Influence

We all have heard of World of Warcraft. Some call it the worst game ever created. Others call it a social environment where people gather and work together on quests. In a sense, it seems almost like a culture all on its own. A subculture is a group within a culture with separate norms and values. The “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” extends all over theworld with new gamers as fantasty players, doing whatever they want to do, in whatever appearance (virtually) they want to be in. We have seen games like this like Sims and Second Life, where people get together online. Some business companies use games like this to have business meetings without stepping one foot out of the comfort of their own home and into their company buildings. Is this way of “life” the new social norm of the 21st century? Will people wind up not ever going outside in the near future and step into the Internet-based games to talk to people?