Sunday, November 29, 2009
Perez Hilton (MARK THIS ONE)
This could not be more true. If you were to ask any university or high school student who Perez Hilton is or what he does or what his website is about, there is no doubt in my mind that they would be able to tell you the correct answer. This website which is basically an online tabloid magazine with his own personal opinions about celebrity gossip. This mode of communicating the latest news about celebrities is indicative of exactly how much our society has evolved. We are now so fixated on what celebrities do, how they dress, who they're dating, that this fixation borders on unhealthy. Our society places an unnecessary amount of value on celebrities and their lives, but nobody really takes a minute to think about how they feel about this. This puts huge amounts of pressure on them to always look the part. We idolize them and so they feel like they need to live up to these standards to the point where it can be harmful for them (look at the number of celebrities in rehab for a multitude of different reasons). Even this video of Britney Spears getting mobbed by paparazzi after she just got out of rehab shows just how unhealthy and frustrating this must be. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9lcJHXoPIc. There are also those instances where the paparazzi get injured as a result of this too. This got me thinking.
There is no doubt that we have evolved socially, economically, and culturally through our different uses of media but is this a good thing? The social evolution is the one that really relates to Perez Hilton and is probably the one with the biggest change, however this change might not be good. It really isn't healthy that we fixate of fame and fortune. I think we place value on things that really shouldn't mean that much.
So is this evolution a good thing? Some people don't like change, they think it is bad. Progression and moving forward is usually a good thing, as long as the things we are moving into have meaning. I think that overall our evolution with communications is amazing, but I don't think our cultural and social and even economic evolution are necessarily great.
REMIX - Girl Talk (MARK THIS ONE)
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Resisting Persuasion - MARK THIS ONE
Did You Know? - MARK THIS ONE
So I watched the video on youtube called “Did you know?” and it basically summed up the way we communicate through technology nowadays. This got me thinking about the space and time binding concept. At one point the video even said that in 25 years the computer that is in our cell phone will fit in a blood cell. I think that is kind of a morbid way to get the point across, but anyways the point is that everything will be even more space binding in the future than it is now (in relation to how we communicate).
In my opinion since we have every method of communication at our instant disposal, we have lost some of the ‘flare’ for communicating. What I’m trying to say here is that our sentences now are constructed a lot different than they were 50 years ago. For example, this is a clip from the movie “It’s a wonderful life” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC1HT3UjyDA in this clip the way the two people talk to each over is so different from the way we do now. Instead of saying “I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet…” we would say “I’m leaving”, we don’t try to make our sentences sound like stories anymore. With texting, msn and all of the other ways to communicate now we usually don’t even make full sentences, and respond with half sentences like “Ya bcuz I wanna c u later”. This is a clip from the movie “Knocked up” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMvhmNJoHu8 my point in including this scene is to illustrate the different way we talk to each other now. In the time of the first movie we would never swear at the dinner table, let alone in front of people. Not that swearing is really the issue here, my point is that in the first movie it seems as though the people pick their words carefully, whereas in the second movie they say whatever pops into their heads. Also in the first movie, when they speak it is almost like poetry, whereas the second one the thought process to arrive at a sentence is not as critical. So my question is, do you think that the way we used to talk to each other is better than how it is now? Is space binding media what has started this idea of quicker and to the point is better?
I would say that yes, space binding media (or that concept) is what started that idea, and that this is not better. I think that the way people used to communicate was better. It was almost like a dance with words, and now we’ve lost that dance.