The media: Book post 3

The book brings up some things about the media being able to scare people into doing things or taking action on an issue.  The weather man knows that in order for the growth of food and survival of people it needs to rain; yet every time it does rain is portrayed as something bad or to be feared.  Every time this winter when in snowed less than two inches wasn’t it portrayed on the news as a nasty snow storm moving through our area.  Some times that they predicted a nasty snow storm all of the private schools closed the day before it snowed and we ended up with little to no snow the next day because everthing that fell melted in the morning.  The news tells us the worst case scenario and the worst stories that they could find.  The Michael Moore film on gun control showed examples of this, America sees all these things that only make for interesting stories that would get ratings.  If a kid gets shot people tune in to hear what happened, but if a new stop sign is installed somewhere or someone gets an award for doing something that is not a story.   I’ve seen headline like, “next on [insert news station] find out what is in your apple juice and can it be killing you.” I know that arsenic is in apple juice, but that has been in apple juice long before the story broke about it being in the popular apple drink amongst children. Arsenic is naturally found in apples so it will only be in its natural form and amount when it is in juice form, yet the media ran with it blowing it out of proportion, scaring people, and then saying, “Well it isn’t a big deal, it won’t kill you.” 

The prom

While prom was fun I saw several things that I did not agree with. Prom is a formal event, as it was in everyones attire, however people actions did not reflect the formal occasion that prom is supposed to be. While I danced with my date for a majority of the time there were other people in my prom group that just did not dance until the last song of the evening. This is fine if they decided to just talk to each other for the duration of the dance, but if you have to be on your phone for the entire dance something is wrong. There were several other people on third phones the entire night as well, apparently facebook was a substitute for looking around you because the only thing that they were doing on the phones were looking at everyone else's dresses. The band was not very good "i've got a feeling" is not what I believe to be a good prom dancing song especially when there is no auto tune and it is acoustic. Overall the night was fun, but formal occasion should stay formal occasions.

Post 2 the missing information in the everyday

The author predominantly writes about how we lose touch with natural information and basic instincts people used to have and what people used to do, for example, why travel if the travel channel brings you to a new place without leaving the living room.   He then tells of a time when man could walk outdoors, look up to the sky and determine whether the day will hold rain, storms, snow or some other unpleasant weather or if it is going to be a beautiful day.  We type emails and text messages on our phones so why learn penmanship or cursive. People become less social in person because there are things like facebook.  Like in my post about movie theater etiquette and the people of a generation four years younger than me sitting in a theater watching a movie while video calling, texting, “facebooking,” and talking to each other across the theater all while messing with their phones because god-forbid they turn it off for 2hrs and 14 minutes of their lives.  Technology makes both simple and complicated tasks more easy than they were, but when it does this the human race looses something that is a basic instinct or a piece of common knowledge that everyone should have.  We don’t have to know how to spell any more due to spell check, and phones have the ability to guess at what you want to say before you say it.  SIRI in the iPhone allows people to not even have to type a text, SIRI is your personal stenographer and organizer.  Which way are you going? Probably the only people in the united states that would have to solve this question are frequent backpackers, hikers and military personnel.  GPS, triangulation, turn by turn directions, and compasses in every piece of technology void the use for a paper map and other land navigational skills.  We don’t need to know which way is north because a voice guidance system just tells us when to turn.  This does make it easier to navigate, but it makes the knowledge of how to navigate less and less a part of the collective human necessities.  People get less intelligent and less aware of themselves in the world around them as technology progresses.

Guns and control

While guns are an instrument of death and should be more closely looked after and a little less accessible, the class, in our discussions, was overlooking a few things. One of the questions that grew out of the movie was, why can't a bullet cost $5,000? Because guns are not really the problem. We the people are. I went to this thing while visiting my grandparents, its a self defense class for seniors sponsored and hosted by the local police department. We went to the firing range and the instructor (a former detective), after showing clips of officers who were in bad situations that involved weapons, told everyone in the class that guns were not the problem. I agree. The officer, who has been shot at several times, continued to say "I can take a gun load it, turn the safety off, and put it down on a table. It will sit on that table forever. It will never harm anyone unless a person picks it up and pulls the trigger with the intent to harm another." guns don't kill people, people kill people. They use guns to assist them in the killing, but it is merely a tool. There are places in the united states where guns are a necessity, these are places where a person can walk out of his or hers home and immediately runs the risk of getting slaughtered by a bear or other animal. We have 11,000 deaths by way of guns in the united states, if we had no guns and someone wanted to kill another person there are always some other equally effective methods that a person intent on killing would find.

The age of missing information post 1

The book that I have selected for this semester is a book that closely relates to a post that I wrote on movie theater etiquette and the loss of common knowledge due to the media.  Like Michael Moore pointed out in his movie on gun control, the media in america is reporting thing that are tragic because they are entertaining.  The black people getting tackled on Cops because that is what people want to see or various violent things because it makes a good story for the news.  The author of the story spent months watching 24 hrs of one days television shows across all of Fairfax, VA’s 90 something cable channels.  Then he went out into his backyard, climbed a mountain, and sat a day reflecting on his experiences watching TV in the wilderness.  He says, “Television tells us we have everything in common. But we don’t.  And as we lose our particularity we lose prodigious [excessive] amounts of information”(41).  The author, Mckibben, is saying that as the news becomes more and more international, the audience becomes larger and the cultures that will watch news networks such as CNN will become greater.  This means that when the news gets a hold of a story they try to either spin or choose stories that apply to an international audience and “we must restrict our conversations to what we have in common... [because] the things that interest me may not interest, or be even be comprehensible by you”(48). This erases a piece of information that may be important to know, but it is irrelevant to a specific international group and is subsequently not reported on because certain viewers would not comprehend it. We are being censored by the fact that we as a international group are brought closer together through the television screen.