Is America A Melting Pot?

America is a melting pot in many different ways. We have an enormous influx of immigrants every year and we have people from every single ethnicity, background, race, religion, culture and nationality possible in the country. The real proof that we're a melting pot is that for the most part, the races and ethnicities mix together in everyday life without a problem. Sure there are the extreme cases of racist hate crimes and segregation, but those are not the norm. For the most part everyone has a chance at upward mobility and if they put in the work, they can be extremely successful. We even have an African American president. However, there are people who are trying to prevent America from being such a mixture of cultures and beliefs. Some people are extremely ethnocentric and think that America should only be full of W.A.S.Ps (While Anglo-Saxon Protestants). They are completely insane and think that immigrants are dirty thieves who are trying to abuse our system and find loopholes to better their lives. What they don't seem to realize is that they're ancestors were immigrants to who came into the country, ravaged the land, killed the natives and destroyed the landscape in order to construct their towns and cities. So what their ancestors did was far worse than what the immigrants of today are doing. So even though these people are trying to discourage immigration and impose laws and policies that make life harder for people who are here illegally or who aren't full citizens yet, America is still becoming the melting pot of the world. Their attempts to suppress the diversity in America are essentially useless and we will continue to grow in diversity as time progresses.

Identity, Society, and Culture

Our position in the world affects how we view our lives in such a great way and half of the time, we don't even realize it. It affects many aspects of our lives such as how we view identity, society and culture. Being from the middle class, I can really only give my views on such things because I've never really been part of any other class and therefore don't have any other experience to base my ideas off of. Along with being part of the middle class, I'm an 18 year old American male, which affects my views a lot as well. I'm technically in one of the most privileged positions that I could possibly be in in the world. So, being an 18 year old, middle class, American, male, I view things based on experiences I've had so far in my life. Being an 18 year old, my views on identity are very different than those of say a 50 year old. I'm trying to define my identity right now and figure out who I want to be for the rest of my life, while a 50 year old might be just keeping true to the personality they decided fit them best 30 years ago. Being a male in this society/culture also affects my views. As a male, we're pushed to be more aggressive, masculine, successful, etc. We're supposed to be the bread winners and the leaders of the world (yes it's sexist, but we have a patriarchal society). Being from the middle class also gives me access to opportunities to better myself and give myself chances to make something of myself through furthering my education that people of other classes may not have access to.  So my views on society can be similar to those of people of all races, ages and genders around me because the society as a whole puts similar pressures on and gives similar chances to everyone within certain categories. Our culture is also very focused on independence and being successful of your own accord. So, the pressures to make it on your own are almost universal in America and my views on how cultures should push people can again be very similar to those around me.

Chapter 6 Reading Synthesis

Chapter 6 discusses how to integrate outside sources into your research paper effectively. What I took away from it was mostly the fact that you aren't using your outside sources to create your argument, you're using them to back up what you're saying. Most people try to find sources and then base their argument around them so they know they'll have information backing it up. However, this is not a very smart way to handle a research assignment. What you want to do is to create your argument and then find sources that fit it, not vice versa. So, once you've found these sources, you don't want to just thrown in random quotes or information into your paper, you need to integrate it in an intelligent manner. You find points that back up ideas you have and then when you're discussing these ideas in your paper, you'll bring in the outside information to back up your point and make it seem more valid. You can paraphrase the information, take a direct quote, or summarize the information in order to back up your claims, you just have to make sure it fits well within the paper and doesn't disrupt the flow by being awkwardly placed somewhere it might not necessarily go well. That's what it's talking about when it says you need to integrate your sources, not insert them. Don't just throw them into your paper where you're talking about a certain idea just because that information backs it up. You need to make it seem like the ideas were fluid and you knew exactly where that quote or paraphrasing was going to end up all along. You also want to mix up which form of integration you use. You don't want to just use a bunch of quotes and have your paper be littered with them. It gets boring reading someone else's words in your paper. So use paraphrasing, summarizing and direct quotation throughout the paper and change it up for the reader in order to keep them interested and present your argument to them more effectively.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster

In the two posters on page 433, you see several burly men, whose faces aren't shown, that resemble famous pop culture icons such as Hulk Hogan and Sylvester Stallone as well as some "fit" women such as an Olympic athlete and a ballerina. The poster on the left is pretty bland and just gives you the name of the film ("Bigger, Stronger, Faster: The Side Effects of Being an American") and the tagline "Is it still cheating if everyone's doing it?" with the banner covering the faces of a San Francisco Giants baseball player, Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone. It lets you understand the movie is dealing with steroid use because those 4 pop culture icons have all admitted to using steroids to improve their physique at some point in their careers. However, that is about all you get out of that poster. The one on the right is where a lot of the big symbols come in. Standing on top of a mountain of steroid pills and hypodermic needles stands Hulk Hogan in his signature pose. Surrounding him are Sylvester Stallone as "Rocky" with his arms raised, a female USA Olympic athlete, a San Francisco Giants baseball player holding an enormous American flag (to show that steroids are just a part of American society now) that encompasses a good portion of the poster a ballerina jumping through the air and Arnold Schwarzenegger standing at a podium. While no one's face is shown again, you can easily identify which pop culture icon it's referring to. You can also easily identify the purpose of the movie based on the fact that it's common knowledge that these celebrities have all used steroids at some point and they're standing on a giant mound of pills and needles. It shows the tagline again at the top "Is it still cheating if everyone's doing it?" and the title in large letters "Bigger Faster Stronger: The Side Effects of Being an American." It intrigues viewers and makes them wonder exactly what the movie is going to be talking about. Over the past few decades, athletes and celebrities that have used performance enhancing drugs have been punished and frowned upon for engaging in such activities, but the tagline makes a viewer curious as to whether or not they're going to condone the use of steroids due to it's popularity among athletes in American society. Overall they utilize the images very well and grab the attention of the viewer and make them wonder exactly what they movie is about due to the ambiguity of the poster and the great use of ethos, logos and rhetoric in general.

Chapter 7 Reading Response

When I'm taking notes (which is rare to begin with), I make sure to keep the ideas concise and to the point so I'm not writing too much and I can keep a good pace going. When I'm taking notes that I'll be using for research, however, my method changes a little bit. I still try to write concise notes that aren't full of fluff so I can just get the main point when I go back over the notes, but now I have to make sure to cite the source that I got the idea from. I won't necessarily write out the full citation right then and there, but I will make a note of where I got the information such as the title of the book or a website URL. This helps me avoid plagiarism later on when I'm integrating the information into my argument. When I'm scanning through a lot of sources, I'll remember certain facts I came across that I found useful, I just won't remember exactly where they came from if I don't write it down as soon as I decide to use any of the information I found. And since plagiarism can be so accidental a lot of the time, it's worth the extra 20 seconds it takes to write down the source as you're going than to risk someone realizing you've plagiarized and getting into serious trouble. As the book states, it's also a matter of respect to mention whoever's ideas you're using to back up your argument because you're giving them the formal recognition that they had a useful idea and that you found it helpful. So, while I try to make my note taking as short of a process as possible, I don't try to shorten it by negating to write down sources and risking the chance of plagiarism since it can lead to such severe punishment and possibly even expulsion.

Interview Comparison

In the two interviews, the one dealing with embedding reporters in war zones and the other discussing the "McDonaldsization" of our country, you can see a few similarities as well as differences. They're both using their arguments to prove that their subject is an unpleasant one and that we need to bring about changes to it as a country. With the first interview, they're trying to show that while we want a high tech coverage of what's going on with our troops overseas, it's not the safest or smartest plan to just plant reporters right in the middle of the war zone because they're right in harms way. So they set up the interview to say that this isn't the best idea, and then have quotes from reporters that were in an area while it was being attacked so you could understand how horrified they really were. They do this so it's much easier to convince you that their point is correct. The same goes for the Ritzer interview. By just having one person answer questions and give you only their opinion, you're getting a very biased point of view, but a very effective one. Since you're not hearing the other side of the argument, you are much more likely to side with what he's saying because he does make valid points and talks in a very intelligent manor. So, they planned that interview to be very one sided and to just be a Q&A session with the interviewer in order to give the readers only one side of the argument that they were presenting. At least with the first interview, they gave you a few different examples and showed you different perspectives on the issue, so that you could somewhat decide for yourself. You were just more likely to side with the fact that it wasn't safe for reporters to be out there because you can read the transcripts of what they were saying as they were being attacked.

Chapter 13 Reading Response

Different types of texts provide a well rounded view on certain topics across the entire board. They're usually consisted of first hand accounts and second hand accounts where people are simply recounting what someone else told them about their personal experiences or their observations on a topic. With the topic of minorities in sports and stardom in chapter 13, the ranges of texts fall more into the second category and consist mostly of second hand accounts of what it's like to be a minority celebrity. However, with the "Expect Great" Commercial with Sue Bird, you get someone who actually is a minority in sports (WNBA) telling you that women can be just as good as men at the sport and trying to get people to open their eyes to see that. The rest of the texts do tend to fall into the second category, such as "Doin' Me": From Young, Black, Rich, and Famous. Boyd describes how famous African American athletes act such as Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson and Joe Louis bring styles from their culture into the sport and how people react, but he's not describing his own personal experience, just his observations of famous athletes and his ideas on why they act and dress a certain way. With Say It Ain't So, Big Leagues by Dave Zirin, he talks about how Major League Baseball relies on upcoming talent born and raised in Latin America and how a large portion of the big players today hail from Latin American countries. He describes how the culture in Latin America makes it easy for baseball scouts to tell people they'll become rich and famous if they come and play for a certain team, but yet again, he isn't describing his personal experiences. He is merely writing about his observations on the relationship between Latin American players and Major League Baseball. So, both types of sources (first hand and second hand) help develop different perspectives on certain topics by giving the reader a specific side of the story that the author wants to present. That's why you have to evaluate the level of bias in a text when reading it to determine if it is really credible or not to use to try and back up an idea, because people can skew things so far to fit their purpose that it may end up giving you false information and making your argument suffer inevitably.

Chapter 5 Reading Synthesis

This reading was again pretty repetitive and didn't really inform me of anything I didn't know already. The downside to being in an intro English class is that the text is created on the idea that the people reading it are inept and have no concept of how to write intellectually at all. So, when people who actually can write well and know how to analyze the validity of sources already start reading about how to do these things for 20 pages,  it starts to become frustrating. But, the chapter just discussed basically how to get your research paper started. Once you figure out your general idea, you start searching for information on it and in doing so, start narrowing your search until you refine your idea to a very specific topic. From there, you can start figuring out what sources you want to use and determining whether or not they are valid sources that you can use. When doing this you want to look at things like the author, date of publication, if it's a journal, scholarly article etc. Once you figure out if the source is one you can actually use, then you can start sorting them out into primary and secondary sources. Primary sources being ones that prove your argument and secondary being ones that just kind of help you comment on the topic but don't really provide much factual backup for your statements. After this you can work on citing your sources and things such as an annotated bibliography in order to further prove why your sources are useful in proving your argument.

EID Avatar Reading Response

Avatars are a staple of the internet culture of to today's society. They allow for the user to create the image of themselves that they want others to perceive, and also allow for a sense of anonymity with other people that you wouldn't necessarily have otherwise. When people who are insecure or ashamed about a certain part of their physical appearance, they can create an avatar that doesn't have such qualities and use that to interact with other people and leave their insecurities behind. People can also use avatars to accentuate particular parts of their personalities. If someone wants an avatar that acts like "the funny guy," then they might end up creating a clown or something similar. If they want to show your athletic side, even if you might not be the most buff guy, you might create an avatar that is extremely muscular and fit in order to show that you're athletic and in shape. So avatars allow the user to show the parts of themselves that they really want to and allow them to leave the parts they don't like behind.

As for the use of avatars in the classroom, the only instance where I could think they would come into play is in online classes. In a class that you actually go to, you can't create an avatar to go for you and present to everyone else only the qualities that you want to portray. You have to go yourself and you have to embrace everything about you that others are going to notice. But, with online classes, you'll probably never meet your classmates and therefore, if you have the option to create an avatar, even if it's just a profile picture, then you can still present to these people qualities that you want to present and ignore the ones you don't want to. In this instance, you wouldn't have to worry about contacting people and them looking at your profile and thinking you're weird and ignoring you. You can just contact them and not have it be an issue. But other than with online classes, I don't think avatars would really come into play in a classroom setting.

DK Reading Response

I feel like responding to the reading about plagiarism because in high school our teachers drilled into our heads the fact that it's insanely easy to plagiarize and you may not even realize you've done it. And the fact that I can now be expelled if I made that mistake terrifies me. My roommate and I have both talked about this and posed this hypothetical situation: What if you and someone else who got published actually happened to have the same idea about a topic and wrote them down, not exactly the same, but similar enough, and you turned your paper in? Would that be plagiarism? Even if you had no knowledge of this writer or his work on the topic? The fact that it could be done so accidentally and incur such extreme repercussions scares me and would actually make me really angry. If I was just being dumb and forgot to cite a source, then I'd take the blame. That would have been my fault completely. But, reading this section in the book made me feel a little better by telling me what I can do to prevent plagiarism as best I can. The only thing that I am still a little skeptical about is the whole "common and shared knowledge" thing. This term is left up to interpretation way too much and that could really screw someone over. Something I think most people should know might not be considered so by someone else and if they're grading my work, then I've now plagiarized. So, the entire subject just leads to trouble and personally I think that we need to lessen the punishments for it because it can be so accidental and I don't think people should be expelled from school for a simple mistake.

I'm Not Sure What to Title This Blog

You said to give you our opinion on the class so far and how we feel about writing the paper on rhetorical ads, so here it goes. I was actually very surprised at the topics we are covering in class. Every English class I've taken has been the cookie cutter "Lets read a book, write a paper on it, take a test and then repeat the cycle" and I have HATED it. I've dreaded English classes for pretty much my entire academic career because I'm a very logical person, I don't like that there can be several different answers and I don't like that anybody can come up with some two bit idea and they can be just as right as everyone else. So, finally going to a class where we're analyzing media and ads from today's culture made me think that I might actually not hate English this year because we're talking about things that are relevant to our lives today instead of reading books written by "Old dead white guys" as my high school AP Lit teacher would say. So, I actually am interested in taking this class and think it's nice to take a different road in an English class and to write papers analyzing media and rhetoric instead of plot elements and literary devices for once.

Fat Is an Advertising Issue Reaction

This reading focused on the fact that advertising has created such an impossible to reach image of women that it has led to a massive increase in women who feel insecure about their bodies, want to change their appearance and do drastic things such as becoming bulimic in order to try and look like these "sexy" women. After realizing that advertisements like this led to such problems all over the world, Dove decided they needed to step in and change things. They wanted to create and ad campaign that promoted normal looking women and that highlighted they're uniqueness and differences instead of their conformity to a certain "'appealing" body image. I, personally, applaud Dove for this effort and am glad they achieved a good amount of success with their ad campaign. I'm tired of seeing ads showing these sickly looking, anorexic women and saying "this is what you need to aspire to look like". I've always thought that was stupid and knew that real people didn't look like that. I've also scolded people who think they need to aspire to that image because it just leads to insecurity, unhappiness and anger. It's not a healthy lifestyle to live. But, thanks to companies like Dove, people can hopefully see that being as thin as possible and starving yourself isn't the right way to live and they don't need to try and attain that image in order to be accepted and feel sexy. So, I'm glad companies like Dove exist and hope that all of their competitors follow in their footsteps and realize that they can better the population if they stop promoting impossible to attain images as what people need to look like in order to be sexy and to be accepted.

EID Reading Synthesis #2

These readings focused on the fact that over the past few decades, photography has transformed from something available to a very small amount of the population to the vast majority of people when all you need to take a picture is a piece of crap cell phone you bought at the flea market. Photography used to be reserved for chemists who could figure out the right amount of chemicals to put onto the glass plate in order to create the right flash for their camera to work. Nowadays, anyone with half a brain cell can snap a quick picture of something they think is cool or interesting at the time.

Also, new technology such as inexpensive disposable cameras that you can buy at your local drug store opened up the world of photography to anyone that wanted an easy, convenient way to record their memories. Then, with the growing popularity of the internet and digital photography, photography websites starting popping up left and right where you could upload any picture you wanted anytime, edit it and share it to other websites you use. Overall, the advancement in photography over the past few decades has been astounding. We've gone from the original Kodak box cameras that took weeks to deliver, have developed and shipped back, to digital cameras that are the size of a credit card and half an inch thick that can hold thousands upon thousands of photos and upload them to your computer in a matter of minutes. It's really amazing, but the fact that everyone has access to photography can lead to some stupid, and I mean STUPID, people thinking they're artists because they can use a sepia filter or because they can take an angled photo of a tree. But, as it is with any form of technology, there will always be some people who abuse it.

EID Reading Synthesis

This reading was actually pretty interesting. The first few pages made me think I was going to be hitting myself in the head due to the general repetitiveness of the reading at that point, but it eventually got better. The first few pages described the fact that most people view photographs as simply a still frame of a moment in time, when in reality, a photograph is an extremely useful and successful tool of rhetoric. While it expressed this basic sentiment over and over for the first 3 pages, it at least brought up a valid point. When people view a photograph, they aren't taking into account that the photographer is using this image in order to make the audience think and feel a certain way about the subject in the picture. They think the photographer may have just thought that particular scene was interesting and decided to capture that moment on film. They don't stop and think that maybe everything was intentional, that it was all done with a purpose. Photographers are sneaky people and can slip things into a photo that go almost undetected but still incite reactions and emotions within the viewers.

They also go on to mention what everyone knows as a "Kodak Moment". Skenazy describes the moment as "the moment our life most conforms, however briefly, to the way we'd like it to be." She describes the fact that people only take photos of their every day lives that make them appear to be the happy, normal, successful family that they want to be. People will take pictures of their child's 5th grade graduation or a mother and son making cookies together, but they'll never take a picture of a messy, toy covered room, a child in timeout or mom and dad fighting and stick that in the family photo album. They won't because it represents parts of their lives that they aren't exactly proud of or want to capture forever. By doing this, they effectively distort or negate the true memory of their lives. This is something that almost every family in America does, but they don't realize it until someone points it out. We try to embed only what we want into our memory of our lives, and try to push out everything that doesn't coincide with the image of ourselves that we want to perpetuate to the people around us.

Sisley: Fashion Junkies Ad

This ad from the fashion brand Sisley is clearly making a statement about the way people in today's society act when it comes to the newest fashions and trends. It depicts two women ("Fashion Junkies") in what appears to be a club snorting the straps of a dress as if they were huge lines of cocaine. The two women look completely intoxicated and appear to be a complete mess while they continue to snort their drug of choice. However, while the ad depicts a behavior that is illegal and frowned upon in our society, Sisley nonchalantly prints their name right in the middle of the image. So, surprisingly, they're promoting this type of obsession and addiction to fashion, as long as its with their brand of clothing. That you can be a "Fashion Junkie" with Sisley clothing and it would be ok. They've managed to take a scenario that would turn most people away from the product and tried to sell their own with that message. It's really quite astonishing.

They did use a good form of kairos and pathos with this ad however. They printed the ad at a time when large portions of the world focus only on the material aspects of people's appearance. Not even necessarily their physical attributes anymore, just what types of clothes they're wearing and what accessories they have with them. I know you wouldn't expect this, but it's very similar to the movie The Devil Wears Prada (yes I actually like that movie). Anne Hathaway is looked down on because she isn't wearing name brand clothes or what is considered "fashionable" at the time. However, once she starts wearing those things, she moves up in her job and people start thinking she's attractive for once. The ad also utilizes pathos in that it invokes a strong reaction from the audience and sparks up their emotions. You don't often see ads with people snorting lines of cocaine and Sisley knew that. They wanted to cross the line and grab your attention in order to get their name out there. They knew that by having the girls in the ad doing an illegal drug, it would incite anger and controversy around their name, but people would still be talking about them. It's like the saying "Bad press is better than no press". Even though what people are saying may not be the best things to have said about your company, they're still being mentioned and they're still on people's minds, which is exactly what the advertisers wanted to happen. So, since the advertisers got their desired result, this is a very successful form of rhetoric. It persuades you to think about Sisley even though those thoughts may be negative, and that's all that Sisley wanted you do to.

Cagley Comic Analysis

I found this comic on the website www.cagle.com, and just looked through some of their comics until I found one that I personally found appealing. The artist of this cartoon is very upfront and direct with the point he wants to make addressing the nations enormous debt issue. It depicts Captain America, someone who is supposed to embody all of the qualities that make America superior, as a morbidly obese man sitting on a chair shoveling junk food and sweets into his face from his shield that are labeled "DEBT", while a scientist behind him yells at a colleague "No! No! No! I said give him 'Super-SOLDIER serum' not 'Super-SPENDER serum!'" The author also utilizes a single frame composition in his comic in order to further the image's impact and give it a much more direct appeal to the reader.

The artist is trying to appeal the American public of today, saying that by allowing ourselves to become such wasteful spenders, we have abandoned many of the principles that America once stood by as a nation. By having a symbol of American superiority look so utterly defeated and pathetic, he's using a pathos appeal to show that if we don't change our ways as a nation, it's only going to end in turmoil for us. He also makes the words and image equally important in conveying his message. Without one another, the message would not be as strong. Without the words, one could horridly misconstrue the meaning of the cartoon, thinking possibly he could refer to the obesity problem present in America today. But, by adding the dialogue and label of "DEBT" on the junk food Captain America is eating, the artist makes a much larger statement than if he had left the image alone.

Again, the author is simply looking to open the public's eyes to what is happening within their own country and to realize that something needs to be done and it needs to be done quick, otherwise, this country is headed down a path of destruction. By utilizing the image of such a well know American hero as pathetic and defeated, he's trying to appeal to the audience on an emotional level in order to stir up feelings and reactions within them in hopes that maybe they'll actually realize that something needs to be done and they can help get things rolling.

Rhetoric

Prompt: Give some examples of rhetoric you see on a daily basis. Try to consider what you see on your way to class.

The amount of rhetoric we see from day to day is much more than any of us would have ever realized. As soon as we wake up, we're being bombarded with ads and signs and arguments for every possible point of view and group out there. We see signs for the intramural sports, for special meetings where they persuade you with free giveaways, TV ads trying to get you to buy the latest product, ads on Facebook trying to get you to join christianmingle.com. You'll see bumper stickers advertising a certain surfing company, billboards promoting a certain fast food chain that's "Right At The Next Exit!" or a flyer hanging up in your hall showing how much fun it is to attend the school football games and that you should go as well. It's ridiculous. Granted, we aren't persuaded by every single piece of rhetoric we see, but others are, and that proves that the ad has done it's job. The small portion of rhetoric that does persuade us, however, has to be something we personally identify with, enjoy, or are interested in. Otherwise, we simply ignore the argument they're trying to present to us. This is where you have to analyze the audience that the ad is aiming at. If a guy walks up and sees a poster talking about joining a sorority, he's not going to pay much attention. He's not going to be able to join that sorority so there's no point in listening to their argument. However, if an entering, female freshman who has always wanted to rush sees the exact same poster, she's probably going to give it more attention that others would. So, we see non-stop rhetoric throughout our daily lives, but that doesn't mean that every single bit of it has an effect on our behaviors and beliefs.