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.