Halloween Class

Reading through Toxic Sludge, going to today’s class, everything we have learned, has reinforced my opinion even more. Large corporations control everything today, I can’t even begin to comprehend the amount of connections there are that we don’t even know about. Advertising, government affiliations, the Internet, television, all of these and more are connected, and are exploited by large companies to make their influence even broader. It makes me sick that these companies are allowed to advertise for medicine that may not even do anything. The public needs to be informed about these things, they need to know that they are being taken advantage of. But since most Americans don’t even have past a grade eight education, it would be hard to explain that something from the television lied.
The amount of wealth that these people hold is also disgusting. According to Forbes.com, 5 of the top 10 richest people in the world are board members of Wal-Mart. The worlds 225 richest people have a combined wealth of which only four percent would be needed to provide basic education, healthcare, food and safe water for every person in the world. This type of monopoly of wealth is not fair. If Bill Gates were to give away all his money, that would mean that the entire world would have better education and healthcare. I’m not saying he hasn’t given away money, Bill Gates has actually given the biggest donation in history, $24 Billion to his own foundation. But for such a small amount of people, to have all the money in the world, all the influence, and all the power, is not fair. Humans have always had to deal with societies that have aristocratic tendencies, wealth has pretty much always been in the hands of a small amount of people.

Group projects

I've been looking into the group projects quite a bit. For the Media hegemonies I was flipping through 'We the Media' and saw that they have the entire media hegemony right there. Wondering if I should be lazy and use that. I'll see what the higher powers say. My activism project is yet again going to involve the Kurds. It is going to be much more general though. I'll be looking at human rights issues surrounding the Kurds throughout the Middle East, but the overall project will focus on broad human rights issues in the world. I've been reading through Amnesty Internationals website, looking at the more recent abuses in Burma through the ruling Junta.
I feel that human rights is the most important issue facing us right now. Although human rights issues have been around pretty much since humans have been on the planet, we still need to know what is happening to some. Torture is the most disgusting thing a human would ever have to face, so someone who has been exposed to torture should let others know what it is like. People need to learn ethical standards and be able to recognize and understand what human beings are capable of.

This idea is getting better and better. Looking at Kurdish culture and what they are fighting for. Kurds have recently been in the news over issues of PKK and Turkey. I'd like to add this issue into my paper. I've begun writing, exploring thoughts and seeing what my mind is capable of comprehending.
I've been watching the PKK and Turkey story closely because I am Kurdish. I'd like to make it clear that Turkey has no right to treat the Kurds they way they do. If any group of people were oppressed like the Turks oppress, they would have an active 'terrorist' group too. I am very hopeful that this issue is resolved without much more conflict. Iraq is already a mess, and to invade a part of the country with the most progress and calm would be a disaster. Business is booming up north and half of this is due to Turkish investors, so an invasion by them wouldn't be good for most.
In my paper I'd like to take a step back and see why they are fighting and why it hasn't been resolved since the PKK started 30 years ago. Turkey must be holding onto that chunk of land for some reason, and its not due to the love of it, I'm sure.

Semiotic thinking

This class really put forward what I want to do with my semiotic analysis. I’m going to attempt to write about Kurdish culture and how it compared to Western culture before and after the war. Kurds are an ethnic group in the Middle East consisting of around 30 million people. This is the biggest ethnic group in the world without their own country, although the Kurds in Iraq have enjoyed autonomy for the past 16 years. The way that American culture has seeped into Kurdish culture is due to a huge boom in business, which has made this society even more capitalistic than it was before. Also, before the war, Kurds were still a modern society even though they have been oppressed for as long as any Kurd can remember. Comparing these two culture is where most semiotic analysis will come from. Symbols mean very different things between the cultures and I’d like to look at what these differences are.

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

What struck me most about the book Understanding Comics is the space between comic strip pictures. We were talking about the same type of concept in the class the other day, metonyms. These little spaces of time are where it is up to the reader to interpret what is happening in the story. They are usually obvious things like an image of an axe, and an image of someone struggling on a tree stump. We put two and two together, and that person is assumed dead.
McCloud goes on to explain the differences in Western and Japanese comics. When going into metonym’s he sees that there is a big difference between the way Western’s perceive and interpret over the way Japanese do. “Traditional Western art and literature don’t wander much. On the whole, we’re a pretty goal-oriented culture. But in the East, there’s a rich tradition of cyclical and labyrinthine works of art” (McCloud, 81). Here we have to look at the cultural and mental differences between these two sets of people. In the East people are much more focused on aspects and learning about an environment. In the West we are all in a rush. We need to get places as fast as possible, that’s why we don’t care much about how we are getting places, but what happens when we get there.
Understanding Comics definitely shows how much comics represent a culture. He breaks down time periods, types of comics, different publishing locations, which all help show that comics hold a fundamental understanding of our culture. Although comics have been denounced as a form of entertainment for kids, McCloud shows us that there is more behind a comic than you would think.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. 2. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

October 10th Class

Class focus was on semiotics, which is still a concept I have yet to completely grasp. I've asked my mom about it, looked at cultural studies books, found definitions on wikipedia.org and it has made a difference in my understanding. Hopefully I'll be capable of talking about some cultural issue or phenomenon in a semiotic sense. Semiotics is such a complicated way of looking at things, in my opinion. The theory I comprehended most was how we view the world. Denotation, connotation, ideology. This seems to be exactly what I do when I look at anything in the world and I have some major connotations about things.
There are connotations everywhere, good ones and bad ones. I think of my car, I think gas-guzzler, money consumer, earth destroyer, but yet I still drive. On the other hand I think of my car as my way of getting from point A to point B. Without it, I would be stuck with using the bus, or a bike, or any other form of ‘green’ transportation. When breaking down these points, I can look at any form of medium and we usually have negative connotation towards it. TV is used to commercialize, to materialize, to make us buy things. Internet is also an advertiser. What do these things do to us? Are we willing to fight it? It doesn’t seem like there is much protest to the things that enhance our lives. Even though these things give us more time to work, they do make our lives easier in some way and protesting against it involves either not using it, or being a hypocrite.

Ten Things Wrong with the Media 'Effects' Model

It seems to me that people doing research on the effects of TV needed to realize that the methods they were using weren’t very effective. They needed to see that television influences our reactions, it doesn’t simply change our behavior. In my experience I have never seen any type of violence shown on TV turn into immediate behavioral changes. When living in Iraq I would often see, with my cousins, executions being shown live on the National Iraqi channel during that time, which was the only channel for the non-fly zoned area. People lined up, blind folded, then shot in the face by Saddam’s soldiers. My cousins saw these things, I saw these things and it was a common occurrence and not one of my cousins has any indication of violent or even aggressive tendencies and neither do I. Many other things have happened to my cousins and myself and still I see no change.
I support what David Gauntlett is saying. You must see how TV affects us in a broader sense, because TV is so broad. When looking at how children are affected by TV you should look at what they wear, what they talk about, to what extent does their knowledge go and where does that information come from. It seems that this should have been obvious after so much rigorous research, but it seems this is only being realized.

Slideshow project

The group project has worked out. I am in a group of two other people, Jenn Doxsee and Kelly Scott, and we worked productively together. I went home last weekend and took shots in the mall and in the grocery store Sobey’s. I shot for a few hours, took them home, loaded them on the computer and I realized that most of the people in my shots seemed very down and somewhat depressed. These places are supposed to make life easier. Advertisements exist to show off what could make your life better, they show an ideal that only few have supposedly obtain, say celebrities. If you have what we have, you will be happy. Most people don't have what advertisements advertise or have what celebrities have. I’m slowly learning here that our society is surrounded by images that make us envious towards the ideal life. White house, fluffy dog, shiny car, perfect kids, all these things are continuously portrayed through these advertisements.
The images that I took were of people shopping, store shelves, advertisements that came along with a product. I took the shots in black and white to give off a sense of control. I feel like I am living in a society controlled by signs. These signs show us the direction in which we should go in, the direction to happiness. The pictures that I present show people in their unhappy states. It also shows some regular advertisements that help persuade us to buy the products that will make us happy or more efficient. What I’ve come to realize is that everything that humans create is to make us more efficient and quicker in our daily lives. These things are created to give us more time for our enjoyment, but as humans become more and more efficient the result is we have more time to work and make money.

October 3rd Class

I really liked this class because of the heated debate about who can get post-secondary education. Public education has alot to do with what we were talking about. The education system, to me, makes people fail, or strives to make kids fail. Most of what I have heard from friends and family is that the teachers are very impersonal, if you do not try, they do not care. To give everyone equal opportunities you must first give everyone equal education. I come from a privilaged family myself and feel lucky to be able to get an education without much fuss, for others this isn't the case and I feel that this is not fair at all.
Another point was about the individuals themselves, if a person tries hard enough, they will succeed. This works for some, but others are stuck in the system. If your family doesn't make enough money to provide, the kids must either drop out to get a job or the family must wait until that child is out of high school and then start work. Once you are providing for your family, paying the bills and insurance and being influenced by our materialistic ways you become stuck. You cannot just quit your job and enter schooling to get a better job. I've worked in factories the past two summers and every single "lifer" (the people who work there year round) who works there tells all the summer workers to stay in school or you will get stuck. Some people had been manning the most boring machines ever invented for over 10 years. Actually going there everyday for 8-12 hours made me feel extremely sorry for those people, just because I was born into a higher class family I have the opportunity for a better life.